Day 1: Manager: “So… what do you work on?” Boris (staring into middle distance): “I improve latency.” Everyone nods. No one knows whose.
Week 2, Boris replaces the build pipeline with something called *Hyper-Schrödinger-CI*. It both passes and fails until observed. QA quits.
Week 5: PM: “Why is the app faster?” Boris: “I removed time.” PM: “From… the app?” Boris: “From the concept.”
Graphs go up. Metrics look illegal. AWS bill drops to negative dollars. Finance sends an email asking if Boris is laundering compute.
Standup becomes surreal. Engineer: “What did you do yesterday?” Boris: “Refactored causality.” Scrum Master: “Blocked on anything?” Boris: “Yes. Reality.”
No one dares touch his code. It’s just one file named `truth.go` with no comments and perfect indentation.
Then one day, customers vanish. Revenue hits zero. The system is too optimized. It no longer needs users.
Company goes bankrupt. Boris is unfazed. As he leaves, he turns back: “I warned you. I optimize endgames.”
The repo still compiles. No one knows why.
Penultimate commit refactored dispatch to bootstrap reality when accessed any means. Comment on the commit is "made things deterministic by sidestepping heisenberg principle".
Oooof. Following this paragraph is a recipe for age and family status discrimination lawsuits. (A number of states prohibit both, and federal law prohibits the former above 40). Quite possibly sex discrimination lawsuits as well if a court quite plausibly concludes that someone who makes decisions this way will also be averse from hiring women of childbearing age or life stage.
These people were exceptional and I would easily call them The Best any day.
As someone who spent almost my entire career, until fairly recently, in startups, I would not consider age in any way a determining factor /especially/ for early hires. You need "adults in the room", because they will help to establish the bar for the remainder of the team as you grow, act as technical leads, and have a very broad scope of responsibility. The more experienced and capable they are, the better the quality of your future hires and the less technical debt you incur in the process of getting to product-market fit and growing to profitability/critical mass.
You should not (legally) have an age bias at all, but if you were going to apply one, the reverse bias is more rational.
Engineers follow a pareto distribution. In a normal sized team, with a typical hiring funnel, you will have a few high performers, who are responsible for most of the team's productivity. If you can only hire one person from that team, then it is more likely than not that you will hire someone with productivity below the team's mean. At an early startup, this could be a death sentence. Especially since we typically reason and plan in terms of means, so it may come as a surprise that your single engineer is less productive than the mean of most teams that you have worked with.
The other reason (also not mentioned) is that you eventually want to scale hiring. That means that you need to have people, that you have hired yourself, hire more people on your behalf. The best people (A players in the metaphor) don't have imposter syndrome, they know how good they are, and how good they aren't. They want to work with other talent, that makes their lives easier, more interesting, and less stressful than covering for/babysitting other people. It's also the only way they can grow from where they are at. So they can be trusted to hire more A players, out of self interest.
The median engineer (let's call them a B player) often knows about where they stand as well, and often they will have started to diversify their skillset into organizational politics. They intuit: hiring people more competent than them gives them less leverage, and they are pretty good at zero-sum status games, that's their edge. They don't want competition, so they hire C players.
So the reason you want to start with the best is because it's the only way to ensure you can move fast when you need to, and the best way to keep the organization effective long enough to exit. All organizations decay into incompetence, but hopefully you can get yours and get out before that happens.
In general, I've found that the younger engineers (20s, up to 30s) have a lot of vim & vigor; but, even the very best ones generally do a lot of spinning-in-place, when they think they're making progress. Almost anyone above a certain level -- call it the 30–40% mark (it's low!) -- can be raised up to be a competent engineer. Probably what'd be called an "an A- or B+" player? That's just part of a good training & onboarding regime; although, it can take 1-3 years, depending on the person. Very good "natural" talent can definitely boost top performance to an A+, but it won't substitute for literal time-under-stress of delivering high quality product-ready code to clients.
