[HN Gopher] What "The Best" Looks Like
___________________________________________________________________
What "The Best" Looks Like
Author : akurilin
Score : 86 points
Date : 2026-01-26 16:04 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.kuril.in)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.kuril.in)
| akurilin wrote:
| Thoughts on finding the hidden gems in early-stage startup
| hiring.
| kekqqq wrote:
| Thanks, this might come in handy. Currently, 4 years in the
| business. Working for an S&P500 company at the moment, but I am
| considering running my own thing or joining a startup as the
| next stop.
| akurilin wrote:
| I would love to learn if many of these ideas are applicable
| in the S&P500 world, and if not, why that is the case. A
| little outside of my first-hand experience for me to have an
| opinion there.
| Centigonal wrote:
| Good article, reflects my experience hiring at a small services
| firm, too.
|
| 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.
| akurilin wrote:
| Great point, definitely a possibility. I think I've gotten
| lucky in the past here where either the process caught that
| kind of abnormality early in the funnel, or these folks just
| happened to actually be super early in their careers and just
| hadn't had anybody take a chance on them.
|
| Do you find that in the tarpit scenario they will typically
| have a work history hinting at these quirks?
| Centigonal wrote:
| Sometimes!
|
| 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.
| titanomachy wrote:
| Thanks for writing this. As an IC, I read this more from a
| perspective of "how can I be better at my job and derive more
| satisfaction from work".
|
| 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?
| akurilin wrote:
| So hard to say in abstract without knowing more. I always
| wonder if this is something you can fix through process and
| habits, or if this is something you just need to feel
| intensely first, and only then will the right behaviors will
| emerge.
|
| 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.
| Finbarr wrote:
| "maybe even a high production value promo video showcasing happy
| employees, rare wood office counters and a shoes-off policy."
|
| 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.
| akurilin wrote:
| Thank you! I wanted to mention toasted coconut flake snacks as
| well, but the sentence was long enough already. If your company
| has those in the kitchenette, you're definitely well-
| capitalized.
|
| 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.
| elcapitan wrote:
| Meta, but why does the HN title change the kuril . in domain into
| just `kuril` here?
|
| edit: interestingly, that happens even in comments..
|
| edit 2: ouch, yes, that was some extension.
| akurilin wrote:
| Never noticed that, thanks for pointing it out. Where are you
| seeing this?
| stavros wrote:
| That must be some extension you have installed. I don't see it.
| reilly3000 wrote:
| In all humility I think I at least loosely embody those
| qualities. Right now I'm in a comfy F500 remote job that is
| stable, and it's been at a time where stability has been
| important for my family. There will come a time when I'm ready to
| start or work at a startup. When I do, I want to find a place
| where my values are valued. I come to work engaged no matter
| what, but my work is able to be far more impactful when it comes
| from my self, not only my work avatar.
|
| 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.
| alphazard wrote:
| This completely misses the reason why you need to hire the best
| initially. It has nothing to do with the hardness of your own
| company's problems. It has everything to do with the distribution
| of productivity among any kind of engineer.
|
| 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.
| akurilin wrote:
| Totally fair, thanks for pointing that out.
|
| 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.
| NewEntryHN wrote:
| One reason you see a pareto distribution in "normal sized"
| teams is not solely because of competency, but because the 80%
| can rest on the 20% and therefore don't feel too pressed to
| work that much. Therefore the pareto model breaks down in 1-man
| teams.
| babelfish wrote:
| Only hire A players. B players hire C players, and C players
| sink the ship
| alphazard wrote:
| Yes this is the proverb. I often hear it quoted as A hires B
| hires C, as a remark on organizational decay. But the
| original (and the way you phrased it) is a statement about
| what kind of person each _wants_ to hire out of their own
| self interest. That 's the more insightful version IMO.
| thechao wrote:
| So... every company only hires the best!? I jest, I jest!
