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Comment by sharemywin | Hacker News Reader

I can just imagine a room full of top 10% engineers/architects...No we need to do it like this...Well, no did you think of this obscure use case... what about performance? I think...should we...fast forward a year later and the company went belly up because everyone was trying to be best and piss on each other to prove who was top...top.

At least when middle managers do it they're only interested in who gets credit for the work so they leave the average tech guys alone long enough to get the work done.

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OTOH, I've had the good fortune of working in a team of top 10% engineers/architects (I'm not top 10%, btw) who worked harmoniously, and it was one of the best times I ever had in my career. Learned a lot, upped my level trying to keep up, helped create a good product, etc.

In that case, the key was that clumps of them had already worked together in earlier jobs, so the incompatibilities had been pruned.

I've worked at a company that generally hired extremely good engineers - much better than average and they were very successful because (1) doing that was actually important to the very hard problems they were solving, and (2) every other company in the world wasn't trying to take the same approach to hiring. Today, everyone thinks they should hire like google, even though they're building a mid-sized web or phone app.

That's not a problem, the problem is they want to hire like Google yet they do not provide equivalent level of compensation.

How did they interview these engineers to hire them in the first place?

Really hard puzzles that you had to submit a solution to if you wanted an interview. This was very rare in those days. The problems were original and clever, not pulled from a book or website. Also, the company was in Cambridge, MA and had very close ties to MIT so they could find people like that.

If you got an interview, and did well you got another challenging programming problem to solve on-site. You were given a computer with the programming environment of your choice and as much time as you wanted, as well as someone to ask questions from.

I think it was also important that the company solved hard graph problems in Lisp, with a lot of macro-driven code. If you were a Lisp programmer, you generally wanted to work there.

That room sounds like every room at Netflix, except it works just fine.

Top 10% engineers aren't just really good at tech, they're really good at working productively in team environments and delivering products.

Someone being smart does not mean they are going to be an architecture astronaut or that they will be unable to cooperate with other people (especially with people who are roughly as smart).

People with top competency rarely go out of their way to display it. Are you sure you are correctly assessing those people?

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