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.
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?
I don't know anything about the story of Otherbranch's business (they launched ~about a year ago†), but Patrick, Erin & I briefly worked on a firm with similar business dynamics (Starfighter, a contingency recruiter based on CTF qualifiers). The prospect of eventually writing posts like this is part of why that business got wound down.
I think the points in this post are mostly all well taken, but I also think a hiring manager looks at this and says "yes, this a vendor talking their book". Most of the relationship between a recruiting firm and a tech company is a disagreement about what the threshold for a viable candidate is!
I think the post is getting at the idea that pedigree is not a reliable predictor of talent, but because it's a convenient and standard one, everyone uses it (which in turns reduces its usefulness). It's harder for a recruiter to fully experience the perils of hiring mediocre people, but they're definitely at ground zero for "what's on a resume is mostly not representative of actual talent".
Again... You don't need the "best" engineers to develop some crappy derivative app that probably already exists. 99% of the stuff people are trying to build these days requires nothing more then a few competent engineers.
Good software is made by motivated people working with a shared vision and with good communication skills. Coding talent and raw CS genius frankly I feel is almost the least part of it, especially since most of these "innovative" startups are mainly gluing together other people's work at this point.
If you don't have people excited about what they're building, talking to each other and liking or at least respecting each other, it's game over.
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.
> 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.
The only addendum to this I'd add is the best engineers rarely have to go through the hiring process in a meaningful way, it's usually someone recognizes them from a previous job and vouches heavily for them.
I say this because if you're going through the hiring process like a chump, I'd leave the ego at the door and not talk about compensation or try to demand remote work on a desirable position.
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)?
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.
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/
This is so interesting to hear. From what I've seen, probably half of recent yc startups have founders below 30. I wonder how senior talent views being interviewed by people who are essentially junior/mid developers.
I'm in my 20s with good credentials and have quite a few friends in the startup world. I would never feel comfortable interviewing someone with 10+ years of industry experience.
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.
Where I'm from, and this might be universal, those types of firms are either finance or consulting shops.
The actual work practically never warrants the type of people they want to hire, but they pay well enough and they can leverage their prestige. Part of the schpiel is that they can boast to their clients that they hire the best of the best, and thus billing $1000 for a fresh grad is worth it.
There's a lot of focus on signaling. Of course Jane or Joe with a graduate degree in theoretical physics from MIT is going to be able to sift through data and compile spreadsheets and nice powerpoint slides...but it's going to be complete overkill.
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.
Since I can't edit my first reply, I'll also say this:
Many of these shops are strategically preying on the infamous "insecure overachiever" types.
The idea is to work smart and ambitious (but insecure) people to the bone for a short period. 1-3 years. Then when exit opportunities arise, most will leave. Those that stay will have been indoctrinated to think that the toxic culture is normal, or they simply just thrive.
I wish there was a way to figure out if someone is proactive, willing and capable of learning and having little patience for bullshit.
These have been the most important traits i've seen on great engineers, people that just plow through the work day after day and jump over hurdles to get stuff done. It feels like everything else is secondary to just wanting to put in the work.
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.
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.
I was working for a large company with great pay and incredible benefits. I was fucking miserable. I took a 35% pay cut to go to a small company with basically no benefits. I'm so much happier now. I live in a rural area and work remote. I live reasonably. I don't need all the money I can possibly get.
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 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.
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.
The market is definitely not dead. It started warming up last summer and has continued to do so throughout 2025.
But the market is two-tiered in a way it hasn't been before, particularly w.r.t. remote hiring. Almost all engineers want remote jobs and a small number of employers offer them, so the remote job hunt still puts employers in the driver's seat. But (good, senior) engineers hold the cards right now for in-office roles.
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.
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.]
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.
> Hits home as we’ve not filled a role for over six months.
Sounds like a you problem, TBH. To be even more honest if, after six months, you haven't yet realised what the problem is, your company has deep self-awareness issues.
It's quite simple: if the candidate you want is not applying for your open position, then that's on you; increase the comp, the benefits, the work environment, anything, until the candidate you want sends you a CV.
You're bidding on an open market for talent. I find it hard to believe that the talent you want does not exist.
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.
When JavaSoft spun out of Sun to build Java, they hired recent graduates, many out of CMU: Mark Reinhold, Josh Bloch, Anand Paliswamy (?), David Connelly, et al. The exception was the Swing team, who had done GUI frameworks before (though never in just one year).
Their key virtue (imho): no politics. They hadn't learned to play the game, buy time, pad estimates, defend their technical choices, and so on ad infinitum. Instead they mostly tried to gain the respect of each other.
Granted as the team grew into 2D and the 10K API's of Java 2, some political teams came on board. sigh.
And it wasn't "companies" hiring and developing them. It was 1-2 senior managers with long histories who managed to extract JavaSoft from Sun to get some breathing room.
As a startup you don't have Google's money. You don't have Google's employer brand. You don't have Google's work environment.
in fact as a (hopefully) fast-growing startup the only thing you really have to offer is growth. So make it clear how you are going to help the candidate grow their career and experience faster at your startup than at the established company, and offer the best you can do on comp and work environment.
