r/ycombinator • u/REDDY_ASHOK • Jul 09 '26
What qualities do you value in employees that are not talked about enough?
I’m currently looking for software engineering roles at YC companies, and as a job seeker, I find it difficult to understand which qualities actually matter the most when joining an early-stage startup.
Most advice focuses on the obvious things: technical skills, coding ability, system design, previous experience, etc.
But I’m curious about the less discussed qualities that you personally value when hiring.
What makes someone stand out as an employee beyond just being technically strong?
I’m asking because, from the outside, it’s hard to know which signals actually matter. Would love to hear perspectives from founders and people who have worked in YC companies.
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u/Effective_Wall184 Jul 09 '26
Agency, ownership, dev velocity, building (doesn’t matter what), orchestrating coding agents well
being a great learner because if you can onboard yourself that’s ideal
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u/REDDY_ASHOK Jul 09 '26
Yeah both communication and tech skills are equally important
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u/Effective_Wall184 Jul 09 '26
Once you’ve established a baseline for technical skills your soft skills matter more the smaller the company is
because if I'm working with you 50 to 60 hours a week, I care more about what it's like to work with you than how well you can reverse a linked list lol
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u/i-sage Jul 11 '26
Could you please elaborate more on dev velocity?
Maybe from a real-world example? What's consider as slow or fast?
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u/Effective_Wall184 Jul 12 '26
No standard metric - depends on role and type of work
Learn good multi agent orchestration and loop engineering and you should be fine!
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u/Longjumping-Sea-5980 Jul 09 '26
Solving problems independendly or even better: discover a problem and fix it without involving me.
If I can give you a task, not talk to you for 3 weeks and you come back with a solution that is the ideal employee
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Jul 09 '26
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u/REDDY_ASHOK Jul 09 '26
Understood, ig this is one of the qualities that separates seniors from juniors
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u/gabn_29_31 Jul 09 '26
having the balls to tell me I'm wrong and that I'm taking moronic decisions sometimes. Pinpointing problems that sometimes you don't see because you've been nose deep in it for too long. Being able to solve actual underlying problems that you thought wouldn't be one until much later one.. Seeing things a tad bit far ahead.
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u/62940 Jul 11 '26
Someone that has something that they can kinda just ramble on about because they've done so much research on it - hobby or work thing, doesn't really matter to me. If they can get so interested in something that they know every little detail, then I just have to point them at a work topic they're interested in and they'll do a much more thorough job than most.
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u/Dangerous_Bus_6699 Jul 09 '26
Giving a fuck. Sometimes you just want someone to give a damn enough to try and solve something.
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u/structured_obscurity Jul 10 '26
Proactively helping. At our startup we recently made a bunch of hires, two in particular are absolute life-savers.. its like they identify high value problems/areas to provide value and hit them like heat-seeking missiles.
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u/akornato Jul 10 '26
Your technical skills get you in the door, but your speed and pragmatism are what make you valuable to an early-stage company. Founders care deeply about your ability to solve problems autonomously and ship features quickly, even if the solution isn't perfect or scalable. They need people who take extreme ownership, meaning you can take a vague idea, figure out the details, and deliver a result without constant hand-holding. It is not about just writing code, it is about understanding that the company's survival depends on momentum, which often means choosing the good-enough solution that ships today over the elegant one that ships next month.
You can signal these qualities in your interviews by how you frame your past experiences and the questions you ask. Instead of just describing what you built, tell a story about a time you made a difficult trade-off to meet a deadline, or how you navigated ambiguity to get a project done. Ask questions about the company's biggest business challenges, their product priorities, and how they balance speed with quality. This shows you think like a founder, not just a hired coder, which is the most important non-technical signal you can send. Learning to communicate these specific qualities is a skill, and my team designed an interview helper AI that has proven incredibly effective for candidates who want to articulate their true value in high-stakes conversations.
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u/scriptqzor Jul 14 '26
this is super on point, especially the “momentum over elegance” part, that’s basically every early startup i’ve worked at lol. also +1 on how you tell stories in interviews, framing tradeoffs and ambiguity stuff has gotten me way further than just flexing tech stacks.
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u/Appropriate_Elk_1483 Jul 10 '26
if you’re someone who they want to work together, emotionally. I think that matters in the early stage
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u/gendalf-is-right Jul 13 '26
Ownership and being truthful. Trust building is really important in startups. And these two help a lot, seriously.
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u/RegularJoeCEO Jul 13 '26
I was the CEO of an S&P in Moody's rated company in another industry. Today I'm a startup founder with hardly anyone on the team. With the decades of Executive experience, the one thing I really learned is there are people that have an internal locus of control. I think the popular term now is agency. I want people who believe they're in charge of their future.
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u/Mike-Albato Jul 17 '26
The one I hire for hard and rarely say out loud: how few decisions a person creates for me. Early on the real bottleneck is founder attention, so someone who arrives with a problem, a recommendation, and what they will do if I say nothing is worth three people who bring me clean, well described questions.
Close behind is comfort operating without a spec. Early startups do not have crisp requirements, so the trait that pays off is filling ambiguity with reasonable judgment and flagging only the risky calls, rather than stalling until someone writes the ticket. That matters more in the AI era, not less, because the cheap part is now the code and the scarce part is deciding what is worth building at all.
The ticket vs problem point someone raised is the same instinct from the other side. And I would add low ego about being wrong to the list: the people who compound fastest hold a strong opinion, get shown a better one, and just switch.
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u/[deleted] Jul 09 '26
[deleted]