Posted by rachofsunshine 9/2/2025
- 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.
Then again, I'm on HN. Show me the Benjamins. ;)
I currently make around the 20th percentile for my level of experience. I do look for higher paying jobs, but they're all at stupid boring companies doing fintech, adtech, or trying ineffectually to position themselves as middlemen in whatever the latest tech trends are. I don't love my job, but at least I'm making real things that actually help the world.
I don't anymore. I learned it actually made me worse at the job, and didn't allow me to contribute to the things I DEEPLY care about, because I'm actually just pushing work.
It is not an easy lesson. But I'll take the money, and derive my value to society elsewhere. Alot easier that way.
One of the best games programmers I know went to [[very large video game company]], but didn't do well. They then went to [[different very large video game company]] and knocked it out of the park.
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.
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.
And you haven't had a single candidate that could possibly pick up the missing skills[1]?
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[1] I don't know what those are. There are two extremes here:
1. PhD level Maths is involved.
2. You require them to have experience in a specific product (anything from a Python library to a framework like HF)
If your requirements are closer to the first extreme, well sure, you're gonna have to wait for someone that has that.
If your requirements are closer to the second extreme, why not just take a candidate? If it takes 2 months to skill up on whatever product you need them to skill up on, right now you would have had that position filled for the last 4 months with your ideal candidate.
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.
The fifth engineer can be a junior. Once you've built a base you can start expanding and hiring on potential.
I'm sure the cto did a massive amount of training early on but this is a near billion dollar company in a fairly complicated industry. You dont HAVE to have 4 incredibly senior super engineers as your first hires. It might make coding easier early on, but its going to make hiring much much harder.
No matter what you do, you will make wrong decisions and need to fix things once you need to scale. That's the way of startups. However, you also need to prevent the high level footguns such as OWASP top 10 and exponential algorithms with minimal supervision.
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.
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.
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?”
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.