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Counterpoint: You want to hire the best engineers and empower them to work how they are most effective, remotely or not.
Seems like the author is a bit frustrated from unrealistic expectations. Hits home as we’ve not filled a role for over six months.
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/
Seems like the author is a bit frustrated from unrealistic expectations. Hits home as we’ve not filled a role for over six months.
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.
I mean...you should probably hire good enough engineers that a website can withstand a pretty small amount of HN attention... ...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,…
I would bet HN's readership are majority lurkers and not signed in.
In this case their hosting app has screwed up SSL configs for some of their GeoIP served options.
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.
Yeah don't need best engineers to build another CRUD app.
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.