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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,"

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.

trevorLane 1y ago
this. high performance is idiosyncratic, based on context and many other factors in dynamic environments.
gyomu 1y ago
Notch, Carmack, Spolsky may have engineering in their skillsets, but they are also product (game) designers and executives (and world class ones at that). I don’t think that’s really what people want when they’re looking to hire an engineer for their startup. As for Bill Atkinson… looking at his Wikipedia page, looks like he was indeed a top notch engineer in the 80s, but doesn’t seem like he worked on anything noteworthy after that? Definitely not in the same league as the other 3 IMO.
binary132 1y ago
That sounds like you’re talking about distinctions within “the best” to me.
- littlestymaar 1y ago
  Except if you put any of the above names in an environment that doesn't suit them, they will likely be mediocre at best, and even damaging at worse. The “best candidate” depends a lot on your existing organization.
  - swiftcoder 1y ago
    > Except if you put any of the above names in an environment that doesn't suit them, they will likely be mediocre at best, and even damaging at worse. In the immortal words of Jobs, "real artists ship". Those names are well known precisely because they have a proven track record of shipping products - very few of those would let a challenging environment get in the way of shipping. That said, as their employer, you may well not like the way they go about it. Name-brand engineers don't take shit from management, and if you get in their way, they won't be shy about airing that publicly.
    - littlestymaar 1y ago
      > In the immortal words of Jobs, "real artists ship". Art is an individual endeavor, most of the time engineering isn't. Management is though, and that's why individuals can make or break a product, iif they are in a management position. And being an excellent engineering manager doesn't even necessarily mean you need to be an excellent engineer, and vice versa.
nathell 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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 1y ago
    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.
giancarlostoro 1y ago
It's all about personality and attitude, anyone can learn to become a better engineer than they were yesterday. The issue is, do they have the resources to do so, are there incentives? Are you making sure they're fully equipped to give you their best? That includes everything from offering training to even benefits, overworked engineers will make mistakes sooner or later.
- j45 1y ago
  One can always train for knowledge and skills, attitude is much harder.
  - giancarlostoro 1y ago
    It is definitely doable if you have a good mentor / role model you admire. I change a lot in my early to mid 20s because one of my uncles took the time to have one on one convos with me to give me feedback on my behavior and why I should do x, y or z instead. It was like I was a completely different person a year later. Senior Software Engineers should not promote bad habits to juniors.
    - j45 1y ago
      Absolutely can be developed, takes buy in from both sides. Unfortunately in tech either seniors aren't available as they should be everywhere, and juniors can.. sometimes.. prefer.. shiny object syndrome and re-learn everything from scratch, until they realize they aren't the first and that's a great thing that will help them go much further, quicker.
glimshe 1y ago
Sometimes I'm just happy to avoid the worst engineers. They do exist. Bad work ethic, poor foundational skills, hard to work with. I feel that if I can weed them out, I've done 75% of my job as a hiring manager.
- foobarian 1y ago
  So much this. As I've been changing teams at my company (which by and large has awesome people) there is the occasional person in the team that just drags down the rest so much, they are probably a net negative. And it's such a breath of fresh air when the whole team is excellent.
- j45 1y ago
  So true. Anyone who isn't wanting to be a self-directed learner misses the essence of working and growing with technology.
- pbronez 1y ago
  Yes, essential to protect the broader team from low performance and toxic colleagues. The trick is to get the disruptive folks off the team quickly without causing the productive folks to doubt their job security. Clear communication and transparent accountability are the way.
- Centigonal 1y ago
  Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer talk about this right at the start of No Rules Rules. Netflix had to lay off a big chunk of of their staff because of a funding crunch early in their history. Despite the negative emotional toll that took on everyone, productivity actually improved. The authors reference a Will Felps experiment[1] that showed that introducing just one pessimistic, lazy, or mean actor into a group of professionals cut the entire group's productivity by 30-40%. As a result of this lesson, Netflix now only hires "A-players" and is pretty aggressive about letting go of "B-players" and "C-Players." [1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/370/transcript https://www.thisamericanlife.org/370/transcript This has been borne out in real-world observational studies, too: https://www.washington.edu/news/2007/02/12/rotten-to-the-core-how-workplace-bad-apples-spoil-barrels-of-good-employees/ https://www.washington.edu/news/2007/02/12/rotten-to-the-cor...
eszed 1y ago