I would extend that even further, I'm a fan of the idea that you should thoroughly vet the founders for excellence if you want to maximize your chances of ending up at a great startup. Not just your eng manager and peers.
Like with your "A player" engineers example, founders need to be exceptional if they want to attract great talent to work for them. So if you're pretty unimpressed with them as you're getting to know the company, the likelihood that the team they hired makes up for that deficiency is very low, and you'll end up around non-A players.
One of my best hires ever was a VR dev we brought in as an intern. He became the backbone of our Unity/Unreal work, including some genuinely gnarly low-level haptics integration into the physics engine. On paper he didn’t look like the “obvious” pick: he’d majored in English Literature, largely because his (UK) school’s CS track was taught in a way that turned him off (they were still doing Fortran…). But he could build.
After our startup, Improbable scooped him up on the strength of that very real, shippable experience, and he’s now a senior SWE at Epic, doing exactly what he loves.
One practical thing that’s helped me find these kinds of people in startup interviews: optimize for calm + realism. My #1 goal is to get the candidate relaxed enough that I can see how they actually think and code. I often ask them to bring any public code they’ve written and we walk through it together. It’s a great way to surface judgment, taste, and real ownership that don’t show up on a resume.
And yes, many candidates struggle with performing under the totally unnatural pressure of an interview, so you can cater to them with something like the github project review. Then you end up potentially filtering out people without a rich body of work that can be easily reviewed, which is a trade-off. Actually something I've been meaning to write about, I always say that there's no way to please everybody with an interview funnel. Someone perfectly fine will be filtered out, or turned off, by any of the approaches you choose.
You just need to choose which false negatives you will be ok with.
| In fact what I would like to see is thousands of computer scientists let loose to do whatever they want. That's what really advances the field.
- Knuth
| How do you manage genius? You don’t.
- Marvin Kelly (Director of Bell Labs)
I think, at least for the cutting edge, it's easy to understand why these tropes are true. (IIRC Kelly even discussed it) Experts already know what the problems are and are naturally drawn to fixing them. By focusing on impact or importance all you're doing is taking away time from problem solving. Taking time from allowing people to be creative. If creativity wasn't required we'd have already gotten there.
I'm often left wondering how much we waste by trying to over optimize. How much we hurt progress by trying to attach metrics to things that are unmeasurable.
Honestly, the thing I'm most excited to see from a post scarce world is how humanity changes and progresses. When we then have this freedom to explore and innovate. To let people become experts in what they want. To let experts explore the topics they want, without need for justifying their work and the stress of not being able to put food on the table.
But until then, maybe we should recognize that innovation is so difficult to measure and has so much noise that we shouldn't rely too heavily on what the conventional wisdom says. If conventional wisdom could get us all the innovation and was optimized then startups wouldn't exist as established players could just follow a clear playbook and out innovate before anyone even has a chance. It's weird that we both recognize big established players are too big and set in their ways yet we also look to them as the playbook to follow to succeed at where they fail.
I really think there's a lot of untapped potential out there. So many just waiting to be given a chance
But this candidate profile is the best anywhere. It’s also a bit like writing an article and saying “you shouldn’t try to buy shares in the most well known tickers, try to buy things that are undervalued but will be great in the future”. Yeah, but also duh.
1. Having FAANG-level budgets to hire vs three packs of ramen and a spool of string at the average startup makes it so that you have to learn how to spelunk through less obvious talent, you're looking at very different pools of potential hires.
2. This is written with the first-time YC-style startup CTO in mind who might be in their early 20s and might have never had to interview a single person until that point. I remember none of this being obvious to me the first time around, and I'm still refining my thinking all the time as the projects and markets change
I've seen "the best." I've had what could be considered "life changing" success by most metrics (but irrelevant by SV-billionaire standards).
The lesson:
There are, in general, two groups of people you can work with. People that do what they say they are going to do, and people who don't.
