13 ms·

You don't want to hire "the best engineers"

• ospehlivano 1y ago
  The irony: while you're waiting 4 months for the perfect engineer, your competitor shipped with a good-enough one who's now senior-level from the experience.
  • arandr0x 1y ago
    That's definitely a valuable take, but it's worth noting that not everyone will make better decisions just by sitting through enough fires, and it's also possible that your good enough person will fail to notice some larger risk or market shift that the person you could've waited for would have, because they'd have seen it before. Hiring decisions tend to be a hindsight is 20/20 proposition.
    • ospehlivano 1y ago
      Exactly - you never know either way. You hire the senior, might be useless. You hire the mid-level, might be great. At least with the faster hire you're making progress while finding out.
  • OhMeadhbh 1y ago
    Um. No. You don't become a senior engineer in 4 months.
    • ospehlivano 1y ago
      Fair point about 4 months, I was thinking longer term there. But the original post was about finding the 'best' engineers, not necessarily senior ones. Either way, you can't know what's best for your situation until they're actually working.
      • OhMeadhbh 1y ago
        "best" engineers vs "senior" engineers is a valid point. I think a lot of my comments on this thread are of the mode of "best engineer" should also be thought of as "best engineer for this environment / culture." I tend to stay away from people who say things like "top talent" and "10x engineer" and (worst yet) "Unicorn." You can't really make a judgement about an engineer without describing the environment they'll live in. And also... maybe more importantly... there's a saying (almost a joke) in the military: "You don't go to war with the forces you want, you go to war with the forces you have." (or maybe it was "people" instead of "forces" and no doubt the Air Force replaces "forces" with "very expensive weapon system manufactured by lowest-bid contractors by people who happen to live in districts represented by members of the congressional armed forces committee.") And that might be what we're getting at here. While it would be great to get the absolute best engineer at day one, it's more likely you're going to get an engineer that requires a fair bit of training and in-the-trenches experience.
        • ospehlivano 1y ago
          Great point about environment fit. I've seen a wonderkid with amazing potential but no drive, and a solid engineer who maximized their potential through pure effort. Hard to say which was more valuable - depends on what the team needed.
• gilli 1y ago
  Loved this article, funnily enough I wrote something in a similar vein, due to my frustrations with nonsense requirements, yesterday: https://gilli.is/journal/the-best-designers-know-nothing-about-your-industry https://gilli.is/journal/the-best-designers-know-nothing-abo...
• alfredbones25 1y ago
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• sfvisser 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • bbor 1y ago
    Dang, the cope is rarely this obvious. Don't take out your commute on the rest of us, we're harmless!
    • iLemming 1y ago
      This! Most people don't even realize how much we sacrifice just to get to the office - even if your commute is only 30 minutes (which sounds amazing for a developed country like the US) - it still adds up to 240 hours per year - equivalent to 6 weeks of work time. Now, if your employer is honest with you - they are paying these costs, in most cases - it comes out of your pocket. Software developers have been building large projects successfully without ever seeing each other for decades. Somehow Linux kernel, Apache projects, Postgres, Mozilla, Emacs, or Neovim hackers do not need to be in the same office every day, yet they've been around for decades and they definitely have some of the best programmers involved. Complex software can be successfully developed without daily in-person interaction. If you're striving to become a great software developer - do plan to switch to work fully remotely at some point of your life if not today. Because great software developers understand the value of time - they can build some amazing shit in six weeks, instead of spending that time on the road.
  • Glyptodon 1y ago
    I haven't seen a lot of evidence of this. Just a lot of CEOs and managers who really want it to be true.
  • monkeyelite 1y ago
    This is just true on its face. Imagine you were building a new CPU architecture and the head engineer was just not at the office. Maybe people would agree if we change the word “best” to “most responsible” or “most accountable”.
    • 1y ago
• aorloff 1y ago
  The best companies hire relatively green engineers and develop them.
  • ebiester 1y ago
    Not as their first 4 engineers. The fifth engineer can be a junior. Once you've built a base you can start expanding and hiring on potential.
    • AlwaysRock 1y ago
      I dont know about that! In theory it sounds good. I know a company that hired a very good hands on cto who then hired 5 50k entry level engineers that was largely the extent of their team for 1-2 years. Then they started to hire more senior people. I'm sure the cto did a massive amount of training early on but this is a near billion dollar company in a fairly complicated industry. You dont HAVE to have 4 incredibly senior super engineers as your first hires. It might make coding easier early on, but its going to make hiring much much harder.
      • ebiester 1y ago
        I don't think you need "super engineers" either. They just should have made it through their first mistakes on someone else's money. If your founding team is not technical, it's important that one of them has seen the problems that will come up in your first 5 years. No matter what you do, you will make wrong decisions and need to fix things once you need to scale. That's the way of startups. However, you also need to prevent the high level footguns such as OWASP top 10 and exponential algorithms with minimal supervision.
  • propter_hoc 1y ago
    This is the answer As a startup you don't have Google's money. You don't have Google's employer brand. You don't have Google's work environment. in fact as a (hopefully) fast-growing startup the only thing you really have to offer is growth. So make it clear how you are going to help the candidate grow their career and experience faster at your startup than at the established company, and offer the best you can do on comp and work environment. This doesn't mean fresh grads, but more like someone with a bit of experience who's ready to jump into a team lead or architectural lead role.
• ath3nd 1y ago
  Counterpoint: You want to hire the best engineers and empower them to work how they are most effective, remotely or not.
  • Almondsetat 1y ago
    how is that a counterpoint
  • codingdave 1y ago
    I'd say that you want to choose whether the company is remote vs. office-based, then filter on that before choosing who is "best", in order to hire a team of engineers who all agree on such fundamental choices. A cohort of engineers that has a split decision on where to work never forms a cohesive team. Both ways work... but they don't mix.
• llm_nerd 1y ago
  I mean...you should probably hire good enough engineers that a website can withstand a pretty small amount of HN attention... ...I kid! But seriously, though, how is it possible in 2025 that websites can still collapse from the relatively minuscule traffic that an HN front page sends? Are people upvoting this submission without having actually seen it? EDIT: For the "works for me" people, the site's host, framer.app, uses Amazon's cloud and whole regions are getting SSL errors for this domain.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  • ehnto 1y ago
    I would bet HN's readership are majority lurkers and not signed in.