I agree. I'd argue for an additional "generalist" category, as well. Generalists won't be famous, like the exceptional specialists in your example, but an excellent generalist will be able to do good work in any situation. They will be highly valued by their teammates - though often not, unfortunately, be much recognized by management.
- swiftcoder 1y ago
  And in most startups, you desperately need a generalist among your first few hires. By all means make your founding engineer a specialist in your specific field - but right after that hire, you need a generalist who is going to knock out all your infrastructure, devops, tooling, testing, and team processes. Otherwise your specialist is never going to have the time to do their thing.
rgbrgb 1y ago
100% agree that there's a lot of diversity in what makes the engineers good. My only quibble is with the conclusion: "identify the specific skills for which you need exceptional talent". Any of these people would be great for your company. When you're small, you can be flexible... if you can get any of those archetypal great engineers, get them and adjust your workflow to work productively with them.
- j45 1y ago
  There are likely still some more universal aspects of good engineers. Curiosity, resourcefulness, empathy, being user-centric are all things to never stop developing.
  - goopypoop 1y ago
    > Curiosity, resourcefulness, empathy, being user-centric are all things to never stop developing. those qualities were over-developed by e.g. the cenobites
Cyclone_ 1y ago
Err I don't think that's exactly true to say there's no such thing as the best engineers. There's very few who would be capable of solving problems that someone like a Jeff Dean is able to do. Realistically though, not every company needs to solve problems of the difficulty that Google has.
rustystump 1y ago
What are you talking about? Clearly they are all cracked engineers and anyone not cracked is cooked like this take. /s God i hate the tech world these days.
CobrastanJorji 1y ago
You're missing the most important kind of great engineer: the guy who's got adequate technical skills but fantastic executive functioning skills. A lot of bright engineers target the "fun" problem or will otherwise get distracted, leaving a lot of simpler tasks ignored. Every team needs the dev who opens up Jira, opens a sorted list of tickets, and just knocks them down one by one, all day every day. Without them, the product will crumble slowly around an increasingly amazing and elegant core.
- VirusNewbie 1y ago
  So, when I interviewed at all the top tech companies, they all had 4+ technical rounds and one behavioral round, not the inverse. So either you're correct, or all the top FAANG companies are...
- francisu4 1y ago
  Guy?
- tikhonj 1y ago
  Eh, with good leadership who knows how to support different people with different motivations, you really don't. But good leaders are even harder to find and hire than good engineers. And they probably won't use Jira. Or tickets.
  - hobs 1y ago
    Good leaders are great communicators and if they don't write anything down I wouldn't consider putting them up as either.
    - mac-mc 1y ago
      JIRA is so dysfunctional in many places that people do a good chunk of intra-team planning in spreadsheets and docs instead, and use JIRA sparingly to make everyone faster. I saw this effect live at my previous big tech after they moved to JIRA. JIRA got used way less than Phabricator because of all the friction it introduced and a lot more informal google docs + slack bot usage increased instead. I remember to this day asking a report to plan more stuff in JIRA and seeing a beautiful task tree in Phabricator they did in the past. I asked why, and he shrugged and said it was just easier. That's when it really clicked for me. Linear can't come soon enough and burn JIRA to the ground.
the_af 1y ago
> 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. Sure, but I don't think that's the point of the article. The point of the article is that startups always claim they only hire "the best" (by whatever metric), but they actually don't, because they cannot pay for the best, nor accommodate their needs and opinions. They actually want "good enough" engineers, not "the best". Again, the precise definition of "best" is not the point; we all agree it varies (though there are some common elements to all the best engineers). Far from being upset by this, I'm thankful: I know I belong with the "good enough", definitely not the best :)
- rachofsunshine 1y ago
  It doesn't even need to be "good enough". People SHOULD be picky about founding engineers. But they should be picky about HIRES, not about top-of-funnel proxies for skill.
logsr 1y ago
this is a lot like the debate over IQ. there is no single measure of intelligence. humans have a broad array of different capabilities with every individuals capabilities sitting somewhere on a spectrum compared to the overall population. some capabilities are highly valuable in particular contexts and so people who are entirely focused on making money over-focus on the capability set that they believe translates into making money. the people doing the hiring want to hire someone with capabilities they lack (which is why they are hiring in the first place) but then also expect that they will be able to exploit the person they are hiring in order to gain an excess share of the profits they create. the idea that you can hire people for their logic and math skills and expect that they won't be able to calculate their own value is a bit of a paradox.

