Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Hire dreamers and systems experts
The early team was full of strong product generalists. Then it became clear that people with systems and distributed systems backgrounds were missing.
Wherever deep subject matter expertise is needed, models are good but still need verification, so those areas are worth investing in.
Builders with product sense work like dreamers. They are passionate about a product, have an idea, build it, then watch feedback and iterate and polish, owning the product end to end. That skill set served the team very well.
Why do distributed systems need specialists?
Distributed systems run on many machines connected by a network that can fail, and the failures are hard to reproduce. Engineers at Sun Microsystems, including Peter Deutsch, listed the "fallacies of distributed computing" in the 1990s, such as the false belief that the network is reliable. Eric Brewer proposed the CAP theorem in 2000, which states that a system under a network partition must choose between consistency and availability. Handling these trade-offs takes experience that product work rarely provides.
Where does trust but verify come from?
"Trust but verify" is a Russian proverb, "doveryai, no proveryai." Suzanne Massie, an American scholar of Russia, taught it to Ronald Reagan, who used it in the 1980s when negotiating arms control with the Soviet Union. In engineering, the phrase means accepting a result only after checking it. Automated tests and code review serve that purpose in software.