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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 scream "we want someone who will execute our vision exactly as we've defined it."

The best engineers will tell you why your architecture is wrong, why your code sucks, why your timeline is unrealistic, and why your product decisions make no technical sense. If you're not ready for that level of pushback, you don't actually want the best engineers.

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, nothing is a priority.

3. Recognize market dynamics. If you pay shit for shit hours to do shit work, you'll get shit unless you just get lucky.

4. Hire great people now, rather than waiting for the "best" (read: naively idealized) people.

To this, I'd probably want to see the author add another essay on the perils of hiring mediocre people (Jobs: bozo explosion, Rumsfeld: "A's hire A's, B's hire C's..."), because that's the very common company-killing pit that people are trying to avoid.

Mediocrity drives away talent, and a small team of talented people will absolutely smoke a large team of mediocre people. And therein lies the conundrum of startup hiring: what's the right balance?

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 (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.

> 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.

Yep

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 interviewed with an early stage pre-seed startup with a very young team, like 25-27. I was interviewed by someone way more junior than me. According to the recruiter, in 3 months, I've made it the furthest and he told me this startup was churning through top tier candidates left and right.

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/

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.

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.

> 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.

I always chuckle when I see a posting where the "BUSINESS" founder says something like "looking for a founding engineer to define our tech stack, but we've already decided we're going to use Python 2.8, Solaris, Azure and a custom build of VIM." [Obviously this is a bit of an exaggeration.]

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.

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.

The best people have the best options which may be leaving the company only a few weeks to months when their ‘dream offer’ comes in. In addition most work doesn’t need the ‘best people’ but consistent and dedicated people. I think this was even in a Dale Carnegie course. I’d have to look it up. My point is ‘qualified’ people with good values are mostly want companies need.

I have seen organizations that actually want "the best" developers almost never.

They may say this, but what they are looking for are "the most compatible" developers. The distinction is monumental. The best developers are at the top 15% of a bell curve where the line is very close to flat, but what they are actually looking for are people in the range of 45-70% of the bell curve where there are the most people doing the same exact things as each other.

Conversely, I have seen many developers actually take lower paying jobs to get away from the bell curve stupidity.

Seems like the author is a bit frustrated from unrealistic expectations. Hits home as we’ve not filled a role for over six months.

What most companies consider to be the "best" engineers is different from what engineers would consider to be the best.

Companies want engineers that get the job done the way they want it. Building a structurally sound product is so far off their radar that actually being a good engineer isn't that important. Unless you're good enough that you have clout, you're better off focusing on your interpersonal skills and marketing yourself to these companies; even clout often isn't good enough.

When an employer says "we only hire the best", the most that can truly mean is they want to hire engineers who will play by the rules of their game. That's it. They can't define "best" beyond that without contradicting their other corporate values.

Treat empty statements like "we only hire the best" the same as "are you a coding rockstar?" and "bachelors required, masters preferred"; horsecrap to be ignored.

The best companies hire relatively green engineers and develop them.

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.

I think this framing is exactly right: once you cross the threshold of intelligence and work ethic, “best” stops being a single axis and starts becoming contextual.

In practice, the engineers who end up being game-changers aren’t necessarily the ones with the cleanest codebases or the fastest prototype cycles — they’re the ones whose strengths match the moment.

A few real-world examples come to mind:

Linus Torvalds didn’t just write code; he created a system of distributed collaboration (Git) because the scale of Linux demanded it. His engineering contribution was partly social architecture.

Margaret Hamilton at NASA defined entire disciplines of software reliability and safety at a time when “software engineering” wasn’t even a recognized field. Her context required meticulousness and systems thinking over speed.

James Gosling’s creation of Java wasn’t just about syntax, but about building a portable runtime when fragmentation was the biggest pain point in the industry. He solved the problem the world cared about most at that time.

Guido van Rossum intentionally designed Python to be simple and approachable, betting on readability over performance. That “engineer as teacher” quality ended up seeding one of the most important ecosystems today.

