[siempreb]

> 3. Hire the best engineers you can.

This is where most companies fail. Yes, they do want the best developers, but for the budget of an average junior/medior dev.

For some reason most companies/managers I worked for do not understand the financial impact of a not so good developer. Or the other way around; they fail to value the best developers and are unable recognize them.

I've worked for plenty companies where they let mediocre dev's build a big app from scratch (including the architecture), in an Agile self managed team.. These are the codebases that always need to be rewritten entirely because they have become an unmanageble buggy mess of bad ideas and wrong solutions.

[lelima]

>"3. Hire the best engineers you can."

If every single company wants that, where is he space to grow and learn from mistakes?

Maybe I'm wrong but I think those "mediocre dev's" learned a lot building a big app from scratch, solving bugs and refactoring.

[matz1]

They can learn them on their own time outside of work.

[whynotminot]

This is just an awful, awful mindset.

If you want great devs, you're going to have to invest in junior devs, and you're going to have to expect them to be learning at work. This is also why the best use of your senior devs is as mentors to your less experienced ones.

[floriol]

I agree that it is an awful mindset, but it's also true that they should not be given a task that they can barely do. Instead the formerly mentioned great devs should mentor over them, so they can become similarly good.

[coldcode]

That is the mindset of upper management at many companies. But if your upper management wants miracles performed in impossible schedules with too few people, there is no room for a junior dev. In fact most of the junior devs at where I work are cheap outsourced contractors, not junior employees, as impossible projects also need to be done with limited budgets. Not of this makes sense to me.

[matz1]

Thats true if you have no choice.

But If you can hire great devs that already comes with the experience, required skill and you can pay for it, then why not?

If I'm a dev who is willing to put the time outside work to improve myself, wouldn't that put me in advantage when applying for job, compared to people who are not willing to put the time?

[Aeolun]

This mindset is what leads to utterly incapable people being hired as seniors. If nobody is willing to hire junior or medior developers, then naturally everyone starts calling themselves senior.

[notabee]

This is such a critical point. So many problems that plague the industry tie back to this. Lack of company investment in juniors leads to greater job hopping, which leads to building things based on bleeding edge fads to pad resumes, which leads to ever increasing title inflation, NIH syndrome, or cargo culting, which leads to the brutal churn that most everyone hates and wastes tons of man hours instead of just maintaining and improving existing software and teams.

[matz1]

How so ? If utterly incapable people being hired as seniors, isn't that failure in evaluating candidate ?

Senior/junior title designation shouldn't have much importance when evaluating candidate anyway, rather on what they can actually do or provide.

[jshowa3]

I've worked for companies where supposed senior devs write a massive amount of code without even the slightest indepth thought because they think they know everything.

Then the project turns out to be months late, even though I called the timeline of the project virtually unfeasible, and we have to go back and make several changes that could've been caught early on with a better strategy.

The problem with hiring the "best" engineers is as follows:

1. Nobody can ever tell you what the best means. People just throw 10x around without any explanation.

2. Most people in the world are average. You simply don't have enough of the best people to handle the work load, even if they're 10x average. So much existing software and new problems exist that it's nigh impossible to have the best everywhere.

3. Many of the best people are able to write really good code, but they consider it so easy that they often write code that they think is correct and it gets put in production. Since they're loners, they often don't do the necessary leg work either because of their own arrogance, or because the company hasn't clearly defined its processes and the developer can't even reach this goal despite numerous efforts. So management just believes the code is correct without any verification.

4. Many average developers support the best ones by taking needed work away from them through comparative advantage. Just because X employee is awesome at Y task, doesn't mean he meets the highest utility by doing Y task all the time. Especially when there are conflicting priorities.

5. The best engineers aren't going to be working at a small company in most cases. They also aren't likely to be paid well outside a large company either. The article sites Google, Facebook, and all the large tech companies and their supposed stringent interview process as a reason. But these companies have written terrible software (Google+, AMP pages) and become ethically compromised easily. Plus their interview process is often so outside the daily work flow because it involves answering algorithm questions, that it often makes no sense. Even worse, it teaches people to do katas instead of build actual projects. Project based interviews make much more sense.

6. Rewriting code bases is one of the worst things you can do and is what caused Netscapes downfall. Companies with supposedly the best engineers (ie. Netscape), can't even do it well.

So while hiring the best engineers is an awesome goal. It isn't feasible in a lot of cases.

I admit I have some bias as I consider myself pretty average. But I do a lot of crap on the side that "10x devs" don't even hear about because they're working on something more urgent. Does that mean I'm worthless?

[amoitnga]

Agree. sports analogy follows.

it won't help you to have 11 'Lionel Messi's on your team. good compatibility among players is much more preferable. It's probably better to have small robust teams that can work together, ppl who are avg in most required areas and are rockstars in certain specific ones.

[dnh44]

If you had written any other athlete I would agree.

But in this case I think 11 Messi's would win everything there is to win in football for a decade straight.

[oblio]

He's too small and his defense contribution is too low. You'd just chuck 11 prime Yaya Toures at him and watch them dominate the game :-)

[jshowa3]

To go further, it reminds me of the movie Money Ball.