You don't want to hire "the best engineers"

Posted by rachofsunshine 9/2/2025

You don't want to hire "the best engineers"(www.otherbranch.com)

393 points | 319 commentspage 4

rvz 9/2/2025|

The whole truth:

When the average pre-revenue startup says:

> "We need the best engineers"

What they really mean is this:

"We really need ex-FAANG engineers from Ivy League, Stanford, MIT and Oxbridge for close to below market rates."

*6 months later:*

"We have a skills shortage of the best engineers"

What they really mean is this:

"No one wants to accept our below market price offers, even with 0.01% equity which may be worth something one day."

If the startup cannot offer a competitive compensation to FAANG or the big AI companies, just walk away. Likely dodged a bullet anyway.

6r17 9/2/2025||

ngl - the worst times I ever spent was in companies that did not care about tech or what they were doing. The thing is, *i'm* a tech profile ; I like doing deep tech - going to the heart of the tissue. I learned with difficulty that it's sometimes better to not be open-minded, to not go for companies that "just get shit done" etc... - because the realities is that, most of the time, people do what they like, and it just happens that they can latch on something that make them earn money. And we forget that's it's actually a multiple body problem, and that we therefor need to have a strong focus in order to be competitive. But I don't want to be competitive doing php, or staying on the same Django framework since 2012 ; or sticking do doing the same job for the next 2 years until the HR is done with me because they got that smart idea. The truth is ; everybody has to cross the market somehow to be competitive. So you better find a way to be part of the best engineers - and I don't want to be in a company where this is undervalued - because *I know* that in 6 month to 2 years - my skills will not have increased, my competivity on the market would have decreased ; my profile won't sound as strong - and the economics just don't math out.

Let's compare the salary of a back-end engineer with a distributed engineer - it's literally 3x to 4x as much in Europe. If you have no job ; it's literally an opportunity to multiply your salary, improve, know the stack better, etc... - The end-goal is not to be part of a company that stagnates both in technology and ideas for many years - that's already a waste of time and money.

petesergeant 9/2/2025||

The "Extra details that didn't fit in the post" at the bottom of the post are very much worth reading, even if they didn't naturally open themselves up.

braiamp 9/2/2025||

Linus Sebastian, from LTT asked Noctua CEO if they had the best engineers. He said they had good engineers but also give them time and resources to develop good products.

ospehlivano 9/2/2025||

The irony: while you're waiting 4 months for the perfect engineer, your competitor shipped with a good-enough one who's now senior-level from the experience.

arandr0x 9/2/2025||

That's definitely a valuable take, but it's worth noting that not everyone will make better decisions just by sitting through enough fires, and it's also possible that your good enough person will fail to notice some larger risk or market shift that the person you could've waited for would have, because they'd have seen it before.

Hiring decisions tend to be a hindsight is 20/20 proposition.

ospehlivano 9/2/2025||

Exactly - you never know either way. You hire the senior, might be useless. You hire the mid-level, might be great. At least with the faster hire you're making progress while finding out.

OhMeadhbh 9/2/2025||

Um. No. You don't become a senior engineer in 4 months.

ospehlivano 9/2/2025||

Fair point about 4 months, I was thinking longer term there. But the original post was about finding the 'best' engineers, not necessarily senior ones. Either way, you can't know what's best for your situation until they're actually working.

OhMeadhbh 9/2/2025||

"best" engineers vs "senior" engineers is a valid point. I think a lot of my comments on this thread are of the mode of "best engineer" should also be thought of as "best engineer for this environment / culture." I tend to stay away from people who say things like "top talent" and "10x engineer" and (worst yet) "Unicorn." You can't really make a judgement about an engineer without describing the environment they'll live in.

And also... maybe more importantly... there's a saying (almost a joke) in the military: "You don't go to war with the forces you want, you go to war with the forces you have." (or maybe it was "people" instead of "forces" and no doubt the Air Force replaces "forces" with "very expensive weapon system manufactured by lowest-bid contractors by people who happen to live in districts represented by members of the congressional armed forces committee.") And that might be what we're getting at here.

While it would be great to get the absolute best engineer at day one, it's more likely you're going to get an engineer that requires a fair bit of training and in-the-trenches experience.

ospehlivano 9/2/2025||

Great point about environment fit. I've seen a wonderkid with amazing potential but no drive, and a solid engineer who maximized their potential through pure effort. Hard to say which was more valuable - depends on what the team needed.

zwhitchcox 9/2/2025||

Recruiters can’t tell a good engineer from a a bad engineer

rachofsunshine 9/2/2025|

We can. That's kind of the entire point of our business. Check back in a week or two - we've got another blog post on some of our interviewing data in the pipeline.

andy99 9/2/2025||

> Would you rather spend four months in stasis waiting

This is a false dichotomy. Hiring slowly doesn't mean doing nothing. It's really more like "do you (CTO) want to slow down on building and become a manager now?" Waiting and finding someone who doesn't need managing can be way less distracting than going for someone imperfect because you've convinced yourself you need to hire now.

Lyngbakr 9/2/2025|

The author's point, though, is that folks tend to wait four months and then hire "someone imperfect", which they could've done now.

rachofsunshine 9/2/2025|||

And, more to the point, that they'd hire a _better_ imperfect candidate by taking those four months doing tough interviews with lots of imperfect candidates (rather than hiring one in desperation later).

OhMeadhbh 9/2/2025|||

If you find you're shooting yourself in the foot, do not reload.

fullshark 9/2/2025||

Hiring committees want people who can execute their vision no matter how poorly or well conceived it is, that’s it. Everything else is noise and you shouldn’t take it too seriously. There is a ton of bullshit floating around the industry, calling it out is an endless and ultimately fruitless exercise. Get paid and get out with your sanity/health in tact and you win.

AnotherGoodName 9/2/2025||

A good rule of thumb as a founder and someone that's worked in big tech;

Big tech rules out any red flags. This means any engineers that get a passing grade across all interviews are in. Anyone that fails one of the multiple interviews is out, despite possible strengths.

Small tech should hire on the green flags. This means you can tradeoff weaknesses if they can do a job that needs to be done.

rachofsunshine 9/2/2025|

This is a specific application of a good general principle. Big companies need to watch for failure modes. Small ones need to watch for success modes, because the default is always failing.

siliconc0w 9/2/2025|

The general goal of hiring for startups is, essentially money-ball or finding value. You could pay market-rate for a tenured senior engineer from a top tech company or you could pay a lot less from someone out of a state school that might fly under the normal resume screen but is otherwise highly motivated and high agency.

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