    • llm_nerd 1y ago
      I know how much of a traffic pump HN is, having had a number of pages front-page here during prime time over the years. It isn't that big of a traffic spike at all. It's a much more interesting and interested group than many sources, but a single-core min-scale cloud compute can handle it presuming you aren't doing something silly. In this case their hosting app has screwed up SSL configs for some of their GeoIP served options.
  • shadowgovt 1y ago
    Out of curiosity: what error are you seeing? That site appears to be running on an Amazon IP (on my traceroute, in the block https://ipinfo.io/AS16509/52.223.48.0/20 https://ipinfo.io/AS16509/52.223.48.0/20). If it didn't load immediately, I wonder if you got unlucky enough to catch an autoscaler napping (or maybe they aren't autoscaling; sometimes dodging the hug of death completely isn't worth the cost, depending on how cost-sensitive a firm is). (ETA: However, the DNS entry is willing to give some wildly different IPs for the lookup, and at least one of them appears to be flagged as abusive, so if you're behind a corporate firewall it's possible an auto-protector is blocking you).
• onesandofgrain 1y ago
  Companies that say they only want the "the best engineers" or "we only hire A-students" and "top of the cake-engineers" I've usually found to be a breeding-ground for a somewhat toxic work-environment.
  • edude03 1y ago
    add "we're a meritocracy"
    • y-curious 1y ago
      Add: - we work hard and play hard! - we are full time in office because we are all aligned on a vision - generous equity in a promising startup [series A $5M raised by a recent Stanford GSB grad] [salary for 10 YOE in Bay Area is $180k]
  • tdhz77 1y ago
    I would agree. I would add a straight A student might not be able to hold a conversation very well. There are so many factors, but one thing is for sure— getting a long is what matters most.
  • mlinhares 1y ago
    I wish there was a way to figure out if someone is proactive, willing and capable of learning and having little patience for bullshit. These have been the most important traits i've seen on great engineers, people that just plow through the work day after day and jump over hurdles to get stuff done. It feels like everything else is secondary to just wanting to put in the work.
  • stackbutterflow 1y ago
    Because people who say that are delusional.
  • TrackerFF 1y ago
    Where I'm from, and this might be universal, those types of firms are either finance or consulting shops. The actual work practically never warrants the type of people they want to hire, but they pay well enough and they can leverage their prestige. Part of the schpiel is that they can boast to their clients that they hire the best of the best, and thus billing $1000 for a fresh grad is worth it. There's a lot of focus on signaling. Of course Jane or Joe with a graduate degree in theoretical physics from MIT is going to be able to sift through data and compile spreadsheets and nice powerpoint slides...but it's going to be complete overkill.
• axpy906 1y ago
  Seems like the author is a bit frustrated from unrealistic expectations. Hits home as we’ve not filled a role for over six months.
  • whatamidoingyo 1y ago
    If you don't mind me asking, what's the role?
    • axpy906 1y ago
      AI Engineer. Lots of candidates that want to be one but not many with actual experience, is the problem I’ve heard.
      • mixmastamyk 1y ago
        In a new field, one needs to look forward rather than backward.
      • whatamidoingyo 1y ago
        Ah, that makes sense. I have no experience in AI, and wouldn't even consider applying to those jobs. Although it seems like most jobs are for AI these days. Maybe I should learn.
      • nathan_douglas 1y ago
        Honest question: if you'd hired someone who wanted to be an AI Engineer and had plenty of experience with general software engineering, and was of roughly the median quality of the engineers you've hired for other positions, do you think you'd be better or worse off than you are now?
      • lelanthran 1y ago
        > Lots of candidates that want to be one but not many with actual experience, is the problem I’ve heard. And you haven't had a single candidate that could possibly pick up the missing skills[1]? ================================================== [1] I don't know what those are. There are two extremes here: 1. PhD level Maths is involved. 2. You require them to have experience in a specific product (anything from a Python library to a framework like HF) If your requirements are closer to the first extreme, well sure, you're gonna have to wait for someone that has that. If your requirements are closer to the second extreme, why not just take a candidate? If it takes 2 months to skill up on whatever product you need them to skill up on, right now you would have had that position filled for the last 4 months with your ideal candidate.
• fitzn 1y ago
  > The best engineers make more than your entire payroll. They have opinions on tech debt and timelines. They have remote jobs, if they want them. They don’t go “oh, well, this is your third company, so I guess I’ll defer to you on all product decisions”. They care about comp, a trait you consider disqualifying. They can care about work-life balance, because they’re not desperate enough to feel the need not to. And however successful your company has been so far, they have other options they like better. Yep
  • zuppy 1y ago
    it's more like short term gain vs long term gain. experienced engineers can design an architecture that will allow you to scale cheaper and faster in the future, at the high initial cost. it will be cheaper to maintain, better for security. depends at what point your business is at the moment of hiring and what you plan to do with the product. do you need volume or quality (both variants are right)?
    • throwway120385 1y ago
      If your business is going to cease to exist in 4 months, who cares about scalability? Pay the interest when it comes due and when you can afford it. If someone is serious about building a company they will be okay with that.
      • binary132 1y ago
        unpopular opinion with engineers but unfortunately true startups are generally moreso a business endeavor than an engineering one, although the engineering must correctly support the business the engineering begins to take the driver’s seat as the tech debt and cost of scaling catch up to successful companies and begin to create excess drag but for many years, such companies can typically still afford to throw away money to solve business problems, including these problems of scale
        • rachofsunshine 1y ago
• phendrenad2 1y ago
  I appreciate where the author is coming from, but I think when people say they want the best engineers they sometimes mean the top 25% or something. They don't always have a delusional belief that the top 1% are just sitting around waiting for their amazing company to come along.
  • rachofsunshine 1y ago
    There's a bit of doublethink involved. On the one hand (and as I mentioned in the post), yes, most employers are not as dumb as I'm making them sound. In principle they know they need to comprpmise - but in practice, they often balk at doing so because they haven't clearly articulated what they will compromise on.