|
| 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.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| In my opinion as a hiring person at FAANG for almost 20 years,
| what's described here has always been the goal. Lots of people
| work at FAANG who don't meet this bar because a need to fill
| seats exceeded the need to hold the line / bar on quality. So
| tenure pedigree doesn't say much.
|
| 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.
| akurilin wrote:
| Those are fair points. The bit of nuance I would add here is
| that:
|
| 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
| citizenfishy wrote:
| I built my first company on engineers I hired from the local
| college by simply asking them to send me students who had clear
| talent but weren't engaging well in the academic side. We became
| a local clearing house where we quickly found out whether they
| could thrive outside of the academic environment. Two of them
| became "The Best" you talk about. One in DevOps (earns way more
| than me now) another found his talent in DevEx.
| pmarreck wrote:
| I used to be that guy, then I had my first kid at 49 and things
| have been circling around the bowl since then (he is 4.5; I am...
| impacted)
|
| 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?
| esafak wrote:
| Barring special circumstances, kids tend to get easier to
| manage as they age. Being able shower, potty, sleep, etc.
| without assistance will take a load off your shoulder.
| blabla_bla wrote:
| They hired Boris on a Tuesday because HR misread "Kubernetes" as
| "knits sweaters."
|
| 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-Schrodinger-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.
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| > 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".
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| Tabs or spaces?
| augusteo wrote:
| The advice sounds obvious, but execution is hard. The best hires
| weren't the obvious ones. One of our strongest engineers came
| from a completely different industry with no relevant experience
| on paper.
|
| 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.
| akurilin wrote:
| It's perhaps a little reminiscent of stock picking. Everybody
| wants the best deal they can get away with, everybody wants to
| get lucky, occasionally you find alpha with "one weird trick",
| but it turns out you just got lucky, and you regress to the
| mean eventually.
| godelski wrote:
| I think a stock picking analogy is good, but you captured
| wrong. Most of your portfolio should be status quo but most
| of your growth will come from the risky investments you took
| a chance on.
|
| In a noisy environment you can't rely on strategy. Luck is
| necessary. Therefore risk is necessary
| godelski wrote:
| I think that's the advice I take from this article and other
| similar ones.
|
| 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.
| ENadyr wrote:
| Great write-up!
|
| 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.
| akurilin wrote:
| It's interesting that most of us have that story of someone who
| didn't pattern-match and yet ended up being absolutely stellar.
| Makes you wonder just how much latent talent is out there not
| being given the chance for one reason or another. Hope this
| article reminds people to dig beneath the surface a little
| more.
|
| 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.
| godelski wrote:
| | 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)
|
| We have thousands of examples, quotes, and cliches where dark
| horses completely change the field. In CS we see this over
| and over so much that it's a trope of any successful startup.
| I just wonder when we'll notice the pattern. With all the
| cliches like "curiosity is worth 10 IQ points".
|
| 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
| paultopia wrote:
| > _Seniority here also unfortunately often correlates with age.
| The best startup employee will usually be someone early in their
| career who doesn't have as many responsibilities or as much need
| for consistency due to having more dependents. They may have
| fewer immediate cash flow constraints, fewer "adult
| responsibilities." Kids need braces and karate classes, and if
| Mom is doing 996 at a ten-person company paying her peanuts,
| offering a crappy health care plan, promising an epic payout ten
| years from now, that's a real mismatch. Startups are an extreme
| sport, and generally inadvisable for anybody who's not in a safe
| position to speculate on their career for several years._
|
| 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.
| fusslo wrote:
| Also, anecdotally false. The highest performers were often late
| 30s-55 yo at both startups I've worked (acquired and
| 'unicorn'). The young had tons of energy, but their output
| didn't meet any engineering rigor for working in a hardware
| startup. Maybe the mobile/web guys have a different story. But
| here in hardware, firmware, electrical engineering "The Best"
| had families, children, dogs, homes, heli-ski'd, bicycled from
| Mill Valley to SF, and were absolutely surgical with their
| work.
|
| These people were exceptional and I would easily call them The
| Best any day.
