
Ask HN: Hiring excellent engineers - canterburry
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&#x2F;exceptional engineers and therefore don&#x27;t know what one looks like.
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canterburry
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.

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

~~~
canterburry
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.

~~~
draw_down
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.