People who don't do what they say they are going to do outnumber those that do by 20-1.
If you surround yourself with the first group, you're going to be ok. If you don't, most of your time and your organization's time will be spent not-doing, not-measuring, and not-advancing.
"The best" really is that simple, and the bar really is that low.
Of course, if you do what you say you're going to do, and you're incredibly smart, and you have vision, and (insert whatever you care for here) then yeah, you'll be the "best of the best"...but those things are legitimately not necessary for success.
Unfortunately, as you said, this is pretty rare.
What I've learned: hunger shows up in the interview. You can't fake genuine curiosity about your problems. The candidates who ask the sharpest questions about our technical challenges, not salary or perks, consistently outperform.
The trap is thinking you can identify these traits quickly. You can't. If you can, sell the method for a billion dollars.
In most jobs there's going to be some learning that needs to happen on the job. You want the people who will go out and make this happen. It's hard to tell that from credentials because you can't differentiate those who just did what someone else told them from someone who was able to find the underlying challenges and address them themselves.
I think you're right that hunger is the biggest indicator. People that are willing to go into the unknown. People who can identify problems. People who have drive.
I also think it means one of the most important roles of an effective manager is to help maintain the team's drive. If they're just doing it for the paycheck then you'll get exactly that. The work will probably be fine but you won't hire the best. If your whole team is burnt out then it's a systematic failure. It's easy to get caught in the push but a hungry manager needs to make their team hungry, rather than just push them to the finish line. People with their heads in the weeds will find things you never could when you have to look at the entire field.
In a noisy environment you can't rely on strategy. Luck is necessary. Therefore risk is necessary
I’m on HN a lot, and I usually tend to passively browse Who’s Hiring and interesting looking YC ads. Outside of that, I don’t think I would pursue a startup job through job search sites. I would most likely want to find projects I think are neat and start to research and maybe contribute if they have OSS projects, then do individual outreach. I’d probably also start blogging and posting more so people can see if I am a fit for them. Agents may be involved, but only insomuch as I could spend more time doing human stuff like writing, listening, and ideation.
I hope this helps a CTO find a good candidate. I’m personally not on the market right now, but AMA if you want help finding similar folks.
Personally, I think my biggest gaps are around "hunger" and "agency"... I have these things at times, sporadically, but I have difficulty sustaining them long enough to become a really high performer at most jobs. Eventually I get kind of burnt out and stop really giving my all, then transition to something else within a year or so.
I have a high-pedigree CV, so people generally want to hire me, but I often don't live up to their expectations because of this.
Any tips on how to cultivate these traits?
For example, if you're feeling comfortable and handsomely compensated at your current job, and you have the sense of security that you'll keep being hired forever, why would you burn the midnight oil and go the extra mile? Is your lifestyle going to change at all if you get to that next level? You might work longer hours, experience more anxiety and stress, and get barely any upside in return.
My hunch is that the human brain is efficient. It won't make you work any harder than you need to if you have obtained the thing you already want.
Maybe the real question here is whether you truly desire to be this aspirational high-performer, or if that's an idea you're romanticizing, something you feel you should aspire to, but you don't genuinely crave it. You end up fighting between the idealized you and the practical you. Which may explain why you're burning out and losing steam eventually, you can only force yourself to do something you don't feel like doing for so long before the body rebels.
One thing I'd add re: "non-obviousness." There are also tarpits; people who make you think "I can't believe my luck! How has the market missed someone this good!?" At this point, I have enough scar tissue that I immediately doubt my first instinct here. If someone is amazing on paper/in interviews and they aren't working somewhere more prestigious than my corner of the industry, there is often some mitigating factor: an abrasive personality, an uncanny ability to talk technically about systems they can't actually implement, a tendency to disappear from time to time. For these candidates, I try to focus the rest of the interview process on clearing all possible risks and identifying any mitigating factors we may have missed while getting the candidate excited to work with us assuming everything comes back clean.
