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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"

#201

Post by tikhonj »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #171
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…

You're missing the most important kind of great engineer: the guy who's got adequate technical skills but fantastic executive functioning skills. A lot of bright engineers target the "fun" problem or will otherwise get distracted, leaving a lot of simpler tasks ignored. Every team needs the dev who opens up Jira, opens a sorted list of tickets, and just knocks them down one by one, all day every day. Without them, th…

Eh, with good leadership who knows how to support different people with different motivations, you really don't. But good leaders are even harder to find and hire than good engineers.

And they probably won't use Jira. Or tickets.

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

#202

Post by hobs »

Centigonal wrote: post #182
glimshe wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I'm just happy to avoid the worst engineers. They do exist. Bad work ethic, poor foundational skills, hard to work with. I feel that if I can weed them out, I've done 75% of my job as a hiring manager.

Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer talk about this right at the start of No Rules Rules . Netflix had to lay off a big chunk of of their staff because of a funding crunch early in their history. Despite the negative emotional toll that took on everyone, productivity actually improved. The authors reference a Will Felps experiment[1] that showed that introducing just one pessimistic, lazy, or mean actor into a group of prof…

I think the hard part to figure out is how to fire those people without causing a lot of unintended consequences. I have been through layoffs 6 times now, and what I have seen often times they are high up in the food chain with a lot of power, and lay offs are pretty random because they are not telegraphed to everyone so you lose good people.

The people in power circle the wagons around their preferred cliques, because they don't care about the business succeeding nearly as much as their buddies (because there's always the next job.)

Then often the folks are left to do more work with the same pay and the impression that a random draw occurred and they lucked out, nothing more. It really can sour previously hard working folks and have them become that employee that you then think you need to get rid of.

The truth is that most companies are not made of "only A-Players" and that its basically impossible to staff such a company, so you need to limit the damage anyone can do, create systems of checks and balances, reward brilliance and have clear objective levels of work people need to meet to keep their jobs.

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

#203

Post by hobs »

tikhonj wrote: post #201
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing the most important kind of great engineer: the guy who's got adequate technical skills but fantastic executive functioning skills. A lot of bright engineers target the "fun" problem or will otherwise get distracted, leaving a lot of simpler tasks ignored. Every team needs the dev who opens up Jira, opens a sorted list of tickets, and just knocks them down one by one, all day every day. Without them, th…

Eh, with good leadership who knows how to support different people with different motivations, you really don't. But good leaders are even harder to find and hire than good engineers. And they probably won't use Jira. Or tickets.

Good leaders are great communicators and if they don't write anything down I wouldn't consider putting them up as either.

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

#204

Post by VirusNewbie »

Centigonal wrote: post #182
glimshe wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I'm just happy to avoid the worst engineers. They do exist. Bad work ethic, poor foundational skills, hard to work with. I feel that if I can weed them out, I've done 75% of my job as a hiring manager.

Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer talk about this right at the start of No Rules Rules . Netflix had to lay off a big chunk of of their staff because of a funding crunch early in their history. Despite the negative emotional toll that took on everyone, productivity actually improved. The authors reference a Will Felps experiment[1] that showed that introducing just one pessimistic, lazy, or mean actor into a group of prof…

Anecdotal comment here, Netflix had the best interview process of any company I’ve applied to in my ~20 year career.

Very challenging, but no tricky questions, it felt collaborative and low pressure (comparatively at least) and everyone seemed like someone I would enjoy as a coworker.

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

#205

Post by cmrdporcupine »

jdefr89 wrote: post #186
chaboud wrote: post #56

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, nothin…

Again... You don't need the "best" engineers to develop some crappy derivative app that probably already exists. 99% of the stuff people are trying to build these days requires nothing more then a few competent engineers.

In fact sometimes hiring "Really Smart" people leads to excessive complication via overactive abstraction as the intellect searches for some way to make your boring problem interesting (to them) :-)

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

#206

Post by mac-mc »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #171
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…

You're missing the most important kind of great engineer: the guy who's got adequate technical skills but fantastic executive functioning skills. A lot of bright engineers target the "fun" problem or will otherwise get distracted, leaving a lot of simpler tasks ignored. Every team needs the dev who opens up Jira, opens a sorted list of tickets, and just knocks them down one by one, all day every day. Without them, th…

IMO you need all types. A well-functioning team has people with different strengths that can get pathological when they go too far, and they cover for each other's strengths. The "just do it" high work ethic guys like that are great, but they can sometimes "just do it" in the wrong direction and don't stand back and ask if we should even do these things. "Mr. strategic" can sometimes stand back a bit too much and overthink things, etc.

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

#207

Post by rachofsunshine »

the_af wrote: post #187
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…

> 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. 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…

It doesn't even need to be "good enough". People SHOULD be picky about founding engineers. But they should be picky about HIRES, not about top-of-funnel proxies for skill.

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

#208

Post by ilc »

agent327 wrote: post #84
ilc wrote: post #16

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.

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.

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. ;)

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

#209

Post by tikhonj »

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.

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

#210

Post by mac-mc »

hobs wrote: post #203
tikhonj wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, with good leadership who knows how to support different people with different motivations, you really don't. But good leaders are even harder to find and hire than good engineers. And they probably won't use Jira. Or tickets.

Good leaders are great communicators and if they don't write anything down I wouldn't consider putting them up as either.

JIRA is so dysfunctional in many places that people do a good chunk of intra-team planning in spreadsheets and docs instead, and use JIRA sparingly to make everyone faster.

I saw this effect live at my previous big tech after they moved to JIRA. JIRA got used way less than Phabricator because of all the friction it introduced and a lot more informal google docs + slack bot usage increased instead.

I remember to this day asking a report to plan more stuff in JIRA and seeing a beautiful task tree in Phabricator they did in the past. I asked why, and he shrugged and said it was just easier. That's when it really clicked for me. Linear can't come soon enough and burn JIRA to the ground.

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