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Comment by thatguysaguy | Hacker News Reader

I both got a job through such a thread, and have now seen the other side of the applicant pipeline. The average applicant (in general, idk about HN in particular) is not very strong! Especially true when you consider the alternative of preserving runway and being patient.

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I don’t understand the argument for being patient. If you think the new hire will lead to increased profits, there’s an opportunity cost every day you don’t have them on board. And sure, maybe you wait for the best person and they are more productive, but they might be out the door in a few years.

Quality is more important than quantity in engineering, so a mediocre hire can be a net negative. In so many ways:

- consuming time and attention from people who help them

- time spend checking and fixing their work

- additional maintenance costs from poorly thought out solutions

- time spent reproducing and fixing bugs

- lowering morale of better engineers

- creating whatever the opposite of “a culture of excellence” is

- consuming management time in performance management

- inability to interview or saying “yes” to even worse hires

good thing the modern interview process is so efficient at filtering against candidates like this /s

Smells to me that if you can be patient then you’re not after a need. Companies than can hire, hire because they can and not because they need? Isn’t that what got us into this mess?

There is always a need for very good engineers, and you never know when one will come up.

As other posters said, if you get a bad hire (or even mediocre hire), it might be total negative - both because of negative contributions, but also because maybe the management only gave you one spot, and now you've given it to mediocre person, you no longer have a chance to giving to someone better.

Back when I was at a startup, we've were looking for the new people basically constantly. Very few people applied however (we were C++, not web, and in the constrained system...) and even fewer people passed, so we ended up with 1-2 people per year total.

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