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Comment by dudul | Hacker News Reader

I don't have a study to back it up, just my empirical observations over the past 12 years, but I'm kind of convinced that hiring engineers almost randomly (let's say they can speak clearly and write a fizzbuzz) would have almost the same outcome as designing and implementing these complicated and convoluted hiring processes.

I have yet to work with the mythical "really really bad engineer that completely screw up your project and does it in such a stealthy way that you don't even fire them before it's too late".

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I've definitely worked with engineers that are 10x slower or have extremely poor engineering practices: copy-pasting chunks of code, 8+ nested ifs, all code in one giant function, use of global variables throughout, clueless how memory management works/tons of cyclic retains, etc.

I've seen plenty of purported "senior" engineers with 7+ yoe that code worse than new grads.

Now that I'm in FAANG with a high hiring bar, these type of engineers are completely absent. I'm sure that's not a coincidence.

I agree, this was the biggest striking difference I saw between the engineering workforces at FAANG companies vs "everywhere else". You'll encounter a similar percentage of geniuses and top performers at both types of companies. You'll see plenty of regular 1X to 2X engineers, too. But somehow the FAANGs have, for the most part, figured out how to filter out the programmers who literally cannot program, whereas many other companies have not. You'll never see The Brilliant Paula Bean [1] at FAANG, but you will encounter them once in a while pretty much everywhere else.

1: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Brillant_Paula_Bean

I think there are actually a lot of Paula Beans in FANGs, they just perform at an entirely different level. In short, in order to be called out an incompetent liar, someone needs to make an assessment, but if the domain is too complex, if the knowledge is spread across 100 people, nobody will ever be able to assess or even notice the incompetent do-nothing types. Senior management don't understand the technicalities, middle managers see only their own area, very technical architects are very technical only in their domain and so on.

I do think it really depends on the complexity of what you need to build.

The skill level needed to not screw up large complex problems is exponentially higher than for simple small problems.

Companies and products vastly differ in this regard.

that seems ... impossible. almost every single project I have worked on always ended up not really what we had hoped for.

maybe you've generally worked at larger places and I've generally worked at smaller?

3 reasons I can think of why projects fall short -

hubris: you were never really going to be able to do that in the time and resource limits anyways

bad actor: maybe we should really fire Joey, but hiring is hard, and stuff is kinda getting done..if we can just keep it together another quarter

general structural dysfunction: we have a bad culture. no one can really depend on any one else, and its kind of not clear what we're doing anyways.

(1) is a given, but usually isn't the whole story. (3) almost mandates the appearance of (2). but (2) kind of depends on having at least some kind of twisted competence, otherwise they wouldn't be able to do that much damage. so are you in a (3) dominant situation...or do you live in the place beyond the mists where we get what we need to done and have a great time doing it?

I think you may have both misunderstood my comment and made my point.

1) if that's the case, how could spending time and resources in complicated interviewing processes help with that?

2) if you don't f*ck with candidates and have them jump through stupid rounds of interview, hiring may not be that hard.

3) Bad culture comes from the top, not from the code monkey.

Sure projects fail, sure they end up being not very satisfactory, but it's not because your complicated interviewing process didn't prevent you from hiring bad people.

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