• ilc 1y ago
  Why do we go to work? - Sense of value and worth to society? Go volunteer. - Wanting to help make someone else's dreams come true? Probably not. - They pay us! Ummmnnn. I may or may not be a top engineer. But, in large part for most people the big reason is: They get paid.
  • agent327 1y ago
    You could also ask the question for "why do founders even bother with startups", and you'll get the exact same answer. It seems selfish that they then expect their employees to work for them, not for money, but rather for love and exposure.
    • ilc 1y ago
      Startups can be for a variety of reasons, not everyone who starts a business wants to make billions. Sometimes they just want to have a nice life doing something they enjoy, find value in, or can just make money at. Then again, I'm on HN. Show me the Benjamins. ;)
  • matwood 1y ago
    It's always about the money. And when someone says it's not about the money, it's absolutely about the money. Once people understand that, the world becomes much easier to navigate.
  • feoren 1y ago
    Yes, I work for a sense of value and worth to society, and I would accept being paid less if it meant a greater sense of worth. Think about it this way: I have about 40 productive hours per week (young kids, otherwise it'd be more). I could spend 30 hours at a worthless, pointless job that pays well, making enough money for my family, and then 10 hours volunteering on something I care about that makes a difference; or I could spend 40 hours at a job that pays only 3/4 of the former but also achieves my goal of producing valuable things for society. I get paid the same per productive hour, and the latter is much healthier for my psyche. I currently make around the 20th percentile for my level of experience. I do look for higher paying jobs, but they're all at stupid boring companies doing fintech, adtech, or trying ineffectually to position themselves as middlemen in whatever the latest tech trends are. I don't love my job, but at least I'm making real things that actually help the world.
• tomatohs 1y ago
  It's not 2010 anymore. Most startups can't even attract "the best engineers" much less hire them. This is the late game, why would an engineer work for a fraction of a percent of equity and a below market salary when they can take a job at FANG? You've got to be offering something really, really valuable like remote work, an interesting problem, and/or a new experience. Otherwise the math doesn't math.
  • OhMeadhbh 1y ago
    Because FANG companies do not attract "top talent." They attract "very good talent," but typically talent that requires infrastructure that doesn't exist at startups. Daryl Havens is the exception that proves this rule, and you are not Daryl (unless you are Daryl and in which case, "Hey Daryl! Let's meet up sometime and chat about VAXen.")
    • senko 1y ago
      Neither do scrappy startups, because they don't have the money. Top talent that accept below-insanely-great pay start their own startups.
      • OhMeadhbh 1y ago
        Yup. It's somewhat rare to find "top talent" at a startup, but more because many modern startups are stupid, existing only to suck from the VC teat. In my day... Be was a "startup" and Dominic and Andy were "top" talent. (and wasn't Dianne Hackborn at Be back then?) NeXT was a startup once and Avi Tevanian (despite my many, many technical disagreements) was an EXCELLENT engineer. RSADSI was a startup an Steve Dusse and Bob Baldwin were TOP talent. I think after the dot-com run-up, "startup" often implied "unprofitable idiot idea that looks plausible long enough to convince VCs to use your company as a demonstration of the greater fool theory." But I said "often," not "always." The critical and vexxing part of this is it's so hard to figure out which idiot ideas are profitable before the VCs shower a small cadre of Stanford GSB grads with cash.
  • indoordin0saur 1y ago
• amelius 1y ago
  Reminds me of that post explaining how to make "stupid" LLMs work together to make something more useful. Maybe it works with engineers too.
  • OhMeadhbh 1y ago
    The term you're looking for is "development methodology."
• austin-cheney 1y ago
  I have seen organizations that actually want "the best" developers almost never. They may say this, but what they are looking for are "the most compatible" developers. The distinction is monumental. The best developers are at the top 15% of a bell curve where the line is very close to flat, but what they are actually looking for are people in the range of 45-70% of the bell curve where there are the most people doing the same exact things as each other. Conversely, I have seen many developers actually take lower paying jobs to get away from the bell curve stupidity.
• ravenstine 1y ago
  What most companies consider to be the "best" engineers is different from what engineers would consider to be the best. Companies want engineers that get the job done the way they want it. Building a structurally sound product is so far off their radar that actually being a good engineer isn't that important. Unless you're good enough that you have clout, you're better off focusing on your interpersonal skills and marketing yourself to these companies; even clout often isn't good enough. When an employer says "we only hire the best", the most that can truly mean is they want to hire engineers who will play by the rules of their game. That's it. They can't define "best" beyond that without contradicting their other corporate values. Treat empty statements like "we only hire the best" the same as "are you a coding rockstar?" and "bachelors required, masters preferred"; horsecrap to be ignored.
• mrbluecoat 1y ago
  You're right, don't hire the best engineers - let them create a startup instead with more VC funding than you've ever dreamed of, then watch as they erode your market share through aggressive marketing, better features, and faster release cycles as they slowly displace you by siphoning off your second-best engineers and eventually get bought out by your biggest competitor. /s
  • tmnvdb 1y ago
    Did you read the article?
    • mrbluecoat 1y ago
      Yes, the points are valid but over-generalized. I've met many engineers that I would consider are "the best" which aren't whining remote prima donnas the article makes them all out to be.
  • phoronixrly 1y ago
    I am also getting a 'these are not the droids you're looking for' vibe from this
• andy99 1y ago
  > Would you rather spend four months in stasis waiting This is a false dichotomy. Hiring slowly doesn't mean doing nothing. It's really more like "do you (CTO) want to slow down on building and become a manager now?" Waiting and finding someone who doesn't need managing can be way less distracting than going for someone imperfect because you've convinced yourself you need to hire now.
  • Lyngbakr 1y ago
    The author's point, though, is that folks tend to wait four months and then hire "someone imperfect", which they could've done now.
    • OhMeadhbh 1y ago
      If you find you're shooting yourself in the foot, do not reload.
