This is really well written. Great read.

What’s with the pivot away from the purely speed based testing? I recall getting the ick when I saw it as your primary metric for engineer goodness not too long ago and I don’t see any mention of it anymore on your site. Have you pivoted to something more sane?

Most companies want a tailored Savile Row suit, but only budget for supermarket polyester. Don’t worry though - I’ve got a warehouse full of polyester, and for £40k I’ll happily convince you it’s bespoke.

One thing I learned from working on a remarkably good team—at Target of all places—is that you can hire great people as long as you can demonstrate (show-not-tell) that you're doing something different and interesting. How you demonstrate this can take lots of different forms (the whole point is that there is no one way to do this!) but just saying "we have high standards and work hard" is never enough on its own. Everybody says that.

You'd think that startups would be the best-positioned organizations to do things differently in the name of hiring. When you start your own company, you don't have to answer to management or HR, and you don't have to follow trends for political reasons. ("We can't let your team do X differently from everybody else, people are going to talk...") But I rarely see this in practice. Most startups seem intent on having a pretty standard approach to management and work; there's clearly some pressure, whether directly from investors or just purely sociological, to be like every other startup.

This seems like just a purity spiral effect. What do you expect recruiters to say, that they hire medium engineers? I think this is mostly just performative

Reminds me of that post explaining how to make "stupid" LLMs work together to make something more useful. Maybe it works with engineers too.

It reminds me of what a recruiter once told me something among the lines of:

We ask for god in person, hoping for a prophet, we are happy when we get the faithful.

Why does no one ever seem to apply early stopping theory to hiring even though that's the canonical example of early stopping theory?

Not mentioned enough: watch out for engineers (or any hires) who will take zero interest in helping the business succeed.

You can try and hire for brains and experience, say. And have your business constantly undermined by empire building, "just collecting a salary", resume building, and other popular nuisances. Attitude and alignment matters.

If you are yourself "empire or resume building", nevermind, carry on.