If you're a CTO for a growing startup, this might be a familiar challenge for you. On top of building the product, finding product engineers is becoming one of the hardest things for a CTO to do in 2019, especially in tech hubs like NY and London due to higher demand and competition. This problem is no longer exclusive to the Bay Area. Hiring is time-consuming and expensive, and many startups feel that they can’t compete with some of the top salaries and perks offered by deep-pocketed alternatives. It makes sense to rely on your network to hire the initial few developers, but this approach is not sustainable in the long run. Job boards are getting crowded. Recruiters are generally worse. I've read a lot of stories about using recruitment platforms. Few are great, but many are unpleasant. The flaw with many recruitment companies is they don't reliably deliver enough good candidates to build trust. Asking for profile A and getting profile B is a common frustration. For startups, this tends to be a deal-breaker because hiring the wrong candidate has a significant cost and impact on backlog and team. Is it that most recruiters or on-demand marketplaces aren't highly technical? Is it that they also suffer from talent shortage? Remote work has been getting a lot of love in recent years to bypass the talent war. Although it has come a long way, it's still hard to pull off, especially for companies that are trying to do both local and remote but are not remote-first (think infrastructure and payroll primarily). With that being said. How do startups in hubs currently find great engineers quicker? What's an approach that you have been investing in recently to hire product hackers?