    • rachofsunshine 1y ago
      And, more to the point, that they'd hire a _better_ imperfect candidate by taking those four months doing tough interviews with lots of imperfect candidates (rather than hiring one in desperation later).
• tibbar 1y ago
  I mean, you don’t hire the best engineers by just blasting off a LinkedIn ad. Or by cold-emailing them. You hire them by already being their friend and offering a massive chunk of cash and equity to work on an interesting project, plus a variety of other concessions, as needed. The best companies don’t generally do this, because it doesn’t scale. You can scale “find strong talent that hasn’t had its big moment yet, and teach them the trade” a little bit farther.
• koakuma-chan 1y ago
  Yeah don't need best engineers to build another CRUD app.
  • chistev 1y ago
    Everything is CRUD
  • Insanity 1y ago
    100% this. Unless a startup is doing something truly novel from a technical point of view, what you really need at the early stages is someone who can glue together CRUD apps. Later you might have to worry about how to make sure your system can scale, how the overall architecture fits together, etc etc.. but even _having_ those problems is already somewhat of a luxury as it means your startup hasn't died yet.
• guestbest 1y ago
  The best people have the best options which may be leaving the company only a few weeks to months when their ‘dream offer’ comes in. In addition most work doesn’t need the ‘best people’ but consistent and dedicated people. I think this was even in a Dale Carnegie course. I’d have to look it up. My point is ‘qualified’ people with good values are mostly want companies need.
  • OhMeadhbh 1y ago
    Just to complicate things, "best people" also means "best fit for an organization's culture." I know several HIGH FUNCTIONING engineers from Amazon who went on to startups and failed miserably. But then again, I know several HIGH FUNCTIONING engineers from Amazon who founded startups and did pretty well. But my point still holds... just 'cause you're doing well in one organization doesn't mean you'll do well in a different organization. One of the best games programmers I know went to [[very large video game company]], but didn't do well. They then went to [[different very large video game company]] and knocked it out of the park.
• arandr0x 1y ago
  A more generalizable approach might be to consider - what are you looking for that most other companies either are actively putting off or passively neglecting, and what's the best way to identify the best engineers in that group. To use examples in the post, if you're remote then you can get "startup experience - hard worker - impressive project - aces your 20 ridiculous interviews" by getting in front of people who live in Ohio and people who live in the Bay Area and low key hate Caltrain. If you're willing to pay top of band salary all cash, ala Netflix, then you can be a Bay Area Only Senior Elites Need Apply type startup. What about other things? What if you are, in fact, willing to let engineers decide whether they address tech debt, like the post calls out? Or, you don't overvalue confidence and talking and can appeal to female engineers, quiet engineers, or in general less competitive types? What if you want hard worker startup experience passes pseudo-IQ tests, but they don't need actual coding experience measured in years and you think AI and training can bridge the gap? Note, I'm not saying any of these companies will necessarily be more successful with their hires, but they're being intentional with who they hire and how that fits the company's advantage in a way that the "you and everyone else" profiled in the post do not. Like, figure out what makes you different. Figure out how that will make your people different. Then write it in the job description, black text on white background (or the reverse in dark mode), plain language, so it's obvious.
• jackdawed 1y ago
  I interviewed with an early stage pre-seed startup with a very young team, like 25-27. I was interviewed by someone way more junior than me. According to the recruiter, in 3 months, I've made it the furthest and he told me this startup was churning through top tier candidates left and right. After my interview, I immediately knew why. The team was so junior they didn't know how to evaluate senior talent. They didn't know what they wanted. I've arguably interviewed more candidates than the person interviewing me. Last I checked, they still haven't filled that role. The strong hires I've given all came from underrated candidates who didn't come from trendy backgrounds. Still think Dan Luu's advice holds up even more at early stage startups. https://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/ https://danluu.com/programmer-moneyball/
  • William_BB 1y ago
    This is so interesting to hear. From what I've seen, probably half of recent yc startups have founders below 30. I wonder how senior talent views being interviewed by people who are essentially junior/mid developers. I'm in my 20s with good credentials and have quite a few friends in the startup world. I would never feel comfortable interviewing someone with 10+ years of industry experience.
    • jaggederest 1y ago
      > I would never feel comfortable interviewing someone with 10+ years of industry experience. I would say that's probably overcompensating. I've got about 20 years of startup experience at this point, and one of the things that frustrates me the most is a kind of zero-sum mindset, where you "pass" an interview or not. In the best cases, interviewing is a conversation, a path to better understanding for both parties. The idea that you're "not qualified" is just as silly, in my opinion, as the idea that an hour-long interview lets someone pass judgement. We can both gain, and maybe I'm exactly what you're looking for, in terms of someone who brings skills or perspective you don't have. Maybe it's obvious that I'd be an awful fit. But either way, I believe everyone has something valuable to bring to the conversation. Some of the best times I've been involved in interviewing, we've had even an intern talk to someone. If they're helpful, clear, and kind, that can be a huge signal. It's kind of a cliche, back in the day, that you ask the office manager how the candidate treated them, but it's absolutely true that if you treat people "below you" in the hierarchy poorly, that's a red flag, to me.
• OhMeadhbh 1y ago
  I always chuckle when I see a posting where the "BUSINESS" founder says something like "looking for a founding engineer to define our tech stack, but we've already decided we're going to use Python 2.8, Solaris, Azure and a custom build of VIM." [Obviously this is a bit of an exaggeration.]
  • ilc 1y ago
    Only mild. They'd be using Arch Linux and Rust.
• jsojeojojo 1y ago
  Okay
• Centigonal 1y ago
  There is no such thing as "the best engineers." Some engineers are definitely better than others, but once you pass the bar of "really smart, great work ethic," the tech tree diverges pretty dramatically. Some engineers (like Notch) are amazing at quickly putting out vast quantities of mediocre code, prototyping ideas, maintaining a clear product vision, and bringing something into reality quickly. Other engineers (like John Carmack) are great at generating well-founded opinions and finding clever solutions to difficult issues. Some engineers (like Bill Atkinson) worked mostly remotely and developed amazing technology, while other engineers (like Joel Spolsky) insisted on in-office and built a best-in-class mentorship organization. While hiring people with exceptional talent is a step-change when it comes to any organization's ability to accomplish its goals, there is no one metric for "best." Much better to identify the specific skills for which you need exceptional talent, and to create a hiring funnel that identifies people who excel in that dimension.
