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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"

#251

Post by bityard »

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…

I'll heartily agree with that but will point out that Jobs was absolutely famous for believing his opinion was the only correct one, micromanaging anything that caught his interest, and routinely chewing people in public out over unimportant details and simple mistakes. So, great sentiment, not a great example. :)

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.

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

#252

Post by banannaise »

efavdb wrote: post #101
threatofrain wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great talent knows how to scale mediocre talent, but you should do so after building that initial core team.

Why ever hire mediocre talent?

why doesn't every MLB team just go get Ohtani

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

#253

Post by ranger_danger »

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.

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

#254

Post by ebiester »

AlwaysRock wrote: post #77
ebiester wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 s…

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.

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

#255

Post by datavirtue »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #93
adw wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience startups have as much bullshit as FAANG companies, it’s just different bullshit.

Absolutely, I agree. A few years ago I walked away from 10 years at Google hoping to rekindle some excitement in exchange for losing out on money. I hated the way things ran at Google and only lasted there so long because of the money. So far I've mostly found different (often worse) kinds of dysfunction and not really much better velocity. There are broader dysfunctions in our industry.

Everyone struggles to keep top talent engaged anyway. You can't move fast enough and don't have any problems that need fixing (other than the crippling tech debt you managed to accumulate already).

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

#256

Post by feoren »

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…

This is ignoring the fact that there are very few opportunities for the best engineers to thrive. I guarantee you there are thousands of John Carmacks laboring away at mid-tier companies with mid-tier managers, inventing paradigm-shifting technologies that get underutilized and shelved behind IP protection by their clueless leadership, living in a B-tier tech city with kids in school and a wife with a job, not able to move, looking at job postings every few weeks and seeing the same dumb-as-bricks derivative adtech vibe-coding middleman companies looking for someone to fill a seat, not developing a network because the few good engineers they know are all in the same situation as them. If you define the best engineers as those that are already incredibly successful, you're doing a terrible job of recruiting for your company. Even a little effort to recognize under-appreciated talent would skyrocket your team's ability, but instead you're salivating over some over-hyped over-paid Silicon Valley rockstars? What a waste. But it doesn't really matter, because your company is also dumb-as-bricks derivative adtech vibe-coding middleware, so why are you even trying to recruit talented engineers at all? Just fill your seats with someone who knows how to type a prompt into an LLM and make your exit before everyone realizes you're a sham.

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

#257

Post by binary132 »

datavirtue wrote: post #151
binary132 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

I'm in full tech debt black hole right now. Avoid this shit, if at all possible. The excess drag is real AF and is greatly threatening the business.

I’m honestly happy to hear (sorry!) that it matters to someone’s business but the counterargument is of course that if it’s become a threat to the business then it should have taken a front seat sooner….

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

#258

Post by Jensson »

creer wrote: post #235

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.

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.

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

#259

Post by Keyframe »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #123
Keyframe wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? 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.

The problem you'll find (I've found) in this case is that management in many of these "startups" expect a certain kind of ... ahem... motivational/authoritarian structure ... that lacks effectiveness or sense with someone who has paid off their mortgage and is mainly there in order to ship things and enjoy crafting software. Put it another way, there are people in every company whose reasons being there can conflict…

Doesn't have to be a startup. Can be something _not your own_ but aligned with your interests. Maybe you care about the environment, or you're fascinated with weapons and don't particularly like people or whatever.

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

#260

Post by swiftcoder »

efavdb wrote: post #101
threatofrain wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great talent knows how to scale mediocre talent, but you should do so after building that initial core team.

Why ever hire mediocre talent?

Because Zuckerberg or Altman is willing to pay the A players a cool million, and you aren't willing to match that
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