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Comment by fitzn | Hacker News Reader

> The best engineers make more than your entire payroll. They have opinions on tech debt and timelines. They have remote jobs, if they want them. They don’t go “oh, well, this is your third company, so I guess I’ll defer to you on all product decisions”. They care about comp, a trait you consider disqualifying. They can care about work-life balance, because they’re not desperate enough to feel the need not to. And however successful your company has been so far, they have other options they like better.

Yep

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The only addendum to this I'd add is the best engineers rarely have to go through the hiring process in a meaningful way, it's usually someone recognizes them from a previous job and vouches heavily for them.

I say this because if you're going through the hiring process like a chump, I'd leave the ego at the door and not talk about compensation or try to demand remote work on a desirable position.

Yes. The more experienced you are, the more your network does all of your job searching for you in the background. (Of course, this assumes you are actively building and maintaining your network.)

I'm not sure it's just a network thing. Certainly you need experience to be a great engineer, but I've known plenty of engineers with 30 years experience who find themselves competing with everyone else when they lose their job.

The best engineer I've ever known spent most of his career doing drivers at Qualcomm. When he left his job they offered him significant raises to stay, offered months of paid leave, and then said he could always come back. Later, an OSS project he worked with heard he was free, and they changed their remote work policies to hire him. He's under 30, and despite working remotely at an OSS project makes significantly more than me.

I like to think I'm a good engineer, but when I work with customers they aren't setting linkedin alerts on my name for if I leave my job. To qualify for what this article is getting at, you really need to be the best engineer out of 100's, not the best engineer in your team of 5.

> this assumes you are actively building and maintaining your network.

Frankly, being a consistent super-star engineer on a team of good engineers, is more important than actively maintaining a network. Experienced founders ask everyone in their small circle of long-time, highly credible, proven associates "who's the best engineer you've ever worked with?" If the answer is interesting, they follow up with "Where are they now?

In my startups, I recruited nearly all of the star engineers this way. In most cases, getting them on board required significant sustained effort. Sometimes just finding them wasn't easy. So - if you're really the engineer on your team who most everyone else would identify as "the best", please don't waste any time maintaining a network. Just keep doing truly great work that others will still be telling stories about over drinks years from now.

If you're not that engineer... then by all means be a reliable, likable, good communicator and maintain your network! Because as a founder, I never had enough high-credibility sightings of "great engineers" in the wild, so I had to mostly build teams out of credible referrals of best "good engineers" and even best "intern or new grad engineers with potential" you've worked with.

This makes sense in a high-churn environment, but some roles are designed so that you rarely work with more than 20 people in a multi-year gig.

This is a good addendum. Do you mind if I add it to the post (credited, of course)?

You can use it, and you don't need to credit me, I don't think it's that unique.

It isn't, but neither is the original post! It's an important addition.

I'm not the poster you replied to, but as a recently retired multi-decade serial tech startup founder of the old-school bootstrap type - the addendum I'd add is what I now teach to young entrepreneurs: Assuming you're a first-time founder whose not playing the high-profile "raise more/spend more drag race" then accept you cannot hire "the best" engineers. You simply don't have the capital or reputation to recruit proven, top-notch talent. So, the only way to win is to play the game differently.

* Aside from a random, serendipitous surprise (which you shouldn't count on), early on the only proven "A players" you're going to have are your co-founders - which is why you chose them and gave them a huge chunk of equity. So you're going to have to get good at the art of hand-crafting a team that can win out of B and C level players. Doing this is hard but it's a tangible skill you can develop if you consciously work at it. They key is developing the knack for spotting raw, undeveloped and emerging talent. Of course, experience over time is the best way to get the knack but there are shortcuts. Always ask your circle of experienced advisors to tell you about times when they've seen someone emerge as a star despite starting from average (or below) expectations. Ask what that future star was like before and probe deeply on this. Ultimately, just being aware this is something you need to do and focusing on it can go a long way.

* Since you can't recruit enough star talent to win playing the game you wanted to play or using the strategy you'd planned, you have to adapt. Be willing to change your game, strategy or approach based on the unique talents and abilities the team you can recruit has. This is how great coaches can still win even with 'B-level' random talent.

