Readit Newsrachofsunshine commented on You don't want to hire "the best engineers" otherbranch.com/shared/bl... · Posted by u/rachofsunshine
> 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...
rachofsunshine commented on You don't want to hire "the best engineers" otherbranch.com/shared/bl... · Posted by u/rachofsunshine
A good rule of thumb as a founder and someone that's worked in big tech;
Big tech rules out any red flags. This means any engineers that get a passing grade across all interviews are in. Anyone that fails one of the multiple interviews is out, despite possible strengths.
Small tech should hire on the green flags. This means you can tradeoff weaknesses if they can do a job that needs to be done.
This is a specific application of a good general principle. Big companies need to watch for failure modes. Small ones need to watch for success modes, because the default is always failing.
rachofsunshine commented on You don't want to hire "the best engineers" otherbranch.com/shared/bl... · Posted by u/rachofsunshine
Recruiters can’t tell a good engineer from a a bad engineer
We can. That's kind of the entire point of our business. Check back in a week or two - we've got another blog post on some of our interviewing data in the pipeline.
rachofsunshine commented on You don't want to hire "the best engineers" otherbranch.com/shared/bl... · Posted by u/rachofsunshine
Love that compensation plan. I wish my (and every) company did that.
Yeah, so did I. Being both a ride-or-die leftist and the owner of a company is a weird place to be sometimes, and it's basically the way I figured I could best implement the world I want to see inside the world we have.
rachofsunshine commented on You don't want to hire "the best engineers" otherbranch.com/shared/bl... · Posted by u/rachofsunshine
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.
rachofsunshine commented on You don't want to hire "the best engineers" otherbranch.com/shared/bl... · Posted by u/rachofsunshine
Do you have any advice for how to suss out someone's hunger, drive, and scrappiness during the hiring process?
Those things are fakeable, but there are plenty of people who will aggressively signal a LACK of hunger. It's more of a negative predictor than a positive one.
rachofsunshine commented on You don't want to hire "the best engineers" otherbranch.com/shared/bl... · Posted by u/rachofsunshine
I don't know anything about the story of Otherbranch's business (they launched ~about a year ago†), but Patrick, Erin & I briefly worked on a firm with similar business dynamics (Starfighter, a contingency recruiter based on CTF qualifiers). The prospect of eventually writing posts like this is part of why that business got wound down.
I think the points in this post are mostly all well taken, but I also think a hiring manager looks at this and says "yes, this a vendor talking their book". Most of the relationship between a recruiting firm and a tech company is a disagreement about what the threshold for a viable candidate is!
† https://www.otherbranch.com/shared/blog/rebooting-something-...
Yeah, to some extent you have to be willing to deal with this stuff in recruiting, which is why I've taken on the clients under discussion at all.
In my Triplebyte postmortem (also on the blog), one of the mistakes I talked about was that Triplebyte was aggressive about trying to dictate terms. We told people how they had to hire.
Otherbranch takes a softer approach: if you ask for my opinion, I'll tell you what I think. Otherwise, I'll do my best to find you what you asked us for, with the understanding that some sets of constraints reduce the probability of success to ~zero.
That goes on the candidate side, too. I get a fair number of people who will come in and tell me "I only want a remote job where I can take a day off whenever I want and only want to work on a super clean codebase and also get paid 250k a year" - and those people are almost never going to end up with jobs. But the tradeoffs they want to make are their business, not mine, until they ask me to do otherwise.
rachofsunshine commented on You don't want to hire "the best engineers" otherbranch.com/shared/bl... · Posted by u/rachofsunshine
> There is no such thing as "the best engineers." Some engineers are definitely better than others, but once you pass the bar of "really smart, great work ethic," the tech tree diverges pretty dramatically.
Sure, but I don't think that's the point of the article.
The point of the article is that startups always claim they only hire "the best" (by whatever metric), but they actually don't, because they cannot pay for the best, nor accommodate their needs and opinions.
They actually want "good enough" engineers, not "the best". Again, the precise definition of "best" is not the point; we all agree it varies (though there are some common elements to all the best engineers).
Far from being upset by this, I'm thankful: I know I belong with the "good enough", definitely not the best :)
It doesn't even need to be "good enough". People SHOULD be picky about founding engineers. But they should be picky about HIRES, not about top-of-funnel proxies for skill.
I can take a look privately if you'd like, or publicly here if you want broader opinions / to serve as a data point for others.