Item — HN Reader

Yes, we definitely had false negatives. It's always hard to be sure if you made a mistake though -- someone might be super successful at another company but not work out well at yours. I'm sure we made mistakes, though I don't have stats on this.

We definitely hired non-new-grad non-FAANG engineers. In fact, new grads and FAANG alums were a minority for us.

1 comments

> someone might be super successful at another company but not work out well at yours

I don't actually buy this. Environment makes a difference, sure, but if someone goes off and succeeds technically[1] at a another company in a big way they would have succeeded at yours as well. If that person can't succeed with you, then there is something fundamentally wrong with your organization. My experience, though, is that such organizations have much lower hiring bars.

[1] I say "technically" because it's quite possible that the person is not very good technically, but landed at a place where that didn't matter and some combination of non-technical skills led to their success.