The “best” engineer isn’t universal; it’s the one whose particular strengths — whether speed, rigor, clarity, or community-building — align with the bottleneck you’re facing.

So maybe the hiring question isn’t “Who’s the best engineer we can find?” but rather: “What kind of engineering excellence will unblock us right now?”

A more generalizable approach might be to consider - what are you looking for that most other companies either are actively putting off or passively neglecting, and what's the best way to identify the best engineers in that group. To use examples in the post, if you're remote then you can get "startup experience - hard worker - impressive project - aces your 20 ridiculous interviews" by getting in front of people who live in Ohio and people who live in the Bay Area and low key hate Caltrain. If you're willing to pay top of band salary all cash, ala Netflix, then you can be a Bay Area Only Senior Elites Need Apply type startup.

What about other things? What if you are, in fact, willing to let engineers decide whether they address tech debt, like the post calls out? Or, you don't overvalue confidence and talking and can appeal to female engineers, quiet engineers, or in general less competitive types? What if you want hard worker startup experience passes pseudo-IQ tests, but they don't need actual coding experience measured in years and you think AI and training can bridge the gap?

Note, I'm not saying any of these companies will necessarily be more successful with their hires, but they're being intentional with who they hire and how that fits the company's advantage in a way that the "you and everyone else" profiled in the post do not. Like, figure out what makes you different. Figure out how that will make your people different. Then write it in the job description, black text on white background (or the reverse in dark mode), plain language, so it's obvious.

> You're acting like a replacement-level employer and expecting more than replacement-level candidates.

There are probably a lot of people who need to hear this.

these discussion are so repetitious, and so many opinions (which are all welcome, they are opinions) seem so personally motivated. I want to read about some contrast, some "I expected this, but I've learned this"

I really only want to hear from people who announce first

"I went to elite schools, but I prefer hiring journeymen" or "the best I've known come from the unlikeliest places"

or

"I'm self taught, but I'm a good worker with some projects to show and talked my way into some great situations, but I realized I had to go back to school, I didn't have the horsepower"

or

Here's how I've learned to knit a team together, here are the types of diversity (of skills, habits, temperaments, experiences, raw iq, or educations) that will make a team successful.

it's boring to read over and over "mine owne education is that of a young prince, and I will only work with yon other princes" or "me learn code with sticks in cave, no code cave, no code with me"

don't simply justify yourself, that's only what survivor-bias or failure bias "teaches"

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.

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.

A mistake most founders make is they want someone as motivated about their company as they are. But things have changed since even 15 years ago. Back then, the machinery for startups wasn't as available, so many people would work for someone else to do something.

As the machinery has become more available, all those highly motivated people would rather compete with you than work with you.

So founder-level motivation is only available if you give something else up: cash (as opposed to delayed equity), large amounts of equity (2% or more), desirable working environment (close to home, remote, etc) or something else they can't get and can't just get by competing instead.

But the most founder-level motivation guys will just start a competitor. That's life.

I've considered "great engineer" a hiring anti-pattern for a decade. (Specifically in the space of product-focussed pre-pmf startups, through into early scale-ups).

I'll take "great communicator", "great co-ordinator", "great collaborator" and "great technical designer" over engineering prowess any day of the week. That's where the 10x gains come from in a team.

Though, on that last point, I think most great engineers I've met are that way because they are great technical designers. It's not something that usually gets filtered for in hiring in my experience.

We have a career framework that I've refined across 4 teams now. 6 areas, and only one of those is "Coding and testing".

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Of course, running a business is not like saving the planet. Tech companies are companies that make money by means of tech - it doesn't matter how sausage is made but that you are compensated for sausages delivered.

Which is why personal hobby projects are awesome!! No one is going to make a bank building an example of Federation standard issue phaser pistol as close to forms and functions as issued, but it'll be awesome nevertheless and regardless of quality. But it won't make a bank. But it'll be absolutely awesome.

