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.
The authors reference a Will Felps experiment[1] that showed that introducing just one pessimistic, lazy, or mean actor into a group of professionals cut the entire group's productivity by 30-40%.
As a result of this lesson, Netflix now only hires "A-players" and is pretty aggressive about letting go of "B-players" and "C-Players."
[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/370/transcript
This has been borne out in real-world observational studies, too: https://www.washington.edu/news/2007/02/12/rotten-to-the-cor...
Clear communication and transparent accountability are the way.
I am personally guilty of being far too lenient and tolerant in overlooking "hard to work with". Bluntly, as an engineer, I enjoyed working with a few particular "brilliant assholes" (as their brilliance was often but their AH nature rarely directed at me) and so I tended to tolerate them too much when I transitioned into leadership roles. I don't know if that was biggest mistake as a leader, but it was for sure in the top five.
You might get lucky and get the "creative genius engineer who is also an organizational freak who lives to squash JIRA tickets" ... but you also... might not.
The ultimate job of good management in a competently hired software development team is to uncork the potential of team members by finding the things stopping them from being productive, and getting rid of the blockage. Finger pointing about ticket tracking and demanding paperwork ... will not do that, at least not for everyone. For some class of team members the best thing management can do is find some way to accomodate their idiosyncracies.
This is assuming everyone is motivated. I assume most of us are only at work doing what we do at a "startup" type place because we like it and want to do good work. But not everyone agrees on how good work gets done and how to get there.
Too many people go into management for the status or control. In my experience, a good manager is more of a coach than a "boss".
So either you're correct, or all the top FAANG companies are...
And they probably won't use Jira. Or tickets.
The actual metrics (not necessarily easily quantifiable) are the desired traits you put in your job description; they don't correlate perfectly.
I very intentionally did not write anything about finding engineers who are just good at the things you care about and not at other stuff, because every bit of data I have says there is a considerable component of general engineering skill underlying most eng roles. No, it isn't totally one dimensional, but (in a principal-component-analysis sense) it is fairly low-dimensional.
There really are just better and worse engineers in the sense that eng A is better than eng B for virtually every job. But that's precisely why recognizing the competitiveness of hiring is important - the more you insist on narrowing your pool, especially in ways others also narrow theirs, the less likely you are to find the rare unknown great engineer.
Sure, but I don't think that's the point of the article.
The point of the article is that startups always claim they only hire "the best" (by whatever metric), but they actually don't, because they cannot pay for the best, nor accommodate their needs and opinions.
They actually want "good enough" engineers, not "the best". Again, the precise definition of "best" is not the point; we all agree it varies (though there are some common elements to all the best engineers).
Far from being upset by this, I'm thankful: I know I belong with the "good enough", definitely not the best :)
Curiosity, resourcefulness, empathy, being user-centric are all things to never stop developing.
The “best candidate” depends a lot on your existing organization.
the people doing the hiring want to hire someone with capabilities they lack (which is why they are hiring in the first place) but then also expect that they will be able to exploit the person they are hiring in order to gain an excess share of the profits they create. the idea that you can hire people for their logic and math skills and expect that they won't be able to calculate their own value is a bit of a paradox.
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.
/s
God i hate the tech world these days.
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?
I think the points in this post are mostly all well taken, but I also think a hiring manager looks at this and says "yes, this a vendor talking their book". Most of the relationship between a recruiting firm and a tech company is a disagreement about what the threshold for a viable candidate is!
† https://www.otherbranch.com/shared/blog/rebooting-something-...
In my Triplebyte postmortem (also on the blog), one of the mistakes I talked about was that Triplebyte was aggressive about trying to dictate terms. We told people how they had to hire.
Otherbranch takes a softer approach: if you ask for my opinion, I'll tell you what I think. Otherwise, I'll do my best to find you what you asked us for, with the understanding that some sets of constraints reduce the probability of success to ~zero.
That goes on the candidate side, too. I get a fair number of people who will come in and tell me "I only want a remote job where I can take a day off whenever I want and only want to work on a super clean codebase and also get paid 250k a year" - and those people are almost never going to end up with jobs. But the tradeoffs they want to make are their business, not mine, until they ask me to do otherwise.
In sports, you call them role players and it’s no different when building dev teams
I can’t imagine managing a team full of “best engineers”, sounds like a nightmare
Sometimes you just want solid, competent engineers who can agree to disagree and build what you ask them, in the way you ask them to
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.
If you don't have people excited about what they're building, talking to each other and liking or at least respecting each other, it's game over.
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.
Then they'll help you figure out how to get where the company needs to be, on a feasible timeline, with the resources available.
Only if you actually listen to them. A lot of CEOs seem to forget this step
> We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do
> Companies who generically look for "the best engineers"
> 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.
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.
Not just that, it's also "I want to know what your opinion and reasoning is on this as well" This has often led to some of the most productive conversations of my career.
My favorite company I ever worked for was much like what you describe. The management attitude from top to bottom was, here's what we think we need to succeed in this market, tell us what you need to get it done and we will give you the freedom to do it. There was a culture of people fixing small but annoying bugs in between major feature work, prototyping ideas that would make all devs' lives easier, and strong communication within and between teams. You were never chastised for dropping everything to help someone else get unblocked. People were nice to each other and were even not afraid to engage in a little light humor now and again.
It was profitable even throughout the great recession but could only scale to a certain point. So the founders decided to get out at the top and sold it to another company that didn't know what to do with it and most of the good people left when the culture changed to more traditional top-down management.
Jobs 10 minutes later: "You did a terrible job because you are a terrible person and you should feel terrible you even exist"
Yep
I say this because if you're going through the hiring process like a chump, I'd leave the ego at the door and not talk about compensation or try to demand remote work on a desirable position.
