June 25, 2025
The software industry is obsessed with hiring and recruiting “top talent”, “best of the best”, “10x engineers”, and so on. I think this obsession misunderstands the very nature of excellence, both for engineers and for teams, and gets the causal chain precisely backwards.
It’s actually a massive competitive advantage to build an engineering org where perfectly normal software engineers, with a normal amount of experience and skill, can consistently move fast, ship code, understand their software, respond to users, and push the business forward a little more every day.
Sociotechnical systems like these are how world-class engineers get forged.
June 25, 2025