If you want the best engineers, you also need to be the best employer.

Loved this article, funnily enough I wrote something in a similar vein, due to my frustrations with nonsense requirements, yesterday: https://gilli.is/journal/the-best-designers-know-nothing-abo...

The whole truth:

When the average pre-revenue startup says:

> "We need the best engineers"

What they really mean is this:

"We really need ex-FAANG engineers from Ivy League, Stanford, MIT and Oxbridge for close to below market rates."

*6 months later:*

"We have a skills shortage of the best engineers"

What they really mean is this:

"No one wants to accept our below market price offers, even with 0.01% equity which may be worth something one day."

If the startup cannot offer a competitive compensation to FAANG or the big AI companies, just walk away. Likely dodged a bullet anyway.

ngl - the worst times I ever spent was in companies that did not care about tech or what they were doing. The thing is, *i'm* a tech profile ; I like doing deep tech - going to the heart of the tissue. I learned with difficulty that it's sometimes better to not be open-minded, to not go for companies that "just get shit done" etc... - because the realities is that, most of the time, people do what they like, and it just happens that they can latch on something that make them earn money. And we forget that's it's actually a multiple body problem, and that we therefor need to have a strong focus in order to be competitive. But I don't want to be competitive doing php, or staying on the same Django framework since 2012 ; or sticking do doing the same job for the next 2 years until the HR is done with me because they got that smart idea. The truth is ; everybody has to cross the market somehow to be competitive. So you better find a way to be part of the best engineers - and I don't want to be in a company where this is undervalued - because *I know* that in 6 month to 2 years - my skills will not have increased, my competivity on the market would have decreased ; my profile won't sound as strong - and the economics just don't math out.

Let's compare the salary of a back-end engineer with a distributed engineer - it's literally 3x to 4x as much in Europe. If you have no job ; it's literally an opportunity to multiply your salary, improve, know the stack better, etc... - The end-goal is not to be part of a company that stagnates both in technology and ideas for many years - that's already a waste of time and money.

The "Extra details that didn't fit in the post" at the bottom of the post are very much worth reading, even if they didn't naturally open themselves up.

Linus Sebastian, from LTT asked Noctua CEO if they had the best engineers. He said they had good engineers but also give them time and resources to develop good products.

The irony: while you're waiting 4 months for the perfect engineer, your competitor shipped with a good-enough one who's now senior-level from the experience.

Recruiters can’t tell a good engineer from a a bad engineer

> Would you rather spend four months in stasis waiting

This is a false dichotomy. Hiring slowly doesn't mean doing nothing. It's really more like "do you (CTO) want to slow down on building and become a manager now?" Waiting and finding someone who doesn't need managing can be way less distracting than going for someone imperfect because you've convinced yourself you need to hire now.

Hiring committees want people who can execute their vision no matter how poorly or well conceived it is, that’s it. Everything else is noise and you shouldn’t take it too seriously. There is a ton of bullshit floating around the industry, calling it out is an endless and ultimately fruitless exercise. Get paid and get out with your sanity/health in tact and you win.

A good rule of thumb as a founder and someone that's worked in big tech;

Big tech rules out any red flags. This means any engineers that get a passing grade across all interviews are in. Anyone that fails one of the multiple interviews is out, despite possible strengths.

Small tech should hire on the green flags. This means you can tradeoff weaknesses if they can do a job that needs to be done.

The general goal of hiring for startups is, essentially money-ball or finding value. You could pay market-rate for a tenured senior engineer from a top tech company or you could pay a lot less from someone out of a state school that might fly under the normal resume screen but is otherwise highly motivated and high agency.

This is really well written. Great read.

What’s with the pivot away from the purely speed based testing? I recall getting the ick when I saw it as your primary metric for engineer goodness not too long ago and I don’t see any mention of it anymore on your site. Have you pivoted to something more sane?

Most companies want a tailored Savile Row suit, but only budget for supermarket polyester. Don’t worry though - I’ve got a warehouse full of polyester, and for £40k I’ll happily convince you it’s bespoke.

