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

otherbranch.com

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

#71

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

The whole tech recruiting and hiring process is bonkers. But in terms of "finding a candidate":

1) there's no way to know if somebody is skilled, since the industry don't require degrees, titles are absolute bullshit, and "years of experience" is frequently "spent 3 yrs maintaining other people's code and manually running deploys". the interview and take-homes are a bad pantomime. it's mostly vibes.

2) nobody asks the candidates what they want ahead of the interview. I'll gladly tell you what my ideal job would be, ideal culture, day to day requirements, etc. If 90% of those seem to match a trend... maybe change your company to match the trend? Then you get 90% of the hires.

3) on compensation, know what you're offering and go after people looking for that. A) terrible job, amazing pay, B) decent pay, decent job, C) terrible pay, amazing job. A) is golden handcuffs. B) people bail on you whenever a better gig shows up (or retain terrible/lazy ppl). C) is you've got a hire for life. which do you wanna be?

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

#72

Post by pjdesno »

I worked for 5 startups before I went back to grad school and then entered academia; it was over a quarter century ago but I think some of the lessons remain valid.

The best startup I was at was one where four engineers who knew each other had dropped out of a big company and started with a consulting project, developing the first version of the product for an early customer (a national lab) using FPGAs. Then they got venture funding to develop an ASIC version, which is when I got hired as employee #12.

The next best one started when a bunch of friends from undergrad - mostly engineers but one with a business degree - convinced a sales person to go in with them on a startup.

In both cases they didn't have to hire a founding engineer - the founding engineer or engineers were part of the original group that got seed funding. Some of the later hires were quite good, and rose to the level of some of the founders or higher, but their success wasn't dependent on the supernatural ability of someone they hadn't yet identified or hired.

To be honest, the whole idea of "I have a great idea, but don't know how to translate it into product, so I'll hire people to do that" seems like a recipe for disaster in so many ways.

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

#73

Post by baazaa »

IMO there's two reasons you'd want the very best engineers.

A) you're working on one of the hardest engineering problems in the world.

B) you've a track-record of failing to deliver with merely competent engineers.

But in the second case it's invariably incompetent management that's the problem.

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

#74

Post by stackbutterflow »

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.

Because people who say that are delusional.

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

#75

Post by xyst »

Would the "best engineers" even be grinding through applications or 7-8 round interviews?

I thought these folks had headhunters working for them because they were in demand. The jobs came to them. Not the other way around. Or if the product or area was interesting they would seek them out through back channels.

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

#76

Post by binary132 »

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…

That sounds like you’re talking about distinctions within “the best” to me.

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

#77

Post by AlwaysRock »

ebiester wrote: post #19
aorloff wrote: post #3

The best companies hire relatively green engineers and develop them.

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 senior super engineers as your first hires. It might make coding easier early on, but its going to make hiring much much harder.

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

#78

Post by Keyframe »

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.

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.

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

#79

Post by rachofsunshine »

indoordin0saur wrote: post #43
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.

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 thresholds (between 25 and 75%, rising at higher levels of profit) to the team. Keeps things concrete and aligns incentives with building something that works today rather than obsessing over a hypothetical exit.

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

#80

Post by OhMeadhbh »

mitchitized wrote: post #41

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 majori…

Yes and No... My take on the current job market is this has been a slow-slide into oblivion. When I was a kid, we used something like engineering practice to develop software. You would have someone across the hall with a title of "product manager" or something who understood the business and the problem they wanted to solve (and how much money people would likely be willing to pay for it.) Then you would get a set of 15 requirements, 5 of which needed to be met before the product could be shipped. As an engineer, you put your head down and thought about how you would build each feature and there was a back and forth about which features got built at which time and you built something that looked like a product roadmap for the next three to five years. [ This was in the commercial embedded space. Aviation, government and banking all lived in slightly different worlds. ]

Around 1999 there was so much money in the dot-com run-up that the only thing that mattered was shipping something quick before the investors wised up and sued you for fraud. Engineering methodology took a back seat to expediency and this crazy bunch of weirdos practicing eXtreme Programming were used to demonstrate the spiral methodology the big guys used wasn't the only game in town. People took time out from their lunch meetings with VCs to read books by Fred Brooks and Tom DeMarco, if for no other reason than to memorize phrases like "Technical Debt" and "Mythical Man Month." If you say "Fail Quickly" and "Show me your flowcharts..." and you'll sound like a mysterious, wizardly futurian with a deep understanding of the hidden world of the matrix. But most of the people in the 90s in sili valley were ponces.

So where was I? Oh yeah... what we're seeing is the eventual end of a 25-30 year slide away from anything resembling "engineering" and "engineering practice". And I'm not saying that's completely bad. I mean... yes... please hire "real" engineers to design, build, test and deploy avionics firmware. You do not need an engineering degree to create a vibe coded web page that texts your fiends with name suggestions for their children or pets. MyTripToSacramento.Com can probably get by with a product manager and a dog. The dog is there to bite the product manager when they try to change the web site.

The 2025 job market has been dead for 30 years, we just didn't notice it until today.

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