trevorLane 1y ago

this. high performance is idiosyncratic, based on context and many other factors in dynamic environments.

gyomu 1y ago

Notch, Carmack, Spolsky may have engineering in their skillsets, but they are also product (game) designers and executives (and world class ones at that). I don’t think that’s really what people want when they’re looking to hire an engineer for their startup. As for Bill Atkinson… looking at his Wikipedia page, looks like he was indeed a top notch engineer in the 80s, but doesn’t seem like he worked on anything noteworthy after that? Definitely not in the same league as the other 3 IMO.

binary132 1y ago

That sounds like you’re talking about distinctions within “the best” to me.

littlestymaar 1y ago
Except if you put any of the above names in an environment that doesn't suit them, they will likely be mediocre at best, and even damaging at worse. The “best candidate” depends a lot on your existing organization.
- swiftcoder 1y ago
  > Except if you put any of the above names in an environment that doesn't suit them, they will likely be mediocre at best, and even damaging at worse. In the immortal words of Jobs, "real artists ship". Those names are well known precisely because they have a proven track record of shipping products - very few of those would let a challenging environment get in the way of shipping. That said, as their employer, you may well not like the way they go about it. Name-brand engineers don't take shit from management, and if you get in their way, they won't be shy about airing that publicly.
  - littlestymaar 1y ago
    > In the immortal words of Jobs, "real artists ship". Art is an individual endeavor, most of the time engineering isn't. Management is though, and that's why individuals can make or break a product, iif they are in a management position. And being an excellent engineering manager doesn't even necessarily mean you need to be an excellent engineer, and vice versa.

nathell 1y ago

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 1y ago
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 1y ago
  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.

giancarlostoro 1y ago

It's all about personality and attitude, anyone can learn to become a better engineer than they were yesterday. The issue is, do they have the resources to do so, are there incentives? Are you making sure they're fully equipped to give you their best? That includes everything from offering training to even benefits, overworked engineers will make mistakes sooner or later.

j45 1y ago
One can always train for knowledge and skills, attitude is much harder.
- giancarlostoro 1y ago
  It is definitely doable if you have a good mentor / role model you admire. I change a lot in my early to mid 20s because one of my uncles took the time to have one on one convos with me to give me feedback on my behavior and why I should do x, y or z instead. It was like I was a completely different person a year later. Senior Software Engineers should not promote bad habits to juniors.
  - j45 1y ago
    Absolutely can be developed, takes buy in from both sides. Unfortunately in tech either seniors aren't available as they should be everywhere, and juniors can.. sometimes.. prefer.. shiny object syndrome and re-learn everything from scratch, until they realize they aren't the first and that's a great thing that will help them go much further, quicker.

glimshe 1y ago

Sometimes I'm just happy to avoid the worst engineers. They do exist. Bad work ethic, poor foundational skills, hard to work with. I feel that if I can weed them out, I've done 75% of my job as a hiring manager.

foobarian 1y ago
So much this. As I've been changing teams at my company (which by and large has awesome people) there is the occasional person in the team that just drags down the rest so much, they are probably a net negative. And it's such a breath of fresh air when the whole team is excellent.
j45 1y ago
So true. Anyone who isn't wanting to be a self-directed learner misses the essence of working and growing with technology.
pbronez 1y ago
Yes, essential to protect the broader team from low performance and toxic colleagues. The trick is to get the disruptive folks off the team quickly without causing the productive folks to doubt their job security. Clear communication and transparent accountability are the way.
Centigonal 1y ago
Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer talk about this right at the start of No Rules Rules. Netflix had to lay off a big chunk of of their staff because of a funding crunch early in their history. Despite the negative emotional toll that took on everyone, productivity actually improved. The authors reference a Will Felps experiment[1] that showed that introducing just one pessimistic, lazy, or mean actor into a group of professionals cut the entire group's productivity by 30-40%. As a result of this lesson, Netflix now only hires "A-players" and is pretty aggressive about letting go of "B-players" and "C-Players." [1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/370/transcript https://www.thisamericanlife.org/370/transcript This has been borne out in real-world observational studies, too: https://www.washington.edu/news/2007/02/12/rotten-to-the-core-how-workplace-bad-apples-spoil-barrels-of-good-employees/ https://www.washington.edu/news/2007/02/12/rotten-to-the-cor...

