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The single most important thing in engineering management is hiring only the best. The best have two key characteristics: strong technical skills primarily in aptitude but also in technical knowledge, and a great ego-less attitude. It's at least as important to test for ego than for technical skills.

Most of our "engineering disasters" were related to lowering our bar for hiring. Some "engineering disasters", though, i should note were related to inexperienced product development - so if you're a first-time product leader, get an experienced mentor.

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Everyone claims to "hire only the best." It's not a very meaningful statement and certainly doesn't help inform actions when it's what everyone tries to do already. Digging in more deeply, what does "best" even mean? The best among those already hired? The best among a pool of applicants? The best among companies in your domain? Among all domains?

At any organization there will be people of various skill levels. Does hiring the best mean you never hire juniors? It is the best at any given experience level? It might even be hard to compare some people. E.g. what if you have two people, both excellent, but excellent at slightly different things?

Rather than saying "hire only the best" I would perhaps instead suggest that you hire people who fit your culture and compliment your existing teams. A team that works well together, doesn't fight, doesn't get distracted, and is happy, is going to be efficient.

Or, another way to look at it is to consider the "Secretary Problem" [1]. When do you decide to hire someone considering that you can get a stream n people applying over time? You don't want to wait until the last person since n can be large and you need people now not in a year. The solution is to not hire the first n/e people, then pick the first person who you deem to be "the best" compared to the first 1/e people.

Hiring is complicated!

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

I always judge of the quality of a unfamiliar development team by the level of technical debt they agree to let into the codebase. Every team does that to some extent, but if one looks into all sorts of code frequently, at some point one works out a feeling for the "threshold" below which no-one should go.

It takes a good deal of ego to not cave to the pressure, and a growing ego feeds on accomplishments (ok, mostly ;-).

Ah yes: "hire only the best". Like in baseball, just hit 500+. Or Mike Tyson explaining: "you just need to knock everyone else out". Tony Hawk: "You need to stick every move."

You want to make it to the superbowl? Well that is easy just have the right team.

Great advice.

Not everyone can hire the best.

Everywhere I've worked in the last 15 years has aimed to hire the best, none have succeeded.

A "hiring the best" motivation can easily become anti-diverse, because it plays on people's biases about what constitutes "the best", it can also foster a culture of arrogance

Do we ever think about hiring good enough for the tasks at hand?

The converse is "hiring tecent college grads" who don't have a ducking clue, and needing to train them for a year or two. Sucking up the time of your preexisting ICs, and rendering them useless

Do you pay the best too? $500k - $1 million a year? Or more? Give them private offices with plenty of sunlight?

Probably not.

> The single most important thing in engineering management is hiring only the best.

I disagree. Most problems don't require the best, and hiring the best to do things that might be a little bit simple for them is a great way to promote frustration and turnover.

Every organization I've worked for has wanted to and said they hire the best. They didn't actually hire the best, and that's a good thing, because the work we had simply didn't require that horesepower. We needed very good, so I'd hire very good, and it's generally worked quite well.

> It's at least as important to test for ego than for technical skills.

I agree with this. I won't hire assholes. I've inherited a couple when rotating and taking over new teams, and not once has their productivity, subject matter knowledge or any other technical contribution resulted in a net positive when factoring in the attitude issues and other soft impacts to the team. Don't get me wrong, confidence is a quality I like, but to draw from my username, there's a fine line between stupid and clever.

> so if you're a first-time product leader, get an experienced mentor

This is good advice to any manager at any level. The day you're promoted, you're new all over again, make sure someone experienced is teaching you the ropes. And when you're that experienced person, make sure you're teaching someone junior the ropes. This is why I resent climbers/gunners in the organization - they ignore the latter part.

I hire for attitude and aptitude.

If you have a great attitude and you're able to learn then you will be amazing on my team.

It's impossible to say "hiring only the best". Because where are these "only the best" people? I've been smashing keyboards for 35 years, does that make me "only the best". Nope.

What makes an amazing team is the ability to learn, adapt and solve real world problems at scale together.

Not "only the best".

Most of the time, hiring the best means hiring the best you interviewed. The phrase gets over used because it makes the hiring managers look good. If everyone is hiring the best then who is left?

> The single most important thing in engineering management is hiring only the best.

I agree.

It's easier said than done, though. Many engineering managers aren't really involved in the code in any real way. I can't imagine running a restaurant and not inspecting the kitchen, seeing hosts greet patrons, seeing how well tables stay cleared of dirty dishes, and so on.

I find that a lot of "hire the best" ends up boiling down to knowing which engineers are popular with "technical" folks and haven't obviously messed up (at least to someone who hasn't really looked at code or deployments). I'm not sure how to keep this from coming down, again, to politics and popularity.

The replies are all playing word police and missing the point. Hyperboles are great for getting a point across, except when they're taken too literally.

OP means you should be raising the bar for hiring at your org.

My reply was that many (most?) managers don't know how to evaluate the actual work product of existing employees, let alone prospective ones.

So what's the bar? How often, in feedback meetings is the criticism technical versus non-technical?

I know I never get specific technical evaluations from managers. Ever. No exaggeration.

Thanks! Yes, exactly what I meant. "The best" is according to your organization's criteria in terms of skills, attitude, etc. for your team. In my experience, when we've started lowering the bar (after interviewing umpteen candidates and eager to just hire someone), we always had problems down the road and usually big ones (i.e. none of those candidates are any longer with us).

I'm not talking about the mythical 10x engineers or anything like that. It's your bar for what skills fit into your company. If you have no bar...you've got much bigger problems than management...

That said, if you lower the bar a bit in hiring, do not lower the bar in expectations. See if that person who you weren't that confident in can catch up fast. Some candidates work very hard and make it. Those who aren't are apparently fairly quickly...you have to let them go.

Incidentally, there is no real "best" when it comes to engineers -- I've found there are two ways to think about the engineers you need: specific skillsets and brilliance. Someones you need someone who really knows a particular technology or area and can do that very well even if that person isn't generally super-capable. Such a person is often much more efficient than any new-comer will be even after several months of training. Then there's certain work that requires learning or general brilliance (which is probably learning fast if I had to define it...).

I noted in another comment, but I'll say it again hopefully right below my post (sorry I should've clarified it in the original comment because it is VERY annoying that every company claims to hire "the best"). What I meant by "the best" was those folks who meet your bar...whatever that bar is. So it's not anything absolute but depends on your organization.

No more needs to be said than this: https://m.signalvnoise.com/we-only-hire-the-best-c711c330fc2...

> lowering our bar for hiring

Let me guess, Amazon?

Why would that be your guess?

Amazon has a thing about "bar raisers" across the organization.

It's very common concept.

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