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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"

#41

Post by mitchitized »

Although I agree with the overall sentiment of the article, the reality in 2025 is that it is a totally dead market and we are still trying to figure out WTH is going on.

Some companies are holding their breaths due to political instability, others are in sectors that are already getting decimated (likely from the same instability above), yet others have reached a point where they (and "they" appear to be in a majority in their respective industries) are more centered on efficiency than headcount.

I'm employed and I'm grateful... I know plenty of people searching and are getting nothing but silence in their search. I think both sides of the hiring equation are getting a hard reset right now.

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

#42

Post by OhMeadhbh »

tomatohs wrote: post #17

It's not 2010 anymore. Most startups can't even attract "the best engineers" much less hire them. This is the late game, 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? You've got to be offering something really, really valuable like remote work, an interesting problem, and/or a new experience. Otherwise the math doesn't math.

Because FANG companies do not attract "top talent." They attract "very good talent," but typically talent that requires infrastructure that doesn't exist at startups. Daryl Havens is the exception that proves this rule, and you are not Daryl (unless you are Daryl and in which case, "Hey Daryl! Let's meet up sometime and chat about VAXen.")

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

#43

Post by indoordin0saur »

tomatohs wrote: post #17

It's not 2010 anymore. Most startups can't even attract "the best engineers" much less hire them. This is the late game, 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? You've got to be offering something really, really valuable like remote work, an interesting problem, and/or a new experience. Otherwise the math doesn't math.

Engineers don't really care about equity anymore because they've been burned so many times. The big payouts from a successful company are not necessarily guaranteed the way they were pre-2015 or so. It has become too common for there to be behind-closed-doors dlilutions and investor-only exit opportunities. It has become very unwise to trust anything beyond real cash wired to your bank account.

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

#44

Post by cmrdporcupine »

tomatohs wrote: post #17

It's not 2010 anymore. Most startups can't even attract "the best engineers" much less hire them. This is the late game, 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? You've got to be offering something really, really valuable like remote work, an interesting problem, and/or a new experience. Otherwise the math doesn't math.

It's always been the case that FAANG or whatever are not always the "best" home for the "best" engineers. Many do not/did not feel comfortable there, especially as they became more and more corporate and slow.

But unfortunately the answer now is that "best engineers" can't work there either because the layoff / employment-squeeze is in full swing.

You're right that the equity packages offered by startups to engineers are generally insulting. Every time this has come up in negotiation in the last few positions I've interviewed for the founders won't even tell you what % of shares they're offering, nor any sense of what the real value is, just pretend nonsense.

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

#45

Post by Aurornis »

> 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 however successful your company has been so far, they have other options they like better.

In my experience, every single time a company has hired one of these “best engineers” they are not actually good at engineering or delivering anything.

It’s always someone who has some credential that makes them look like the most amazing engineer around. It could be someone who was engineer #7 at a unicorn startup. Some times it’s a person who got famous for speaking at conferences or launched a podcast that caught on. Other times it’s someone who has engineered every aspect of their appearance, from having an Ivy League university degree to having a professional smiling headshot on their professionally designed personal website. In one case the engineer was assumed to be amazing because he claimed to have an offer for a million dollar compensation package from another company so the executives thought they were getting a great deal at a lesser valuation.

Then the pattern is that they spend a couple years in meetings, writing proposals, and doing greenfield initiatives that don’t go anywhere. They get special exemptions to work remote on unique hours and everyone is expected to work around the superstar. Then two years later they disappear, off to the next company for another raise, without having done anything useful for you.

I’m guilty of hiring people like this, too. At one job the CEO reviewed high compensation hires and provided feedback but wouldn’t get in the way. I remember one candidate he flagged as sounding like a “prima donna”, which the hiring team scoffed at. Turns out, yes, he wanted everyone to cater to him, wanted to rewrite everything, and left before delivering anything of value or contributing to existing projects in a meaningful way.

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

#46

Post by tdhz77 »

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.

I would agree. I would add a straight A student might not be able to hold a conversation very well. There are so many factors, but one thing is for sure— getting a long is what matters most.

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

#47

Post by tmnvdb »

mrbluecoat wrote: post #24

You're right, don't hire the best engineers - let them create a startup instead with more VC funding than you've ever dreamed of, then watch as they erode your market share through aggressive marketing, better features, and faster release cycles as they slowly displace you by siphoning off your second-best engineers and eventually get bought out by your biggest competitor. /s

Did you read the article?

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

#48

Post by llm_nerd »

shadowgovt wrote: post #21
llm_nerd wrote: post #6

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,…

Out of curiosity: what error are you seeing? That site appears to be running on an Amazon IP (on my traceroute, in the block https://ipinfo.io/AS16509/52.223.48.0/20 ). If it didn't load immediately, I wonder if you got unlucky enough to catch an autoscaler napping (or maybe they aren't autoscaling; sometimes dodging the hug of death completely isn't worth the cost, depending on how cost-sensitive a firm is). (ETA: H…

From my normal desktop it is resolving as 18.204.152.241 / 18.204.152.241 which seems to have misconfigured SSL. From a cloud instance it is drawing 52.223.52.2 / 35.71.142.77 which load properly.

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

#50

Post by zuppy »

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…

it's more like short term gain vs long term gain. experienced engineers can design an architecture that will allow you to scale cheaper and faster in the future, at the high initial cost. it will be cheaper to maintain, better for security.

depends at what point your business is at the moment of hiring and what you plan to do with the product. do you need volume or quality (both variants are right)?

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