| raffael_de wrote:
| the author almost realizes that hiring cheap talent is like
| looking for a stock to invest in ... the trick is to identify
| undervaluation. then he shortstops and overvalues the usual
| metrics like low age just as everybody else. some people miss
| the forest for the trees.
| titanomachy wrote:
| More charitably, someone who is older _and_ exceptional has
| probably had a chance to find equilibrium with the market,
| i.e. they know exactly how much they are worth and as a
| little startup you 're less likely to end up landing them.
| nsm wrote:
| Seconded. anecdotally. Heck, the best startup _founders_ I've
| worked with had young kids while in the most intense phases
| of the company!
| akurilin wrote:
| The paragraph was supposed to be descriptive what one sees in
| the field, not prescriptive of what managers should do. I can
| see that it doesn't obviously read that way. Will edit, thank
| you for the feedback.
| tristor wrote:
| It's also completely incorrect. The average age of startup
| founders is 45, many of the best engineers in the market right
| now are older Millennials and GenX because they grew up in a
| time when you could still gain legible access to every aspect
| of computing in a home setting with PCs, which gave them an
| exceptional fundamentals basis which allows them to have a
| broader scope than specialists.
|
| 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.
| BinaryIgor wrote:
| Hunger and drive can definitely lead to unexpected initially
| results; they cannot replace relevant experience, but if somebody
| has at least done something similar, it's often worth making a
| bet on them!
|
| 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.
| akurilin wrote:
| I've often heard the idea that you can always teach someone how
| to code, but you can't teach them to want to be great at it.
|
| 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.
| tikhonj wrote:
| A major part of what makes somebody "the best" is _tacit
| knowledge_. This is the sort of skill and "know-how" you can
| build up from experience and one-on-one instruction, but cannot
| easily be captured in text.
|
| 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!)
|
| [1]: https://jelv.is/blog/Letting-Experts-Be-Experts/
| akurilin wrote:
| Hey Tikhon! The Haskell thing was such a great way to filter
| for interesting frontier people back in the day, as we both
| experienced. That was a contrarian bet at the time, but it paid
| off handsomely for at least a few of us. The number of people
| we'd get to interview was only a fraction of the broader
| population, but it felt like 30-50% of the people we would talk
| to were awesome fits.
|
| 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.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| These days, best is whoever engages the best with AI. Those who
| communicate well, with good grammar + detail + nuance + examples
| + skepticism will do better in the results they get from AI. Of
| course they have to capable of critically reviewing the AI's
| output.
| storystarling wrote:
| That might be true for chat, but for building actual products
| the prompting feels like a solved problem compared to the
| plumbing. I've spent way more time lately fighting with Celery
| queues and LangGraph state management than on the prompts
| themselves. If you can't optimize the token spend and handle
| the async complexity, the grammar doesn't really matter.
| uoaei wrote:
| My CV is similar to David's and I find myself also having to
| badger people for the time of day. I have worked in a few roles
| related to a particular industry for a while and still have
| trouble convincing people that I'm quick to adapt to the various
| parts of a large scale ecosystem from R&D to product design and
| logistics. Even though all the details are on my CV.
|
| 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.
| el_nahual wrote:
| Lesson it took me far too long to learn about what "the best" is.
| Bona fides: I'm no titan of industry but I've worked with many,
| across many industries.
|
| 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.
| tristor wrote:
| This is the most accurate comment in response to this article.
| I pretty much have discovered exactly the same thing over a
| more than 20 year career across multiple startups that had
| successful exits. The absolutely most important traits are
| accountability, honesty, and willingness to learn, if you have
| these three traits you will be one of the best people on your
| team regardless of what you do. I have these traits, and it's
| been why I've been successful in /many/ different kinds of
| roles over the years, because I am willing to be honest about
| what I don't know, listen and learn, and hold myself
| accountable for both successes and failures, and when I commit
| to do something I actually do it.
|
| Unfortunately, as you said, this is pretty rare.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-01-26 23:01 UTC)