One thing I learned from working on a remarkably good team—at Target of all places—is that you can hire great people as long as you can demonstrate (show-not-tell) that you're doing something different and interesting. How you demonstrate this can take lots of different forms (the whole point is that there is no one way to do this!) but just saying "we have high standards and work hard" is never enough on its own. Everybody says that.

You'd think that startups would be the best-positioned organizations to do things differently in the name of hiring. When you start your own company, you don't have to answer to management or HR, and you don't have to follow trends for political reasons. ("We can't let your team do X differently from everybody else, people are going to talk...") But I rarely see this in practice. Most startups seem intent on having a pretty standard approach to management and work; there's clearly some pressure, whether directly from investors or just purely sociological, to be like every other startup.

This seems like just a purity spiral effect. What do you expect recruiters to say, that they hire medium engineers? I think this is mostly just performative

Reminds me of that post explaining how to make "stupid" LLMs work together to make something more useful. Maybe it works with engineers too.

It reminds me of what a recruiter once told me something among the lines of:

We ask for god in person, hoping for a prophet, we are happy when we get the faithful.

Why does no one ever seem to apply early stopping theory to hiring even though that's the canonical example of early stopping theory?

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.

Let's make this hit LinkedIn somehow, along with the "why we hate recruiters" submission :p

There is no universal "best" anything. It's all subjective situational evaluation.

reminds me of the obnoxious Ramp ad about how they only hire the best engineers with a very low hire rate

I wonder if they considered that they simply hired people who are just really good at interviewing, and not necessarily actually the best engineers?

I mean, you don’t hire the best engineers by just blasting off a LinkedIn ad. Or by cold-emailing them. You hire them by already being their friend and offering a massive chunk of cash and equity to work on an interesting project, plus a variety of other concessions, as needed.

The best companies don’t generally do this, because it doesn’t scale. You can scale “find strong talent that hasn’t had its big moment yet, and teach them the trade” a little bit farther.

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?

You don't want to hire the worst engineers either.

This guy will have trouble hiring best engineers

Another aspect of this that bothers me is starting off the employer/employee relationship with a bald-faced lie.

I'm not a stickler for rigorous honesty in what is essentially marketing materials -- sure, present your strengths, not your weaknesses; fine, be aspirational. But to start right off with something you know isn't anywhere close to the truth sets a pretty bad direction.

Probably the best case is that people -- some of whom will become your employees -- realize it's BS and learn not to take what you say at face value in the future.

To quibble on a point the “best” egineers don’t have a lifestyle that most people would consider work life balance right? For them engineering is life. (Mild exaggeration)

I haven't read an article this on-point in a long time. As someone comfortably working remotely at BIGTECH it's actually really frustrating.

OK you have a 60% pay cut and forced relocation back to the Bay Area. Let's jump right into the conversation about how you're going to make up for that to attract talent. Don't tell me it's a virtue because I'm not stupid and you're not stupid.

I appreciate where the author is coming from, but I think when people say they want the best engineers they sometimes mean the top 25% or something. They don't always have a delusional belief that the top 1% are just sitting around waiting for their amazing company to come along.

"only hire them if they raise the bar of the current team"

Yeah don't need best engineers to build another CRUD app.

>Would you rather be a green bar in this chart, or a red one?

LMAO with the cult of "No False positives". They'd rather never hire anyone at all.

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, uses Amazon's cloud and whole regions are getting SSL errors for this domain.

Let me translate this article. "Just hire my fucking candidate, this week. Thank you." --your recruiter

you dont understand. that requires training and i dont want to train a midlevel because:

- theyre just going to hop

- i suck at teaching

- vcs want me to hire an ex-faang

- all of the above

"A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one" - A dude.

+1 for the generalists

Straight up recruitment bs

Counterpoint: You want to hire the best engineers and empower them to work how they are most effective, remotely or not.

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

Okay