Hiring your first firmware engineer - what nobody tells you before you post the job

I have gotten the opportunity to talk to a startup founder who has reached quite a respected level and exited the stratup phase . He told me that most hardware founders figure out pretty quickly that finding firmware talent is harder than finding any other kind of engineer. What takes longer to figure out is why the ones you do find sometimes don't work out even when they looked great on paper.

Firmware is one of those disciplines where the gap between someone who can write code that compiles and someone who can ship a reliable embedded product is enormous. And unlike a web developer, you can't always tell from a portfolio or a GitHub profile which one you're talking to.

The other thing that catches founders off guard is timing. Firmware usually can't start in parallel with hardware the way people assume. Getting that dependency wrong costs weeks, sometimes months.

The founders who seem to get through it smoothest either got lucky with their first hire, or had someone in their network who helped them ask the right questions upfront.

What was the thing that surprised you most the first time you tried to bring firmware work in-house or on contract?