I get the sentiment but I have two problems with this. 1) Different stages of companies require different hires. When you're starting out, find the hungry ones

I get the sentiment but I have two problems with this. 1) Different stages of companies require different hires. When you're starting out, find the hungry ones. They'll get better at programming if they care, and they'll build a lot of stuff. Once you have real customers and are growing like crazy, hire experienced people to help you scale. 2) There is a difference between the "interview process" and the screening process. I agree that thinking about "Can this candidate do the job?" and "Will this candidate be motivated?" is the best way to go. But I don't have time to sit down with the ~200 junior engineers who sent me their resume on Indeed in order to figure that out. Hence, I filter by 5+ years of experience, and track record of working in multiple programming languages (don't screen specific languages though). Are the metrics perfect? No. But in my experience they weed out the people who are too junior to be successful on my team. Interestingly, I think that if my company were bigger we might go back the other direction. Once we're on a stable path, and we have a few senior engineers who want to go into management and/or do some mentorship, we can afford to bring on more junior people and help them grow into great engineers. There are many stages of companies, startups especially, and in some situations it makes perfect sense to use some plain old metrics.