It’s my second month as an engineer at a seed-stage startup, and our team is beginning to scale. We’re adding new functions, hiring more engineers, and inevitably re-evaluating how we write code.

Startups are built on speed. To move fast, teams often rely on hacky solutions that get something working quickly, even if the code quality isn’t great and refactoring is inevitable later. That hackiness isn’t a flaw—it’s a feature. Engineering things properly takes time: thinking through design, architecture, and edge cases stretches the gap between a feature request and a release. Shipping a partial but functional solution is often the right call early on.

That said, I believe it’s possible to move fast and build with quality. The key is adopting the right engineering mindset from the start. At the end of the day, it’s about balancing speed and correctness. We’re actively trying to find that equilibrium. When you do, it pays off immensely.

But technical balance alone isn’t enough. A startup is a company, and a company is a group of people aligned toward a single goal. Achieving that alignment is hard. Hiring the wrong people is one of the most common—and most dangerous—startup mistakes.

In a small team, every individual represents a large slice of the pie. When someone is a bad fit, it’s not just their slice that suffers—the rot spreads. Teams work closely together, and misalignment in vision, or more importantly in vibe, hurts both the company’s mission and the people working on it.

I personally think being off the vibe is a bigger problem than lacking technical skills. Skills can be taught; mindset is much harder to change. I see this mismatch most often when engineers move from large companies to very small teams (think fewer than 10 engineers).

At big companies, engineers may be used to perfecting systems, working within fixed stacks, and operating behind layers of abstraction. In startups, shipping and iterating matter more than perfection. You need to be comfortable adopting new technologies quickly, optimizing for learning speed, and focusing relentlessly on user impact. In many large orgs, you might never touch the end product; in startups, product thinking is inseparable from engineering, and hearing customers complain about the new thing you shipped is not uncommon.

So if you’re thinking about building at a startup:

1. Embrace change: If you don’t like switching things up or adapting quickly, this probably isn’t for you.
2. Be purpose-driven: Compensation may be lower than big tech, so you need something stronger than money to keep you going (though ideally not ramen every night).
3. Have a bias for action: Energy matters. Do more than you talk. If you’re a stubborn perfectionist, you’ll likely slow everyone down—including yourself.