  • gyomu 1y ago
    Notch, Carmack, Spolsky may have engineering in their skillsets, but they are also product (game) designers and executives (and world class ones at that). I don’t think that’s really what people want when they’re looking to hire an engineer for their startup. As for Bill Atkinson… looking at his Wikipedia page, looks like he was indeed a top notch engineer in the 80s, but doesn’t seem like he worked on anything noteworthy after that? Definitely not in the same league as the other 3 IMO.
  • binary132 1y ago
    That sounds like you’re talking about distinctions within “the best” to me.
    • littlestymaar 1y ago
      Except if you put any of the above names in an environment that doesn't suit them, they will likely be mediocre at best, and even damaging at worse. The “best candidate” depends a lot on your existing organization.
• mitchitized 1y ago
  Although I agree with the overall sentiment of the article, the reality in 2025 is that it is a totally dead market and we are still trying to figure out WTH is going on. Some companies are holding their breaths due to political instability, others are in sectors that are already getting decimated (likely from the same instability above), yet others have reached a point where they (and "they" appear to be in a majority in their respective industries) are more centered on efficiency than headcount. I'm employed and I'm grateful... I know plenty of people searching and are getting nothing but silence in their search. I think both sides of the hiring equation are getting a hard reset right now.
  • OhMeadhbh 1y ago
    Yes and No... My take on the current job market is this has been a slow-slide into oblivion. When I was a kid, we used something like engineering practice to develop software. You would have someone across the hall with a title of "product manager" or something who understood the business and the problem they wanted to solve (and how much money people would likely be willing to pay for it.) Then you would get a set of 15 requirements, 5 of which needed to be met before the product could be shipped. As an engineer, you put your head down and thought about how you would build each feature and there was a back and forth about which features got built at which time and you built something that looked like a product roadmap for the next three to five years. [ This was in the commercial embedded space. Aviation, government and banking all lived in slightly different worlds. ] Around 1999 there was so much money in the dot-com run-up that the only thing that mattered was shipping something quick before the investors wised up and sued you for fraud. Engineering methodology took a back seat to expediency and this crazy bunch of weirdos practicing eXtreme Programming were used to demonstrate the spiral methodology the big guys used wasn't the only game in town. People took time out from their lunch meetings with VCs to read books by Fred Brooks and Tom DeMarco, if for no other reason than to memorize phrases like "Technical Debt" and "Mythical Man Month." If you say "Fail Quickly" and "Show me your flowcharts..." and you'll sound like a mysterious, wizardly futurian with a deep understanding of the hidden world of the matrix. But most of the people in the 90s in sili valley were ponces. So where was I? Oh yeah... what we're seeing is the eventual end of a 25-30 year slide away from anything resembling "engineering" and "engineering practice". And I'm not saying that's completely bad. I mean... yes... please hire "real" engineers to design, build, test and deploy avionics firmware. You do not need an engineering degree to create a vibe coded web page that texts your fiends with name suggestions for their children or pets. MyTripToSacramento.Com can probably get by with a product manager and a dog. The dog is there to bite the product manager when they try to change the web site. The 2025 job market has been dead for 30 years, we just didn't notice it until today.
• Aurornis 1y ago
  > The best engineers make more than your entire payroll. They have opinions on tech debt and timelines. They have remote jobs, if they want them. They don’t go “oh, well, this is your third company, so I guess I’ll defer to you on all product decisions”. They care about comp, a trait you consider disqualifying. They can care about work-life balance, because they’re not desperate enough to feel the need not to. And however successful your company has been so far, they have other options they like better. In my experience, every single time a company has hired one of these “best engineers” they are not actually good at engineering or delivering anything. It’s always someone who has some credential that makes them look like the most amazing engineer around. It could be someone who was engineer #7 at a unicorn startup. Some times it’s a person who got famous for speaking at conferences or launched a podcast that caught on. Other times it’s someone who has engineered every aspect of their appearance, from having an Ivy League university degree to having a professional smiling headshot on their professionally designed personal website. In one case the engineer was assumed to be amazing because he claimed to have an offer for a million dollar compensation package from another company so the executives thought they were getting a great deal at a lesser valuation. Then the pattern is that they spend a couple years in meetings, writing proposals, and doing greenfield initiatives that don’t go anywhere. They get special exemptions to work remote on unique hours and everyone is expected to work around the superstar. Then two years later they disappear, off to the next company for another raise, without having done anything useful for you. I’m guilty of hiring people like this, too. At one job the CEO reviewed high compensation hires and provided feedback but wouldn’t get in the way. I remember one candidate he flagged as sounding like a “prima donna”, which the hiring team scoffed at. Turns out, yes, he wanted everyone to cater to him, wanted to rewrite everything, and left before delivering anything of value or contributing to existing projects in a meaningful way.
• fussylogic 1y ago
  "only hire them if they raise the bar of the current team"
• chaboud 1y ago
  I was prepared to straight up fight with this author until I actually read what they were saying: 1. Don't hold infeasibly high standards when you're starting up. Time is more precious than than anything (you can't spell "scrappy" without "crappy"). 2. Be more intentional than a lottery-ticket financial plan when it comes to evaluating what traits matter and at what priority order. If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. 3. Recognize market dynamics. If you pay shit for shit hours to do shit work, you'll get shit unless you just get lucky. 4. Hire great people now, rather than waiting for the "best" (read: naively idealized) people. To this, I'd probably want to see the author add another essay on the perils of hiring mediocre people (Jobs: bozo explosion, Rumsfeld: "A's hire A's, B's hire C's..."), because that's the very common company-killing pit that people are trying to avoid. Mediocrity drives away talent, and a small team of talented people will absolutely smoke a large team of mediocre people. And therein lies the conundrum of startup hiring: what's the right balance?