This doesn't mean fresh grads, but more like someone with a bit of experience who's ready to jump into a team lead or architectural lead role.
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.
[+] [-] Centigonal|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] chaboud|6 months ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] tptacek|6 months ago|reply
I think the points in this post are mostly all well taken, but I also think a hiring manager looks at this and says "yes, this a vendor talking their book". Most of the relationship between a recruiting firm and a tech company is a disagreement about what the threshold for a viable candidate is!
† https://www.otherbranch.com/shared/blog/rebooting-something-...
[+] [-] threatofrain|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] arandr0x|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jdefr89|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] cmrdporcupine|6 months ago|reply
If you don't have people excited about what they're building, talking to each other and liking or at least respecting each other, it's game over.
[+] [-] klas_segeljakt|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] fitzn|6 months ago|reply
Yep
[+] [-] guywithahat|6 months ago|reply
I say this because if you're going through the hiring process like a chump, I'd leave the ego at the door and not talk about compensation or try to demand remote work on a desirable position.
[+] [-] zuppy|6 months ago|reply
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)?
[+] [-] feoren|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] jackdawed|6 months ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] William_BB|6 months ago|reply
I'm in my 20s with good credentials and have quite a few friends in the startup world. I would never feel comfortable interviewing someone with 10+ years of industry experience.
[+] [-] onesandofgrain|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] TrackerFF|6 months ago|reply
The actual work practically never warrants the type of people they want to hire, but they pay well enough and they can leverage their prestige. Part of the schpiel is that they can boast to their clients that they hire the best of the best, and thus billing $1000 for a fresh grad is worth it.
There's a lot of focus on signaling. Of course Jane or Joe with a graduate degree in theoretical physics from MIT is going to be able to sift through data and compile spreadsheets and nice powerpoint slides...but it's going to be complete overkill.
[+] [-] tdhz77|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] TrackerFF|6 months ago|reply
Many of these shops are strategically preying on the infamous "insecure overachiever" types.
The idea is to work smart and ambitious (but insecure) people to the bone for a short period. 1-3 years. Then when exit opportunities arise, most will leave. Those that stay will have been indoctrinated to think that the toxic culture is normal, or they simply just thrive.
[+] [-] mlinhares|6 months ago|reply
These have been the most important traits i've seen on great engineers, people that just plow through the work day after day and jump over hurdles to get stuff done. It feels like everything else is secondary to just wanting to put in the work.
[+] [-] stackbutterflow|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] edude03|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] pjdesno|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tomatohs|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] indoordin0saur|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] thinkingtoilet|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Keyframe|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Aurornis|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mitchitized|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rachofsunshine|6 months ago|reply
But the market is two-tiered in a way it hasn't been before, particularly w.r.t. remote hiring. Almost all engineers want remote jobs and a small number of employers offer them, so the remote job hunt still puts employers in the driver's seat. But (good, senior) engineers hold the cards right now for in-office roles.
[+] [-] OhMeadhbh|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] OhMeadhbh|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ilc|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ilc|6 months ago|reply
- 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.
[+] [-] guestbest|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] austin-cheney|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] axpy906|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] rachofsunshine|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] lelanthran|6 months ago|reply
Sounds like a you problem, TBH. To be even more honest if, after six months, you haven't yet realised what the problem is, your company has deep self-awareness issues.
It's quite simple: if the candidate you want is not applying for your open position, then that's on you; increase the comp, the benefits, the work environment, anything, until the candidate you want sends you a CV.
You're bidding on an open market for talent. I find it hard to believe that the talent you want does not exist.
[+] [-] whatamidoingyo|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 months ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mathiaspoint|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ravenstine|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] aorloff|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ebiester|6 months ago|reply
The fifth engineer can be a junior. Once you've built a base you can start expanding and hiring on potential.
[+] [-] w10-1|6 months ago|reply
Their key virtue (imho): no politics. They hadn't learned to play the game, buy time, pad estimates, defend their technical choices, and so on ad infinitum. Instead they mostly tried to gain the respect of each other.
Granted as the team grew into 2D and the 10K API's of Java 2, some political teams came on board. sigh.
And it wasn't "companies" hiring and developing them. It was 1-2 senior managers with long histories who managed to extract JavaSoft from Sun to get some breathing room.
[+] [-] propter_hoc|6 months ago|reply
As a startup you don't have Google's money. You don't have Google's employer brand. You don't have Google's work environment.
in fact as a (hopefully) fast-growing startup the only thing you really have to offer is growth. So make it clear how you are going to help the candidate grow their career and experience faster at your startup than at the established company, and offer the best you can do on comp and work environment.
This doesn't mean fresh grads, but more like someone with a bit of experience who's ready to jump into a team lead or architectural lead role.
[+] [-] baazaa|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] AllenM999|6 months ago|reply
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?”
[+] [-] arandr0x|6 months ago|reply
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.