Ask HN: Hiring excellent engineers

1 pointcanterburry4 comments

I have often wondered if the people at companies who hire middle of the road engineers do so because those conducting the interviews have never actually worked with truly excellent/exceptional engineers and therefore don't know what one looks like.

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I think the overarching characteristic of "excellent" engineers I have worked with was being almost compulsive obsessive about their code, architecture, tests and process.

Each of them held their own code at higher standards than anyone around them and they did it because it was important to them and not to impress others.

Who would hire middle of the road engineers?! Everyone hires only the top 1%, of course.

Sort of my point. You may think you only hire good people, but by comparison you are hiring middle of the road. Thus, you clearly don't know what a top 1% engineer looks like.

Well, I think all of this is just stories that we tell ourselves. Are some engineers better than others, yeah sure, but we're not gonna find that out in our silly little interviews we conduct.

I was being tongue-in-cheek with my first post, but I do think there is a flipside to what you say in the OP. If the people giving interviews are 25 and have only had one job since they graduated, they may mistake an unfamiliar way of doing things as incompetence.

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