* Be willing to accept unconventional, incomplete or flawed candidates if they have above average talent in one or more domains that matter to your unique value prop. Maybe you've figured out there's a backdoor way to win by making a product which doesn't have all the checkbox features but is fr faster than any other alternative at a couple critical things - and your hypothesis is that for some set of customers that will be enough to overlook your lack of features. Then you hear about a dev who's "the best goddamn high-perf optimizer I've ever seen" but after finding and talking to him, you learn he's got an uneven, checkered resume, has a felony record and can't work or live within 500 feet of a school - which is probably why he's available to start immediately if you're willing to have a chat with his parole officer.

Okay, maybe it's not that bad but the point is, you don't have the luxury of being inflexible. Back in the 80s I hired a talented engineer who was openly trans - and this was in a fairly small mid-western city. Times were very different then and it caused significant problems with other employees and even our landlord but I managed the downsides and this person delivered some incredible code that helped our launch product shine. Since times are (fortunately) different today, let's update the example. Maybe today's deeply flawed but weirdly-gifted-in-one-useful-way candidate comes to the interview wearing a MAGA hat and inquires if their licensed hidden carry firearm is going to be an issue in the office. Are you a good enough coach to extract winning results from a random team of flawed players with some unique gifts which are only partial, potential or still emerging? Can you craft a winning team by thinking different and digging deeper than anyone else through the bottomless pool of candidates who couldn't pass the first screen at Google or that hyper-funded AngelList-darling startup everyone's buzzing about? Because there are gems buried in that mountain of mediocrity if you can find and polish them.

Only at very small companies or at very high levels at larger companies. Typically everybody is going to have to go through the full loop. In 99% of cases knowing someone gets you to the interview and nothing more. If you mean the "best engineers" like people whose names are known or the type op AI people that Zuckerberg is personally making offers to, then yes that's different, but those people are such outliers that statements like "going through the hiring process like a chump" don't really make sense because 99.99% of engineers are "chumps."

This.

The best software devs I've hired again and again are basically people i know they are good, or someone I trust a lot recommended them. My "technical" interview is just basically trying to sell them the position.

Likewise I've had the luck of not having real technical interviews in the last 4 jobs I've had, the last being for Principal Engineer. It has been basically acquaintances referring me and soft "what's the problem to solve?" Chats.

Big companies (that pay real money in RSUs) have bureaucracies designed to thwart this. A referral through the hiring manager practically guarantees an interview loop, but there's going to be an interview loop, with at least one veto point outside the hiring manager's sphere of influence.

Several former coworkers have offered me jobs at their startups, but it's like 2/3rds of my current base and 20% of total liquid comp.

> leave the ego at the door and not talk about compensation or try to demand remote work

This makes it sound like these things are written on stone tablets and we just need to accept them as is. They are businesses buying labor. Everything is negotiable.

Talking about those things is not “ego” it’s a perfectly rational thing to do. Whether you should be paid $50k or $500k is not a law of nature but a compromise between buyers and sellers of labor.

Similarly, if you’re willing to trade remote work for a lower salary it’s perfectly rational to bring that up.

Rationality on an individual level is not the same thing as what produces the best long-term outcomes for both parties. On an individual level, bringing up comp immediately significantly reduces your chances of being moved forward. It shouldn't, but it does.

See this other post from us: https://www.otherbranch.com/shared/blog/would-you-still-hire...

You have no leverage "immediately". You bring up compensation at the last minute, when the company extends its offer.

If you're not talking about compensation, you're leaving money on the floor. I'm no "best engineer", but I've never failed to get meaningful bumps to my starting comp by giving some pushback on a company's initial offer. Most of the time the only leverage you'll have is the innate friction in the hiring process: By the time a company has extended an offer to you, they've committed non-trivial resources convincing people you're the right pick. It's a PITA to throw all that away, so something like "I'm very interested your offer. For $(offer+X) I could sign today" or "I like your company, but you're offering a bit below market rates. (A contractual pay bump after 3/6 months, an additional week PTO, whatever) or an extra $X would make me willing to accept immediately." will likely work. This should be ideally in person, or at lease over the phone or VOIP, so you have the opportunity to smooth things over and retreat with your tail between your legs if they take it very poorly, but I've never seen that happen. Worst I've heard of is a firm "Sorry, that's the offer, take it or leave it", leaving the applicant no worse off than they were before.