  • arandr0x 1y ago
    I think the post is getting at the idea that pedigree is not a reliable predictor of talent, but because it's a convenient and standard one, everyone uses it (which in turns reduces its usefulness). It's harder for a recruiter to fully experience the perils of hiring mediocre people, but they're definitely at ground zero for "what's on a resume is mostly not representative of actual talent".
    • GCA10 1y ago
      Hire people on the way up. Hire people who are going to do their best work ever, for you, after having partially but not fully mastered everything you want, via their previous jobs. It's easy to evaluate a resume. It's harder -- but not impossible -- to assess potential. Working inside a big tech company for six years, I saw that PM hires were done almost entirely on pedigree: find me another Stanford grad. These tended to produce a lot of fast exits as well as some comically bad and totally predictable fails. Engineering hires were done on hunger, drive, scrappiness (and networks). They fared better.
      • 1y ago
• jilles 1y ago
  This is really well written. Great read.
• pkilgore 1y ago
  > You're acting like a replacement-level employer and expecting more than replacement-level candidates. There are probably a lot of people who need to hear this.
• fullshark 1y ago
  Hiring committees want people who can execute their vision no matter how poorly or well conceived it is, that’s it. Everything else is noise and you shouldn’t take it too seriously. There is a ton of bullshit floating around the industry, calling it out is an endless and ultimately fruitless exercise. Get paid and get out with your sanity/health in tact and you win.
• 6r17 1y ago
  ngl - the worst times I ever spent was in companies that did not care about tech or what they were doing. The thing is, *i'm* a tech profile ; I like doing deep tech - going to the heart of the tissue. I learned with difficulty that it's sometimes better to not be open-minded, to not go for companies that "just get shit done" etc... - because the realities is that, most of the time, people do what they like, and it just happens that they can latch on something that make them earn money. And we forget that's it's actually a multiple body problem, and that we therefor need to have a strong focus in order to be competitive. But I don't want to be competitive doing php, or staying on the same Django framework since 2012 ; or sticking do doing the same job for the next 2 years until the HR is done with me because they got that smart idea. The truth is ; everybody has to cross the market somehow to be competitive. So you better find a way to be part of the best engineers - and I don't want to be in a company where this is undervalued - because *I know* that in 6 month to 2 years - my skills will not have increased, my competivity on the market would have decreased ; my profile won't sound as strong - and the economics just don't math out. Let's compare the salary of a back-end engineer with a distributed engineer - it's literally 3x to 4x as much in Europe. If you have no job ; it's literally an opportunity to multiply your salary, improve, know the stack better, etc... - The end-goal is not to be part of a company that stagnates both in technology and ideas for many years - that's already a waste of time and money.
• petesergeant 1y ago
  The "Extra details that didn't fit in the post" at the bottom of the post are very much worth reading, even if they didn't naturally open themselves up.
• 0xbadcafebee 1y ago
  The whole tech recruiting and hiring process is bonkers. But in terms of "finding a candidate": 1) there's no way to know if somebody is skilled, since the industry don't require degrees, titles are absolute bullshit, and "years of experience" is frequently "spent 3 yrs maintaining other people's code and manually running deploys". the interview and take-homes are a bad pantomime. it's mostly vibes. 2) nobody asks the candidates what they want ahead of the interview. I'll gladly tell you what my ideal job would be, ideal culture, day to day requirements, etc. If 90% of those seem to match a trend... maybe change your company to match the trend? Then you get 90% of the hires. 3) on compensation, know what you're offering and go after people looking for that. A) terrible job, amazing pay, B) decent pay, decent job, C) terrible pay, amazing job. A) is golden handcuffs. B) people bail on you whenever a better gig shows up (or retain terrible/lazy ppl). C) is you've got a hire for life. which do you wanna be?
• pjdesno 1y ago
  I worked for 5 startups before I went back to grad school and then entered academia; it was over a quarter century ago but I think some of the lessons remain valid. The best startup I was at was one where four engineers who knew each other had dropped out of a big company and started with a consulting project, developing the first version of the product for an early customer (a national lab) using FPGAs. Then they got venture funding to develop an ASIC version, which is when I got hired as employee #12. The next best one started when a bunch of friends from undergrad - mostly engineers but one with a business degree - convinced a sales person to go in with them on a startup. In both cases they didn't have to hire a founding engineer - the founding engineer or engineers were part of the original group that got seed funding. Some of the later hires were quite good, and rose to the level of some of the founders or higher, but their success wasn't dependent on the supernatural ability of someone they hadn't yet identified or hired. To be honest, the whole idea of "I have a great idea, but don't know how to translate it into product, so I'll hire people to do that" seems like a recipe for disaster in so many ways.
  • y-curious 1y ago
    Yeah there's a reason that "ideas guys" are memed to death online. It's very easy to have a great idea, the skill is in selling that idea to VCs, customers, friends and family etc.
    • desolate_muffin 1y ago
      Well and actually building the thing well enough for them to become/remain customers.
• baazaa 1y ago
  IMO there's two reasons you'd want the very best engineers. A) you're working on one of the hardest engineering problems in the world. B) you've a track-record of failing to deliver with merely competent engineers. But in the second case it's invariably incompetent management that's the problem.
• xyst 1y ago
  Would the "best engineers" even be grinding through applications or 7-8 round interviews? I thought these folks had headhunters working for them because they were in demand. The jobs came to them. Not the other way around. Or if the product or area was interesting they would seek them out through back channels.
• jeron 1y ago
  reminds me of the obnoxious Ramp ad about how they only hire the best engineers with a very low hire rate I wonder if they considered that they simply hired people who are just really good at interviewing, and not necessarily actually the best engineers?
• klas_segeljakt 1y ago
  It brings Steve Jobs' quote to mind: "It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do" Companies who generically look for "the best engineers" think their problems will be solved if they can just hire someone smart and tell them what to do. They say they want "the best engineers" but then their job descriptions and interview processes scream "we want someone who will execute our vision exactly as we've defined it." The best engineers will tell you why your architecture is wrong, why your code sucks, why your timeline is unrealistic, and why your product decisions make no technical sense. If you're not ready for that level of pushback, you don't actually want the best engineers.