Do you find that in the tarpit scenario they will typically have a work history hinting at these quirks?
One person had 3-4 positions out of college, all between 8 and 14 months. Turns out they would join a large company, do nothing, and wait until they got let go. Not sure why they tried this at our smaller org, where the behavior was much more obvious.
Another flag for me is when an earlier-stage candidate claims deep expertise in multiple not-closely-related technologies. We hired one person who had deep ML, databases, and cloud services expertise - we have people like that on staff, so no problem, right? Turns out they struggled to do any of those (despite great performance on the take-home and really good, almost textbook-y answers in the interviews - this was before FinalRound and similar, so I assume they just prepped really well and had help from a friend). Now, I try to tease out the narrative of how they developed expertise in each area (e.g. "I started as a business analyst making dashboards, but then I got really interested in how databases worked and ended up building my company's first data warehouse"), which tends to be pretty illuminating in its own right. This sounds a little obvious, but a surprising number of candidates will explain their work history without ever mapping it to the skills they developed at each role unless prompted.
There were a few with really good resumes who got caught out during the interview process. Testing explicitly for humility in the interview helped a lot with this.
There also is an interesting paradox in experience and motivation; often the most experienced and best people on paper are unfortunately the least motivated, least hungry - burn out and boredom do their part.
At the same time, I think there's a limit to how great someone can get even with a lot of experience. We see that with sports, there's probably a similar limit to cognitive activities too.
You can probably get the average, already smart person, to be a pretty good 8/10 on just about anything, be that music, math, writing, coding. But there are levels beyond that may require natural wiring that most of us just aren't born with. An extreme example of course, but there's no amount of experience I can acquire to get to a von Neumann level of genius, but fortunately we don't need that to build business web apps.
Don't forget surfboards!
This was a great post, Alex. Thanks for sharing! Hunger and high agency are such important traits in every startup hire.
And yeah, high agency is really trendy at this moment in the startup sphere, but hunger is not talked about enough IMO. Maybe because it's too obvious to be even worth mentioning.
For programmers, this manifests as some mix of intuition and taste. I've worked with people who have had some especial insight that most doesn't; they don't necessarily "produce" the most, but they make the right key decisions and create the kind of core abstractions and systems that provide a better foundation for everything down the line. Or, alternatively, perhaps they're just preternaturally great at finding and fixing bugs. (My experience has been that really good folks tend to lean heavily towards one side or the other, even if they're solid at both.)
I've written before about how this should change how we structure our teams and manage creative, high-leverage work[1]. The same concept should also change how we find and evaluate candidates, but, honestly, I'm not sure how. Evaluating tacit knowledge and expertise is hard, even for experts!
One thing I've found that works is figuring out a way to show-rather-than-tell that you're willing to do things differently. Doing things differently won't be appealing to everyone, but it will be very appealing to specific kinds of experts! When you can't compete on comp and brand, this is one of the better options. One way to do this is to use a specialized, niche language like Haskell. Alex saw this in action at Freckle and I saw it in action hiring folks for Target's supply chain optimization team. But it doesn't have to be a language specifically; it just has to be something that at least some experts care about, and that you can demonstrate. (Just saying you're doing something different or technically interesting won't work because everybody is saying that!)
I talk about that a bunch in https://www.kuril.in/blog/hiring-telling-your-companys-story... . I agree, finding your niche and doubling-down on it is a solid move.
edit: interestingly, that happens even in comments..
edit 2: ouch, yes, that was some extension.
And now I'm not sure what to do, moving forward. Government job? Find some niche in a large institution that won't fret too much if I have 2 sleep-impacted nights in a row? And then there's the current hiring economy... Who is going to hire me if I'm completely honest and admit I'm buckling under parenting pressure but really do want to help?
I think hiring managers are overwhelmed and exhausted and respond much more strongly to something digestible than to something wide-ranging. The tailoring of your CVs and resumes should be much more aggressive than you initially expect.