Not negotiating compensation just means you're paying a conflict avoidance tax.
This makes it sound like these things are written on stone tablets and we just need to accept them as is. They are businesses buying labor. Everything is negotiable.
Talking about those things is not “ego” it’s a perfectly rational thing to do. Whether you should be paid $50k or $500k is not a law of nature but a compromise between buyers and sellers of labor.
Similarly, if you’re willing to trade remote work for a lower salary it’s perfectly rational to bring that up.
The best software devs I've hired again and again are basically people i know they are good, or someone I trust a lot recommended them. My "technical" interview is just basically trying to sell them the position.
Likewise I've had the luck of not having real technical interviews in the last 4 jobs I've had, the last being for Principal Engineer. It has been basically acquaintances referring me and soft "what's the problem to solve?" Chats.
Several former coworkers have offered me jobs at their startups, but it's like 2/3rds of my current base and 20% of total liquid comp.
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)?
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/
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.
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.
The junior interviewer might be really smart and extremely motivated, but ready to argue about something very specific while missing the forest for the tree.
Years ago, I was interviewed by two young guys at meta. They asked me to solve on a white board a problem to which the obvious and expected solution was a binary search. Which I did.
I wrote a generic binary search function, and then used it in another function. I stepped through the code of each functions line by line as attempt to prove correctness.
They wouldn't have it. They argued I could only prove it was working by stepping through both functions together. While I argued the literal point of using (pure) functions was to simplify by composing and abstraction.
Things got quite heated up. Especially with one of dude. I just left right there and then.
I'm 25+ YOE. 9+ YOE in small companies.
Now, I'll drop a line on ya: I've made several million dollars of mistakes, could easily be 8 figures, though I doubt 9.
Do you want to pay for all that learning someone ELSE paid for, or learn it yourself?
Your call.
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.
Many of these shops are strategically preying on the infamous "insecure overachiever" types.
The idea is to work smart and ambitious (but insecure) people to the bone for a short period. 1-3 years. Then when exit opportunities arise, most will leave. Those that stay will have been indoctrinated to think that the toxic culture is normal, or they simply just thrive.
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.
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.
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.
Totally off the topic of the thread, but it's why I do things differently with the people who work for me. I'm the sole owner of Otherbranch, but I pay out a percentage of profits over certain thresholds (between 25 and 75%, rising at higher levels of profit) to the team. Keeps things concrete and aligns incentives with building something that works today rather than obsessing over a hypothetical exit.
Once you hit a few million in the bank, have a house, priorities kind of shift. Not for everyone, but for those that would work elsewhere for reasons not money.
Put it another way, there are people in every company whose reasons being there can conflict with the motivations of an engineer with the priorities you describe. Often those people end up being your manager.
But unfortunately the answer now is that "best engineers" can't work there either because the layoff / employment-squeeze is in full swing.
You're right that the equity packages offered by startups to engineers are generally insulting. Every time this has come up in negotiation in the last few positions I've interviewed for the founders won't even tell you what % of shares they're offering, nor any sense of what the real value is, just pretend nonsense.
These places are for people who hate thinking but are good at pretending otherwise.
Top talent that accept below-insanely-great pay start their own startups.
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.
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.
But the market is two-tiered in a way it hasn't been before, particularly w.r.t. remote hiring. Almost all engineers want remote jobs and a small number of employers offer them, so the remote job hunt still puts employers in the driver's seat. But (good, senior) engineers hold the cards right now for in-office roles.
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.
- 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.
Then again, I'm on HN. Show me the Benjamins. ;)
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.
I don't anymore. I learned it actually made me worse at the job, and didn't allow me to contribute to the things I DEEPLY care about, because I'm actually just pushing work.
It is not an easy lesson. But I'll take the money, and derive my value to society elsewhere. Alot easier that way.
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.
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.
Sounds like a you problem, TBH. To be even more honest if, after six months, you haven't yet realised what the problem is, your company has deep self-awareness issues.
It's quite simple: if the candidate you want is not applying for your open position, then that's on you; increase the comp, the benefits, the work environment, anything, until the candidate you want sends you a CV.
You're bidding on an open market for talent. I find it hard to believe that the talent you want does not exist.
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.
The fifth engineer can be a junior. Once you've built a base you can start expanding and hiring on potential.
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.
Their key virtue (imho): no politics. They hadn't learned to play the game, buy time, pad estimates, defend their technical choices, and so on ad infinitum. Instead they mostly tried to gain the respect of each other.
Granted as the team grew into 2D and the 10K API's of Java 2, some political teams came on board. sigh.
And it wasn't "companies" hiring and developing them. It was 1-2 senior managers with long histories who managed to extract JavaSoft from Sun to get some breathing room.
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.
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.
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?”
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.
There are probably a lot of people who need to hear 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"
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.
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.
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.
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".
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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.
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.
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.
Hiring decisions tend to be a hindsight is 20/20 proposition.
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.
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.
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.
We ask for god in person, hoping for a prophet, we are happy when we get the faithful.
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.
To my experience, 80% of software developers are like this. May be each 5th bothers to ask "what are we building and for whom?"
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.
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.
I wonder if they considered that they simply hired people who are just really good at interviewing, and not necessarily actually the best engineers?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
LMAO with the cult of "No False positives". They'd rather never hire anyone at all.
...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.
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). 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).
In this case their hosting app has screwed up SSL configs for some of their GeoIP served options.
+1 for the generalists
- theyre just going to hop
- i suck at teaching
- vcs want me to hire an ex-faang
- all of the above
/s