  • vouwfietsman 1y ago
    Jobs: "We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do" Jobs 10 minutes later: "You did a terrible job because you are a terrible person and you should feel terrible you even exist"
  • godelski 1y ago
    > We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do Or from Bell Labs: "How do you manage a bunch of geniuses? You don't" > Companies who generically look for "the best engineers" If you need "the best" then your system is (most likely) too complicated and you're going to have a hard time keeping "the best" as their work becomes frustrating. > The best engineers will tell you why your architecture is wrong, why your code sucks, why your timeline is unrealistic, and why your product decisions make no technical sense. If you're not ready for that level of pushback, you don't actually want the best engineers. I want to stress how important this is. An engineer should be grumpy. The job is to find problems AND fix them. They don't just complain but argue why it should be done another way. They complain about what seems like petty things because they understand that if a big problem can be broken down into small problems than the accumulation of small problems creates big problems. People often conflate phrases like "but what about", "how do we handle", "okay, but" or so on as "no". But these are not "no" phrases by engineers. These are "I'm thinking out loud" phrases. If you surround yourself with yesmen you've surrounded yourself with people who don't care about the company, they just care about their own survival within it. Unless you're perfect, you need people that are unafraid to challenge management when they think management is wrong. You need people to be able to make mistakes because hindsight is a million times clearer than foresight.
• snowstormsun 1y ago
  If you want the best engineers, you also need to be the best employer.
• jmull 1y ago
  Another aspect of this that bothers me is starting off the employer/employee relationship with a bald-faced lie. I'm not a stickler for rigorous honesty in what is essentially marketing materials -- sure, present your strengths, not your weaknesses; fine, be aspirational. But to start right off with something you know isn't anywhere close to the truth sets a pretty bad direction. Probably the best case is that people -- some of whom will become your employees -- realize it's BS and learn not to take what you say at face value in the future.
• rvz 1y ago
  The whole truth: When the average pre-revenue startup says: > "We need the best engineers" What they really mean is this: "We really need ex-FAANG engineers from Ivy League, Stanford, MIT and Oxbridge for close to below market rates." *6 months later:* "We have a skills shortage of the best engineers" What they really mean is this: "No one wants to accept our below market price offers, even with 0.01% equity which may be worth something one day." If the startup cannot offer a competitive compensation to FAANG or the big AI companies, just walk away. Likely dodged a bullet anyway.
• shenenee 1y ago
  Straight up recruitment bs
• lillecarl 1y ago
  Let's make this hit LinkedIn somehow, along with the "why we hate recruiters" submission :p
• heeton 1y ago
  I've considered "great engineer" a hiring anti-pattern for a decade. (Specifically in the space of product-focussed pre-pmf startups, through into early scale-ups). I'll take "great communicator", "great co-ordinator", "great collaborator" and "great technical designer" over engineering prowess any day of the week. That's where the 10x gains come from in a team. Though, on that last point, I think most great engineers I've met are that way because they are great technical designers. It's not something that usually gets filtered for in hiring in my experience. We have a career framework that I've refined across 4 teams now. 6 areas, and only one of those is "Coding and testing".
• throwawaymaths 1y ago
  you dont understand. that requires training and i dont want to train a midlevel because: - theyre just going to hop - i suck at teaching - vcs want me to hire an ex-faang - all of the above
• siliconc0w 1y ago
  The general goal of hiring for startups is, essentially money-ball or finding value. You could pay market-rate for a tenured senior engineer from a top tech company or you could pay a lot less from someone out of a state school that might fly under the normal resume screen but is otherwise highly motivated and high agency.
• __alexs 1y ago
  Why does no one ever seem to apply early stopping theory to hiring even though that's the canonical example of early stopping theory?
• qwertytyyuu 1y ago
  To quibble on a point the “best” egineers don’t have a lifestyle that most people would consider work life balance right? For them engineering is life. (Mild exaggeration)
• fsckboy 1y ago
  these discussion are so repetitious, and so many opinions (which are all welcome, they are opinions) seem so personally motivated. I want to read about some contrast, some "I expected this, but I've learned this" I really only want to hear from people who announce first "I went to elite schools, but I prefer hiring journeymen" or "the best I've known come from the unlikeliest places" or "I'm self taught, but I'm a good worker with some projects to show and talked my way into some great situations, but I realized I had to go back to school, I didn't have the horsepower" or Here's how I've learned to knit a team together, here are the types of diversity (of skills, habits, temperaments, experiences, raw iq, or educations) that will make a team successful. it's boring to read over and over "mine owne education is that of a young prince, and I will only work with yon other princes" or "me learn code with sticks in cave, no code cave, no code with me" don't simply justify yourself, that's only what survivor-bias or failure bias "teaches"
• braiamp 1y ago
  Linus Sebastian, from LTT asked Noctua CEO if they had the best engineers. He said they had good engineers but also give them time and resources to develop good products.
• renewiltord 1y ago
  A mistake most founders make is they want someone as motivated about their company as they are. But things have changed since even 15 years ago. Back then, the machinery for startups wasn't as available, so many people would work for someone else to do something. As the machinery has become more available, all those highly motivated people would rather compete with you than work with you. So founder-level motivation is only available if you give something else up: cash (as opposed to delayed equity), large amounts of equity (2% or more), desirable working environment (close to home, remote, etc) or something else they can't get and can't just get by competing instead. But the most founder-level motivation guys will just start a competitor. That's life.
• datavirtue 1y ago
  Let me translate this article. "Just hire my fucking candidate, this week. Thank you." --your recruiter
• foobarian 1y ago
  This seems like just a purity spiral effect. What do you expect recruiters to say, that they hire medium engineers? I think this is mostly just performative
  • acuozzo 1y ago
    Wouldn't it be refreshing to have the bullshit laid bare for once?
• eunos 1y ago
  >Would you rather be a green bar in this chart, or a red one? LMAO with the cult of "No False positives". They'd rather never hire anyone at all.
• varispeed 1y ago
  Most companies want a tailored Savile Row suit, but only budget for supermarket polyester. Don’t worry though - I’ve got a warehouse full of polyester, and for £40k I’ll happily convince you it’s bespoke.