eszed 1y ago

I agree. I'd argue for an additional "generalist" category, as well. Generalists won't be famous, like the exceptional specialists in your example, but an excellent generalist will be able to do good work in any situation. They will be highly valued by their teammates - though often not, unfortunately, be much recognized by management.

swiftcoder 1y ago
And in most startups, you desperately need a generalist among your first few hires. By all means make your founding engineer a specialist in your specific field - but right after that hire, you need a generalist who is going to knock out all your infrastructure, devops, tooling, testing, and team processes. Otherwise your specialist is never going to have the time to do their thing.

rgbrgb 1y ago

100% agree that there's a lot of diversity in what makes the engineers good. My only quibble is with the conclusion: "identify the specific skills for which you need exceptional talent". Any of these people would be great for your company. When you're small, you can be flexible... if you can get any of those archetypal great engineers, get them and adjust your workflow to work productively with them.

j45 1y ago
There are likely still some more universal aspects of good engineers. Curiosity, resourcefulness, empathy, being user-centric are all things to never stop developing.
- goopypoop 1y ago
  > Curiosity, resourcefulness, empathy, being user-centric are all things to never stop developing. those qualities were over-developed by e.g. the cenobites

Cyclone_ 1y ago

Err I don't think that's exactly true to say there's no such thing as the best engineers. There's very few who would be capable of solving problems that someone like a Jeff Dean is able to do. Realistically though, not every company needs to solve problems of the difficulty that Google has.

rustystump 1y ago

What are you talking about? Clearly they are all cracked engineers and anyone not cracked is cooked like this take. /s God i hate the tech world these days.

CobrastanJorji 1y ago

You're missing the most important kind of great engineer: the guy who's got adequate technical skills but fantastic executive functioning skills. A lot of bright engineers target the "fun" problem or will otherwise get distracted, leaving a lot of simpler tasks ignored. Every team needs the dev who opens up Jira, opens a sorted list of tickets, and just knocks them down one by one, all day every day. Without them, the product will crumble slowly around an increasingly amazing and elegant core.

VirusNewbie 1y ago
So, when I interviewed at all the top tech companies, they all had 4+ technical rounds and one behavioral round, not the inverse. So either you're correct, or all the top FAANG companies are...
francisu4 1y ago
Guy?
tikhonj 1y ago
Eh, with good leadership who knows how to support different people with different motivations, you really don't. But good leaders are even harder to find and hire than good engineers. And they probably won't use Jira. Or tickets.
- hobs 1y ago
  Good leaders are great communicators and if they don't write anything down I wouldn't consider putting them up as either.
  - mac-mc 1y ago
    JIRA is so dysfunctional in many places that people do a good chunk of intra-team planning in spreadsheets and docs instead, and use JIRA sparingly to make everyone faster. I saw this effect live at my previous big tech after they moved to JIRA. JIRA got used way less than Phabricator because of all the friction it introduced and a lot more informal google docs + slack bot usage increased instead. I remember to this day asking a report to plan more stuff in JIRA and seeing a beautiful task tree in Phabricator they did in the past. I asked why, and he shrugged and said it was just easier. That's when it really clicked for me. Linear can't come soon enough and burn JIRA to the ground.

the_af 1y ago

> 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. Sure, but I don't think that's the point of the article. The point of the article is that startups always claim they only hire "the best" (by whatever metric), but they actually don't, because they cannot pay for the best, nor accommodate their needs and opinions. They actually want "good enough" engineers, not "the best". Again, the precise definition of "best" is not the point; we all agree it varies (though there are some common elements to all the best engineers). Far from being upset by this, I'm thankful: I know I belong with the "good enough", definitely not the best :)

rachofsunshine 1y ago
It doesn't even need to be "good enough". People SHOULD be picky about founding engineers. But they should be picky about HIRES, not about top-of-funnel proxies for skill.

logsr 1y ago

this is a lot like the debate over IQ. there is no single measure of intelligence. humans have a broad array of different capabilities with every individuals capabilities sitting somewhere on a spectrum compared to the overall population. some capabilities are highly valuable in particular contexts and so people who are entirely focused on making money over-focus on the capability set that they believe translates into making money. the people doing the hiring want to hire someone with capabilities they lack (which is why they are hiring in the first place) but then also expect that they will be able to exploit the person they are hiring in order to gain an excess share of the profits they create. the idea that you can hire people for their logic and math skills and expect that they won't be able to calculate their own value is a bit of a paradox.