Advice on how many programmers to hire

[mediaman]

I have been working on an internet media start-up for the past year. My experience is in business development and marketing not technology. I wanted to gain some insight from other people who have or are developing a tech start up. A little about my venture the venture will have a content network of about 40 – 50 websites. Content would be hybrid blog / magazines like a techcrunch.com, and foodsense.com just to give some examples. Additional properties will be an ad marketplace website similar to buyads.com and finally an internet tv websites similar to mydamnchannel.com and/or revision3.com and an internet media production company.

I have a pretty good grasp of what I need in editorial/content, products/ux/design, and sales; my concern is what I need on the IT/engineering side. So my questions are how many programmers could I manage at the bare minimum to develop, code, and mange the web properties I will have. By the way we are going to develop apps etc. Since programmers are some of the highest paid I want to make sure I don’t over staff while still paying good programmers top salaries. Oh all content websites will use wordpress vip cms so maybe that impacts the decision.

Any and all advice from people is welcome!

[Fumigator]

With that many websites I'm assuming you'll also be running your own server farm? So you'll need more than just programmers; you'll need network support and server admins, a DBA or two and misc. support for all of that. And probably an IT director to manage it all.

I would suggest you seek out a good IT administration consultant, give him a few months to dig into the specifics of your business and have him come up with staff recommendations. Or hire an IT director first and give him the first duty of hiring his entire department.