• j45 1y ago
  You don't want to hire the worst engineers either.
• nextworddev 1y ago
  This guy will have trouble hiring best engineers
• AnotherGoodName 1y ago
  A good rule of thumb as a founder and someone that's worked in big tech; Big tech rules out any red flags. This means any engineers that get a passing grade across all interviews are in. Anyone that fails one of the multiple interviews is out, despite possible strengths. Small tech should hire on the green flags. This means you can tradeoff weaknesses if they can do a job that needs to be done.
  • rachofsunshine 1y ago
    This is a specific application of a good general principle. Big companies need to watch for failure modes. Small ones need to watch for success modes, because the default is always failing.
• numpad0 1y ago
  Of course, running a business is not like saving the planet. Tech companies are companies that make money by means of tech - it doesn't matter how sausage is made but that you are compensated for sausages delivered. Which is why personal hobby projects are awesome!! No one is going to make a bank building an example of Federation standard issue phaser pistol as close to forms and functions as issued, but it'll be awesome nevertheless and regardless of quality. But it won't make a bank. But it'll be absolutely awesome.
• declan_roberts 1y ago
  I haven't read an article this on-point in a long time. As someone comfortably working remotely at BIGTECH it's actually really frustrating. OK you have a 60% pay cut and forced relocation back to the Bay Area. Let's jump right into the conversation about how you're going to make up for that to attract talent. Don't tell me it's a virtue because I'm not stupid and you're not stupid.
• GuB-42 1y ago
  It reminds me of what a recruiter once told me something among the lines of: We ask for god in person, hoping for a prophet, we are happy when we get the faithful.
• HPsquared 1y ago
  There is no universal "best" anything. It's all subjective situational evaluation.
• tikhonj 1y ago
  One thing I learned from working on a remarkably good team—at Target of all places—is that you can hire great people as long as you can demonstrate (show-not-tell) that you're doing something different and interesting. How you demonstrate this can take lots of different forms (the whole point is that there is no one way to do this!) but just saying "we have high standards and work hard" is never enough on its own. Everybody says that. You'd think that startups would be the best-positioned organizations to do things differently in the name of hiring. When you start your own company, you don't have to answer to management or HR, and you don't have to follow trends for political reasons. ("We can't let your team do X differently from everybody else, people are going to talk...") But I rarely see this in practice. Most startups seem intent on having a pretty standard approach to management and work; there's clearly some pressure, whether directly from investors or just purely sociological, to be like every other startup.
• zwhitchcox 1y ago
  Recruiters can’t tell a good engineer from a a bad engineer
  • rachofsunshine 1y ago
    We can. That's kind of the entire point of our business. Check back in a week or two - we've got another blog post on some of our interviewing data in the pipeline.
• dizlexic 1y ago
  "A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one" - A dude. +1 for the generalists
• creer 1y ago
  Not mentioned enough: watch out for engineers (or any hires) who will take zero interest in helping the business succeed. You can try and hire for brains and experience, say. And have your business constantly undermined by empire building, "just collecting a salary", resume building, and other popular nuisances. Attitude and alignment matters. If you are yourself "empire or resume building", nevermind, carry on.
  • stackedinserter 1y ago
    > watch out for engineers (or any hires) who will take zero interest in helping the business succeed To my experience, 80% of software developers are like this. May be each 5th bothers to ask "what are we building and for whom?"
  • Jensson 1y ago
    Many engineers want to deliver good products, not many care about the bottom line of the business. So instead of wanting them to care about your money, try to make money out of good products and engineers will happily take money to help you deliver that. This does mean that when engineers have to choose between company making more money or a better product for users they will pick the users almost every time, that isn't a bad thing, just try to work with that rather than say such engineers are unhireable.
    • creer 1y ago
      > Many engineers want to deliver good products Yes and that's a great start. > they will pick the users almost every time Empire building is very common (and other nuisances). SOME engineers will pick the users, yes. Thankfully. But many others do not care one bit about the users. Empire building is certainly not about caring about the users. Are empire builders still hireable? Unfortunately they seem to do great at interviews.
• ranger_danger 1y ago
  The entire article to me sounds like it hinges on having a very unrealistic and singular definition of "best", that I would bet money does not even align with the people they are talking about. Of course people don't need or want rocket scientists to work on their facebook clone, isn't that obvious? Why does the whole article center around this one interpretation of a subjective term? Their website advertises a service that provides 90-minute live-coding interviews. Maybe if I actually was looking for a rocket scientist, that might be a good idea, but otherwise that seems incredibly excessive to me. Personally I've been in this industry almost 30 years and I would never take a live-coding interview for a job, but maybe that's just me.
• endigma 1y ago
  What’s with the pivot away from the purely speed based testing? I recall getting the ick when I saw it as your primary metric for engineer goodness not too long ago and I don’t see any mention of it anymore on your site. Have you pivoted to something more sane?
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• AllenM999 1y ago
  I think this framing is exactly right: once you cross the threshold of intelligence and work ethic, “best” stops being a single axis and starts becoming contextual. In practice, the engineers who end up being game-changers aren’t necessarily the ones with the cleanest codebases or the fastest prototype cycles — they’re the ones whose strengths match the moment. A few real-world examples come to mind: Linus Torvalds didn’t just write code; he created a system of distributed collaboration (Git) because the scale of Linux demanded it. His engineering contribution was partly social architecture. Margaret Hamilton at NASA defined entire disciplines of software reliability and safety at a time when “software engineering” wasn’t even a recognized field. Her context required meticulousness and systems thinking over speed. James Gosling’s creation of Java wasn’t just about syntax, but about building a portable runtime when fragmentation was the biggest pain point in the industry. He solved the problem the world cared about most at that time. Guido van Rossum intentionally designed Python to be simple and approachable, betting on readability over performance. That “engineer as teacher” quality ended up seeding one of the most important ecosystems today. The “best” engineer isn’t universal; it’s the one whose particular strengths — whether speed, rigor, clarity, or community-building — align with the bottleneck you’re facing. So maybe the hiring question isn’t “Who’s the best engineer we can find?” but rather: “What kind of engineering excellence will unblock us right now?”