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

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

#191

Post by Centigonal »

rachofsunshine wrote: post #113
nathell wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Existence of "the best engineers" would imply existence of The One True Metric by which you can judge the person in all context; but that's at best an oversimplification. The actual metrics (not necessarily easily quantifiable) are the desired traits you put in your job description; they don't correlate perfectly.

There is some truth to this, but I would argue (with a considerable amount of data on both assessments and hiring behaviors) that it is less true than people might like to hope it is. 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 sk…

Totally agree with this. I'm in consulting, where there's a significant client communication component to most of our eng roles, so it's a slightly higher-dimensional space than engineering for product orgs. Still, there is a pretty powerful "g factor," where someone who excels in one dimension will probably be pretty good at all the other dimensions.

Still, when we're staffing, there's a world of difference between the great engineer who is happy being mostly left alone and writing complex but well-specced SQL queries for 12 weeks and the great engineer who can balance software architecture, customer meetings, and programming for the same project.

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

#192

Post by jdefr89 »

TrackerFF wrote: post #89
onesandofgrain wrote: post #8

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.

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 foc…

Kind of funny I ended up as a researcher at MIT without having finished my degree some how...

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

#193

Post by eschneider »

klas_segeljakt wrote: post #88

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 screa…

>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.

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

#196

Post by mcdeltat »

TrackerFF wrote: post #89
onesandofgrain wrote: post #8

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.

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 foc…

I used to work for one of these places that spammed "the best" kind of attitude in their recruitment advertising and the actual work was nowhere near it. Big talk about performance and algorithmics and then the work is 95% sifting through slop to implement more slop. I'd even say it even bred a worse than average culture because now if you complain about any of the slop, you're the dumb one who can't "navigate the business".

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

#198

Post by logsr »

Centigonal wrote: post #37

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 (l…

this is a lot like the debate over IQ. there is no single measure of intelligence. humans have a broad array of different capabilities with every individuals capabilities sitting somewhere on a spectrum compared to the overall population. some capabilities are highly valuable in particular contexts and so people who are entirely focused on making money over-focus on the capability set that they believe translates into making money.

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.

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

#199

Post by Apocryphon »

monkeyelite wrote: post #9
sfvisser wrote: post #2

[flagged]

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”.

Mac OS X was largely ported to Intel by John Kullmann working remotely, close enough. (Several more engineers were added to the project but not until a year and a half after he started.)

https://www.quora.com/Apple-company/How-does-Apple-keep-secr...

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

#200

Post by scottyah »

bityard wrote: post #118
guywithahat wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only addendum to this I'd add is the best engineers rarely have to go through the hiring process in a meaningful way, it's usually someone recognizes them from a previous job and vouches heavily for them. 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.

Yes. The more experienced you are, the more your network does all of your job searching for you in the background. (Of course, this assumes you are actively building and maintaining your network.)

This makes sense in a high-churn environment, but some roles are designed so that you rarely work with more than 20 people in a multi-year gig.
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