Milo Delgado

CTO & Co-Founder @ Spheric | 3x Founder | 18+ Years in SaaS | Space enthusiast

[Milo Delgado @moladukes]

"The perfect fit would be a Python developer who's also has his a Pilot License."

This was a real request from a client.

They were building software for planes and thought posting the job and running it through an ATS would surface someone.

I told him the truth. That person might not exist, and if they do, software won't find them.

Someone has to hunt that human down and convince them to leave the cockpit.

Hiring tools are strong when the talent already exists and you need to sort signal from noise.

But they're useless when you're chasing a ghost.

Knowing which problem you actually have saves you months.

A lot of failed searches are just the wrong tool pointed at the wrong problem.

[Milo Delgado @moladukes]

Early in my career we took on a client that ran holiday pop-up markets.

Big logo. Real revenue. It was an easy yes.

That yes came with a stack of features that were basically a second product.

We built all of it.

When the contract ended they left us for a more purpose built tool. We were left maintaining features no other customer wanted or cared about.

That was the lesson. Revenue today can cost you focus for years.

Saying yes to the wrong client drains more than it ever pays back.

We sell what we have now. If a client needs something slightly different from what we offer, we validate the demand before we touch the code.

Was there a deal you regretted saying yes to?

Share it in the comments.

[Milo Delgado @moladukes]

We'll set up your hiring funnel to run 24/7:

- Posting
- Screening
- Interviewing
- Test candidates

Get your next qualified hire in 1-2 weeks. Start here: https://t.co/h4Czy2lkj1

[Milo Delgado @moladukes]

The worst advice I've ever heard for product teams:

"Move fast and break things".

I've watched it bury startups in features nobody asked for.

Speed feels like progress. Being able to close a ticket feels like a win.

But ticket crushers (devs who just clear the queue without asking why) leave a mess behind. Fix one thing, break three others. Repeat.

If you don't understand why a ticket exists, you shouldn't be closing it.

I'd rather a developer move slow and think two steps ahead than crush tickets all day and leave a mess behind.

Methodical beats fast when the thing you're building has to hold weight.

The work that looks slow today is the work you don't have to redo on the next PR.

[Milo Delgado @moladukes]

The hiring tech stack is a graveyard of point tools.

One app posts your jobs. Another screens resumes. Another runs the interview. Another designs the code challenge, another reviews and scores the code.

Each one is good at its own thing.

The problem is that you end up having to send links manually. Then, scheduling is done in a separate tool. You copy scores into a spreadsheet, only to duct-tape it all together with Zapier or worse, a vibe coded solution.

The integration work costs more time than the hiring itself.

I stopped thinking about features and decided to focus more on the seams.

A candidate should move from applied to hired through one funnel.

If you're evaluating hiring software, count the handoffs between tools before you count the features.

[Milo Delgado @moladukes]

Not too many people can say they met their co-founder in high school and built a company together 15 years later.

I grew up in Santa Barbara.

My dad took a job out there, so I spent middle and high school in the cold, which is its own character-building exercise for a California kid.

That's where I met Huey.

We went separate ways for years. He stayed in the technical world. I wandered through art and freelancing. Got together with a group of founders and built a ticketing startup.

We reconnected when he interviewed at my company looking for a Rails job.

Years later we'd be co-founders.

The relationships that matter rarely announce themselves when you make them.

Keep the good people close. You never know who you'll be building with in a decade.

[Milo Delgado @moladukes]

@hyperbulla Making someone a 'special case' to move forward and then cutting them over location anyway is a lot worse than a simple no

[Milo Delgado @moladukes]

@n_wittensleger @dessaigne Same thing we're seeing. Systems thinking is becoming more valuable than raw coding ability and most hiring processes are still screening for the wrong skill.

[Milo Delgado @moladukes]

@nate_zelts Understanding the system you're building is the whole job. AI gets you to a draft faster but if you can't explain why it works, you can't fix it when it breaks.

[Milo Delgado @moladukes]

@DevanshuXi Public narratives about ‘software being solved’ and internal hiring filters still reflect very different realities. The latter keeps converging on fundamentals because that’s what actually predicts who can ship under constraints.

[Milo Delgado @moladukes]

Lots of HR tech gets evaluated like it’s a reporting layer problem when the real constraint is alignment under ambiguity between recruiters and hiring managers. The “product” often ends up being the excuse structure that enables trust, correction, and disagreement to happen without breaking relationships.

[Milo Delgado @moladukes]

@meatballtimes @johnloeber LinkedIn-style funnels optimize for volume, not signal. So you end up selecting from people who are best at presenting, not necessarily building.

[Milo Delgado @moladukes]

@johnloeber A lot of this is a lag between hiring signals and actual production. When interviews reward pedigree and narrative, you end up with people weakly tied to shipped work. Eventually the only stable signal is output.

[Milo Delgado @moladukes]

@vivoplt Every additional step in the hiring process is usually a response to uncertainty. The challenge is that uncertainty compounds faster than most hiring teams can manage it.

[Milo Delgado @moladukes]

@torok_tomi Driven and self-motivated are the two hardest things to screen for and the two things that matter most once someone is actually on the team. That's why the interview has to go deeper than the resume.

[Milo Delgado @moladukes]

@BoringBiz_ The pipeline problem is real, can't just skip a generation of hires and expect AI to fill the gap when the senior people leave.

[Milo Delgado @moladukes]

@NipseyHoussle The real question with big tech hires is whether they can operate without the infrastructure that made them productive. Some can, some can't. That's what the interview is for.

[Milo Delgado @moladukes]

@IbrahimOnX Hiring being treated as a cost center instead of a strategic function is the root of every problem in this post. Companies will spend six figures on a bad hire and then refuse to invest in the process that could have prevented it.

[Milo Delgado @moladukes]

@MrCharlesky When recruiters are coaching candidates to bend the truth to get past other recruiters, that's a pretty clear sign the screening process is evaluating the wrong things.

[Milo Delgado @moladukes]

@Narayani07 Ten seconds per resume is generous when you're looking at hundreds. That's where even the best recruiters start skimming and good candidates get missed through no fault of their own.