[nathell]

Yep. Existence of "the best engineers" would imply existence of The One True Metric by which you can judge the person in all context; but that's at best an oversimplification.

The actual metrics (not necessarily easily quantifiable) are the desired traits you put in your job description; they don't correlate perfectly.

[rachofsunshine]

There is some truth to this, but I would argue (with a considerable amount of data on both assessments and hiring behaviors) that it is less true than people might like to hope it is.

I very intentionally did not write anything about finding engineers who are just good at the things you care about and not at other stuff, because every bit of data I have says there is a considerable component of general engineering skill underlying most eng roles. No, it isn't totally one dimensional, but (in a principal-component-analysis sense) it is fairly low-dimensional.

There really are just better and worse engineers in the sense that eng A is better than eng B for virtually every job. But that's precisely why recognizing the competitiveness of hiring is important - the more you insist on narrowing your pool, especially in ways others also narrow theirs, the less likely you are to find the rare unknown great engineer.

[Centigonal]

Totally agree with this. I'm in consulting, where there's a significant client communication component to most of our eng roles, so it's a slightly higher-dimensional space than engineering for product orgs. Still, there is a pretty powerful "g factor," where someone who excels in one dimension will probably be pretty good at all the other dimensions.

Still, when we're staffing, there's a world of difference between the great engineer who is happy being mostly left alone and writing complex but well-specced SQL queries for 12 weeks and the great engineer who can balance software architecture, customer meetings, and programming for the same project.