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You’re both right: most companies want to hire the least competent (least costly) engineer capable of doing the job. Then they have mixed luck in hiring and win
by gkop 5y ago
You’re both right: most companies want to hire the least competent (least costly) engineer capable of doing the job. Then they have mixed luck in hiring and wind up with a distribution of engineers, including some plain incompetent ones. They barely have competent enough engineers to build their core product, let alone perform undifferentiated technical operations on self-managed infrastructure.
I agree with you that if we assume all our engineers are strictly competent, then that gives us a major advantage over our vendors, and tilts the scales to build over buy.
- raffraffraff 5y agoI don't think it's strictly about competence and more about specialism. In my personal experience, which you can take with a large grain of salt, what happens is that the engineering manager with a certain type of career history tends to look down on any type of operations work and anyone who does it. I have heard things that come off sounding like this: "We hire world class computer scientists from prestigious Ivy League schools and FAANG experience, so why do I need to hire some one-trick-pony DB guy, when my engineers could build their own databases from scratch?"