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Comment by trhoad | Hacker News Reader

TLDR; If all you can afford is the B-team then you'll get the B-Team

LOL... the irony being that for a lot of folks whether they are A-Team or B-Team or C-Team depends a lot on the company culture, impact of work they are assigned on, problem statement, team (esp. foundational team), exec alignment and a tonne of other factors that may or may not be in their control.

A supposed "A-Team" Engineer at FB who was part of the early team that built out a messaging platform that is used across FB Engineering will still be seen as a "B-Teamer" at a 20 person startup if she's unable to create similar impact (again, not because she's intrinsically a different person between FB and the new company).

Heck, the easiest way to be considered a 10xEngineer/A-Teamer today is to bring 15% increments to 10 teammembers' productivity rather than be some insanely productive, busfactor=1 developer.

We really need to stop with this silly ranking of devs

In addition to agreeing with your points in general, hiring processes are also sufficiently random that it's not like the big SV companies are capable of actually skimming the cream of prospective employees--even if everyone who could get a job there actually wanted to.

> We really need to stop with this silly ranking of devs

Or realize that past performance isn't indicative of future results.

The reality is almost all of the best devs work at top places and get paid top money. If you need that quality of dev you need to pay that kind of money, now theres a strong argument that in some cases mediocre devs are fine and I'm sympathetic to that argument but from my experience the FAANG+ devs are better than others on average (maybe even most of the time).

Individual performance isn’t the critical attribute for a company / hiring manager though. You can be an exceptionally talented developer and still be a complete asshole no one wants to work with.

You can also be someone who just doesn’t have the rest of the skill stack to deliver really outstanding products. Technically intricate and high performance, sure - but how about easy to use, valuable and cherished, insanely great?

Funny enough, Google’s own HR division did a huge longitudinal study of what makes teams great; Project Aristotle. What they found was that the sum of individual performance is nowhere near as important as having psychological safety in the team - high trust, high empathy, high openness and vulnerability and feedback without blame.

https://rework.withgoogle.com/print/guides/5721312655835136/

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-lear...

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/TAateRpOGZ7R8mKp6SYD7m19r4...

> The researchers also discovered which variables were not significantly connected with team effectiveness at Google:

Colocation of teammates (sitting together in the same office) Consensus-driven decision making Extroversion of team members Individual performance of team members Workload size Seniority Team size Tenure

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