Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

otherbranch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 326 posts

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

#211

Post by rachofsunshine »

tptacek wrote: post #134
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…

I don't know anything about the story of Otherbranch's business (they launched ~about a year ago†), but Patrick, Erin & I briefly worked on a firm with similar business dynamics (Starfighter, a contingency recruiter based on CTF qualifiers). The prospect of eventually writing posts like this is part of why that business got wound down. I think the points in this post are mostly all well taken, but I also think a hiri…

Yeah, to some extent you have to be willing to deal with this stuff in recruiting, which is why I've taken on the clients under discussion at all.

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.

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

#212

Post by rachofsunshine »

jcheng wrote: post #170
GCA10 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ten…

Do you have any advice for how to suss out someone's hunger, drive, and scrappiness during the hiring process?

Those things are fakeable, but there are plenty of people who will aggressively signal a LACK of hunger. It's more of a negative predictor than a positive one.

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

#213

Post by rachofsunshine »

guywithahat wrote: post #181
rachofsunshine wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good addendum. Do you mind if I add it to the post (credited, of course)?

You can use it, and you don't need to credit me, I don't think it's that unique.

It isn't, but neither is the original post! It's an important addition.

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

#214

Post by tikhonj »

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.

There's a massive difference between "don't write anything down" and "don't use tickets". There are lots of (much better!) ways to write things down and to communicate than tickets.

More importantly, there are categorically better ways of understanding what we're working on than trying to break work down into bite-size linear "tasks".

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

#216

Post by xtracto »

guywithahat wrote: post #103
fitzn wrote: post #13

> 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 ho…

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.

This.

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.

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

#217

Post by goopypoop »

osullivj wrote: post #189
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.

One consistent red flag I look for after the hire is a refusal to learn anything outside their own narrowly defined scope.

Do you mean outside their job description?

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

#218

Post by whatamidoingyo »

axpy906 wrote: post #133
whatamidoingyo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't mind me asking, what's the role?

AI Engineer. Lots of candidates that want to be one but not many with actual experience, is the problem I’ve heard.

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.

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

#219

Post by matwood »

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.

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.

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

#220

Post by rachofsunshine »

eszed wrote: post #158
rachofsunshine wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author of the OP here - to put some more empirical backing to this, virtually every single engineer in our candidate pool values illiquid equity at 20% or less of face value, and about one in three give it no weight at all. 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 thr…

Love that compensation plan. I wish my (and every) company did that.

Yeah, so did I. Being both a ride-or-die leftist and the owner of a company is a weird place to be sometimes, and it's basically the way I figured I could best implement the world I want to see inside the world we have.
Post reply on HN