[jenshoop]

This was a great point: "There’s more demand for product-focused programmers than there is for programmers focused on hard technical problems." A very talented programmer from Dropbox once told me that if I wanted to attract top engineering talent, I needed to be able to show the engineer "a problem that no one else has solved yet." This totally changed the way I wrote my job descriptions and conducted interviews. Led to great outcomes, too.

[random_coder]

Care to explain a little? Did your friend mean that talented engineers like working on novel problems and companies facing hard problems are thus more attractive?

[lackbeard]

I read jenshoop to mean: when recruiting, describe in some technical depth, the difficult, unique problems your company is solving to build its product(s).

[jenshoop]

Spot on lackbeard ^^