Not negotiating compensation just means you're paying a conflict avoidance tax.

it's more like short term gain vs long term gain. experienced engineers can design an architecture that will allow you to scale cheaper and faster in the future, at the high initial cost. it will be cheaper to maintain, better for security.

depends at what point your business is at the moment of hiring and what you plan to do with the product. do you need volume or quality (both variants are right)?

If your business is going to cease to exist in 4 months, who cares about scalability? Pay the interest when it comes due and when you can afford it. If someone is serious about building a company they will be okay with that.

unpopular opinion with engineers but unfortunately true

startups are generally moreso a business endeavor than an engineering one, although the engineering must correctly support the business

the engineering begins to take the driver’s seat as the tech debt and cost of scaling catch up to successful companies and begin to create excess drag

but for many years, such companies can typically still afford to throw away money to solve business problems, including these problems of scale

Depends on the business.

Some startups (like mine) are delivering a service, and the technology used to deliver that service is instrumental. Our back-end is an Airtable I configured myself, and it's been sufficient so far; better tech is not make or break for what we do. Other startups, like Flexport some years ago, fundamentally depend on technical function because that's the core of what they do.

One of the common mistakes founders make, in my expetience, is not asking which camp they're in. It's not a hard question to answer (usually), but it's an easy one not to ask.

I'm in full tech debt black hole right now. Avoid this shit, if at all possible. The excess drag is real AF and is greatly threatening the business.

I’m honestly happy to hear (sorry!) that it matters to someone’s business but the counterargument is of course that if it’s become a threat to the business then it should have taken a front seat sooner….

Sure but then incentivize engineers to hack it out knowing they'll have to deal with the shit show if you become successful. Sorry but most "startup engineers" aren't , and it's basically bad for their careers to implement "the vision" in a throw-away manner.

I don't think it's true that it's bad for your career to do it that way. What happens a lot is we think we have to tell the story of how we gloriously implemented some powerful overkill technical stack in a startup with 4 months of runway to be taken seriously as a Real Engineer.

You can also tell the story of how you worked really hard to engineer a solution that was good enough to carry a startup to viability given the 4 months you had. I would choose the second person over the first person because they have a sense of practicality which is really important. But it can be career limiting to not communicate that in your resume somehow, so I understand how you can think it would be a bad thing. And as always you have to be aware that your employer is in that situation, and so if they don't tell you then you're screwed.

There are a lot of people out there who want to hire practical engineers. It's just a different market and you have to signal differently in your resume.

Let's be real. Most first builds are done by very low talent Indian and Vietnamese developers with zero technical direction. Once the business grows, real engineers and architects are brought in to fight the horrendous, almost laughable, mess to pull the company back from certain failure...without getting any credit.

Yes, this is a very important aspect. An early stage startup needs zero-to-one engineers. People who build fast, aren't afraid to break things, and don't mind YOLO'ing a year of their career on a gamble.

If you find product/market fit before you run out of money... that's when you need to hire engineers who are in it for the long hall. People who focus on reliability and scaling. People who might stick around for 5 years to see if your startup becomes a unicorn.

You know, three years ago I would have said that I can give you a pretty good architecture fairly quickly but if you just want banged-out code I'll be beaten by someone who just plows forward for at least a couple of months... but after some vibe coding I've done I think I could do both at the same time now fairly well. Vibe code very quickly that I also know I can make scale fairly well with not much more effort.

Counterpoint: Experienced engineers will design the architecture that is appropriate for the current state of the business.

This is ignoring the fact that there are very few opportunities for the best engineers to thrive. I guarantee you there are thousands of John Carmacks laboring away at mid-tier companies with mid-tier managers, inventing paradigm-shifting technologies that get underutilized and shelved behind IP protection by their clueless leadership, living in a B-tier tech city with kids in school and a wife with a job, not able to move, looking at job postings every few weeks and seeing the same dumb-as-bricks derivative adtech vibe-coding middleman companies looking for someone to fill a seat, not developing a network because the few good engineers they know are all in the same situation as them. If you define the best engineers as those that are already incredibly successful, you're doing a terrible job of recruiting for your company. Even a little effort to recognize under-appreciated talent would skyrocket your team's ability, but instead you're salivating over some over-hyped over-paid Silicon Valley rockstars? What a waste. But it doesn't really matter, because your company is also dumb-as-bricks derivative adtech vibe-coding middleware, so why are you even trying to recruit talented engineers at all? Just fill your seats with someone who knows how to type a prompt into an LLM and make your exit before everyone realizes you're a sham.

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