Don't depend on an interview combined with arbitrary questions as the lynchpin for your hiring decision. Hire people that are motivated to work on what you're doing, and make sure they're actually motivated. Watch out because people will tell you whatever you want to hear to get a job.

There isn't a shortage of tech talent - There's an oversupply of wannabe CEO's and entrepreneurs with no business plan.

We don't use interviews so much for tech review but more for getting a feel on a person's personality. Granted we run the risk of having that person out of their element and not showing their true colors but it does help weed some.

As someone who is doing their first hires as well. I have a few questions outside of the standard pay, health benefits etc.

How do you develop a certain culture as you scale employees? When do you do it? Is it in writing or just a lofty idea in the air.

My first hire was a disaster - I assumed hiring an Indian that graduated from a CS program in India would be a good idea (he could program in Python but just because someone can doesn't mean they are competent at all in the industry, I was hit with this realization quickly).

Second hire was more successful, same city/state as us and he is smart. Problem is he doesn't precisely fit with our culture. His programming is "okay" but in terms of a team my co-founder and I are close friends and we have a highly autonomous structure - autonomy has appeared as the core tenant of our "culture" (this is very true for most early-stage startups IMHO). He fits in very well as a friend, we are all friends now, but in terms of drive it just isn't there the way it is for my co-founder and I. The drive is what I need as a CTO hiring technical people; people need to RTFM and read the source, not be afraid of making a mistakes, and be head-strong about tackling things.

Culture also grows up around programming standards within the company too - it's been my fault that I've been providing very loose definitions for our programming standards. This is primarily due to my lack of time to do code reviews (I'm responsible for our web application with 3 different products, sysadmin duties for a cluster of 5 dedicated machines, a Riak cluster, and 6 big and production level Erlang applications).

Autonomy is expensive though too, keep that in mind. The more autonomous your hires are, the more quirky the culture will become. We are "early" in it too, so it will be interesting to see how that evolves.

As it stands, our next hires are going to be a sysadmin then another programmer.

This is just good hiring and management advice.

Independent of culture, learning to be strict enough in enforcing your own technical standards is something that does not come easily to everyone. It did not for me - I wanted people to come up with the right solution on their own - of course that means I sometimes won't agree with it. Usually that is fine, but more than once I let this slip into just being complacent about terrible code being written in my shop.

Also I don't know your personnel situation but if you are small you will be better served with a jack-of-all-trades with solid experience in sysadmin/devops as well as application development. If they run out of work to do after they have everything running well smooth, you could have them do some product work too.

If they never run out of work, they are not a very good sysadmin.This can be a little hard to find but by no means impossible.

Setting our tech standards is something I've been very strict about and have become more strict about it recently. I believe this is an area that I've been pretty good on.

Didn't see this till late, good response. I agree with your point on hiring a jack-of-all-trades; only problem is that they are really hard to find!

Setting the culture is my responsibility through how I lead and who I hire. I've been really bad with the downtime stuff. We've been pretty slammed and I haven't had the opportunity to do something non-work related with everyone. But, that's probably more bullshit on my part. I really just need to make the time for culture setting stuff

This is precisely what I've discovered too - however, it has begun to morph over time; I now think it's less shaped by how the "leader" does things for people and how the people joining the effort do things for the company.

perhaps you should change "What we do for you" and "How we work for you" on your homepage to statements that actually describe what it is you do for your clients and how.

The current website is getting blown away in a few weeks. We have a redesign branch on Github underway.