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"Hire the best engineers" is somewhat simplistic, and I don't think the article offered great insights on that, but ... all business where I worked that had problems actually Getting Stuff Done were due to either bad hires or excessively bad code (which is often the same as "bad hires", or rather, the result of it).

I've never seen tooling really help. I mean, it's nice, saves time and effort, ensures some degree of quality, and all of that, but it doesn't really move the needle all that much in getting stuff done compared to having a team that works well together. Actually, I've seen desperate adoption of tooling in futile attempts to fix these more fundamental issues, which is how some companies end up with 40 linters that moan and whine about every little thing so everyone is adding //nolint statements every 20 lines.

In short, I do think that it's good advice, although personally I'd phrase it as "hire the right people". Someone who is a good engineer – maybe even among the best – will not necessarily fit in well with any team, or any job, and there are other important qualities too aside from engineering skill. A junior can be a good hire for your team, even in a startup scenario.

How you actually hire the "right people" is of course not easy.

I was the first backend engineer hired at Faire joining 2 of the cofounders in early 2018. I can assure you I wasn't getting paid anywhere close to $200k when I started, and neither were my extremely talented colleagues.

This is going to sound harsh, but based on this, you weren't the "best engineers", I'm sorry to say. If you think the best engineering talent in the world is working on some random ecommerce website for less than 200k/yr, I have news for you. And you know what, that's fine, because people who care about "best engineers" usually suck. What a vapid thing to waste time wondering about. I'd bet you have hardcore impostor syndrome in all your new hires if this is the messaging you put out.

What you want is hard working people that are cool to work alongside and fix problems without much drama or bike shedding, not "the best". This circle jerk of "best engineers" is only useful to pay you less and keep you happy.

Instead of calling each other best, focus on the work and show the work, if it's good, people will judge your organisation's engineering skills appropriately, otherwise you're just patting your own back for no reason.

All good! I agree with you, at the time I wasn't one of "the best". But I think there's a couple key things, one of which you touched on.

The first is that "the best" is subjective. To me, the best engineers _are_ the ones who you enjoy working with and don't cause drama or bikeshedding. Some 10x programmer who everyone hates working with isn't "the best". So perhaps it all depends on what traits others are looking for.

The other is that as a startup you can try to hire "the best" engineers today, _or_ hire people who you see potential in and can grow with the company. I'd put myself in that latter group, along some of my extremely talented coworkers I mentioned. Having that growth opportunity is part of what attracted me to Faire in the first place, and is a way to compete for talent on more than just comp like the original comment implied.

Thanks for sharing! And sorry again for being harsh, I'm keen on reading some more shares about actual strategies in engineering tooling or others that you worked on to keep things chugging along. The focus on metrics I think is very under-appreciated in our industry and the more we can standardize to compare velocity and easily identify companies that don't give a shit about developer experience and velocity, the better in my opinion.

I would say that I believe it's a much happier life the less you think about how good you or your colleagues are and the more you think about the systems and the tools you develop. I really meant what I said about impostor syndrome, I'd be curious what answers you'd get from your engineering team regarding that, if so far you've focused a lot of your internal messaging / culture on "being good", you might find some opportunities for honest feedback and sharing which might get a more tight-knit empowered team, which does wonders for velocity.

"Hire the best engineers?" doesn't read like bullshit to me. A lot of startuos start out with scrappy teams who only half know what they're doing in their domain. That's partly because the domain changes every couple of weeks.

When you scale, that changes. It's crucial that you hire competent people for whatever your startup ended up doing. Have a lot of frontend? Hire UX designers and senior frontend engineers with 10+ years experience. Doing advanced AI? Hire someone who's been in that space for 5-10+ years. Etc. They're worth every penny.

The logic of fake-it-till-you-make it doesn't scale, but many don't realize it early enough.

What is missing is the tradeoff. Hire the best engineers at the cost of what? It’s not a strategy until that’s articulated.

For example you say “they’re worth every penny” but are they? Would you borrow from your 401k to hire them? Pull your kids out of college to afford them? They might be worth a lot- what are you suggesting gets traded off?

The thing is I’ve met founders who implicitly don’t want to hire the best anything. The best are driven, intelligent and experienced which to some founders comes off as a threat. So they hire yes people instead who won’t push back.

This is like a poorly written mission statement like "Win the enterprise market". Of course we want to win the enterprise market and hire the best engineers. Any statement whose converse would be an absurd business tactic should be treated as not particularly useful. "Hire the worst engineers!" This is like a college football coach saying "Recruit every 5-star player in the U.S."

We all want to hire the best engineers from day one. The execution of that strategy requires a combination of early wins, interesting problems, technology stack, compensation, leadership, culture, vision and geography to attract top talent. Faire may be able to check most of the boxes, yet some rock star is going the find the business model boring and the leadership uninspiring and go work for an org that is more aligned to their values and ambition.

Hiring the best engineers is table stakes for a company centered around a love and deep appreciation for building and shipping magical software.

Even from day one, no competent founder says "I should deliberately not hire the best engineer I can find based on the comp I can offer". You may not be able to get them, but that shouldn't change your hiring strategy.

My reaction to the table of contents was similar to yours, and I think it was a poor choice of words to summarize the first section.

Maybe something like "Hire customer-oriented engineers" would've been a better title for section one.

I think the "grit" and expertise in core technology are also important points, but it doesn't hook a reader the same way as saying "don't hire an engineer that can't adapt to the customer" (gloss over the double negative)

There's a nice "you did it wrong" pre-built into "hire the best engineers."

What? That didn't work? Well, they weren't the best.

> Hire the best engineers?

Whenever I see this, I read it as "Hire the most loyal drones."