>The hip thing nowadays is that your software company should hire only A-players instead of B- or C-players, or focus on engineers that are ten times better than anyone else. [...], but I think the sentiment itself is the wrong question to ask.
If people are starting companies, it's not the wrong question to ask. The first 5 programmers hired with fast dwindling startup funds all need to be ultra talented and smart. The competition will kill you with your staff of B & C programmers. When you get to the size of Microsoft with 128,000 employees, you can afford to have some deadwood C, D, F, and 0x employees wasting cubicle space. When you're a startup, you'll go bankrupt because the C players are floundering around not generating enough value in the product to help make the business succeed. It's not a matter of hip or not hip -- it's a matter of survival.
[...]the average company is pretty average. Not everybody can hire exclusively top-tier people. And you know what? That’s fine.
If the readership on HN is plugged into the startup scene, hiring mediocrity is not fine.
EDIT to reply to the replies:
Most of the replies think of "A players" as an absolute ranking on a world scale. Linux Torvalds, etc. That's not what I'm talking about.
Hiring employees or finding a marriage partner is hill-climbing algorithm.[1]
The startup would have some notion of an "A-player" suitable for the company's goals and business standing. It does not mean you try to lure AI expert Peter Norving away from Google Inc to code a bash shell script because you insist on the "best of the best of the best." Whatever pool of candidates your startup can realistically attract, over a constrained time frame, funded by a limited budget -- that's where you find your Local Optimum. To you, you hopefully find your "A-player" although others may view that same candidate as B/C player compared to to someone like Linus Torvalds.
>, the reality was that most of the companies using our hiring software were most interested in finding people that don’t suck.
That's totally opposite from my observations. Startups are most interested in finding great people. They only "settle" for people that don't suck as a consequence of reality. Their hill climbing didn't find their "awesome" programmer so they cross their fingers and hope it works out. The blog post is saying most companies actually prioritize "don't suck hires" over "great hires". The blog has it backwards and that is an outcome instead of the motivation.
As a meta comment, the advice from Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Paul Graham, the YC Sam Altman startup school vids with the dozens of guest speakers (angel investors, VCs), etc all stress the point of hiring the best people you can.
The only sources of advice for "just aim for hiring people that don't suck" are obscure writers of blogs. Why is that? And why does that sentiment have to be delivered as explicit "advice"? Since you can't hire all A-players, you'll inevitably end up with mediocre employees that don't suck even when you don't pursue "don't suck" as a primary goal.