The most dangerous person in Silicon Valley

The other day, a founder and I were talking about recruiting and the dangers of hiring “senior engineers.”

The other day, a founder and I were talking about recruiting and the dangers of hiring “senior engineers.”

In general, I am a fan of the hire fast and fire faster mentality for building startup teams. My friend agreed that the cost of a bad hire only lasts as long as that person is at your company — but asked what if the bad hire can hide in plain sight as an expert in a critical competency? What if they can get into your company and influence teams, change process and define performance for others, spreading their sub-par stench across your team? Imagine the damage they could do if they started to replicate by hiring other people who look, act and perform like they do? This is horror movie stuff, but it happens all the time.

Want to find the employee who is carving redrum into their desk and covering it with empty cans of La Croix?

Please meet the most dangerous person in Silicon Valley today: The Senior Software Engineer.

When it comes to engineering, there is a bias to hire more senior people over more junior people, but this is a trap that leads to undetected bad hires.

Junior people are great at being junior. They know they are high potential but also have a lot to learn. Because of this, they’re open to feedback and not afraid to ask questions.

But today in Silicon Valley, the Senior Engineer is a dangerous person to bring into the team. There are lots of people with the title but not the skills. They are hard to spot because they’re definitely not junior but they’re not really senior either. They’re mid-level engineers who have been convinced they’re senior by the ecosystem. Often you can actually spot this in interviews but, as a leader at a startup, you want to hire them anyway. You do this because senior people are few and far between and conventional wisdom and logic scream loudly that midlevel people are better than junior people — more productive, easier to manage, more capable of management as you scale.

Thats the trap.

Never hire someone that thinks they’re better than they are. Unlike a junior person, they won’t be open to feedback, guidance, or coaching required for improvement.

This is the engineer who started their career at a growing company as an individual contributor and watched as the team grew around them. They managed to contribute to this team and as one of the most tenured people on the team, when it came time to add structure to the org, they became a team lead. The team did good work, this engineer didn’t get in the way, and the company continued to do well. More hiring and more structure was needed in the technical team and another layer of management was added. The title inflated to senior engineer and we see the beginnings of a startup killer.

Then their shares vested and our senior engineer decides to leave for greener pastures — much larger, greener pastures. Starved for middle management technical talent, a much bigger company has looked at a code test and a title and made one of 100 hiring decisions that week.

What they have also done is set an evil process in motion.

The new role comes with the same title but a bigger team, a more complex product, longer timelines, more layers of management and a much, much bigger salary. All of this makes it easier for this killer to hide in plain sight. They remain insulated from their incompetence by the larger team, the slower process, the very big company inertia they may have been hired to help eliminate is their lifeblood — a cocoon that incubates their bad habits and poor management instincts until they are ready to spread their wings and emerge as the moth of death.

But, to the unsuspecting start up who has an urgent need for senior engineering talent, these moths look like butterflies.

• They are called senior engineers at companies that are larger and more successful than yours — they must really love your vision and you must be kick ass to get them to even talk to you.

• They are leading teams bigger than your whole company to build product that seems much more complex — they must have a great network and can help you scale.

• They are paid a metric fuck ton of cash — and while they ask you to stretch your budget by 30–50%, they are willing to take a pay cut to join your team.

It sounds easy, but beware, these moths come in and impress. They act senior. They are polished in their presentation and do well in a code review. They enter the team with high salaries and a good chunk of equity. However, they leave your team in shambles — and you typically have no idea what is happening until something breaks in the product, the culture or another senior member of the team.

As a founder you have to look for the symptoms and then diagnose the problem — identify the danger and eliminate it as quickly as possible. It’s hard to see, but the moths can’t manage an evolving product roadmap or fluid requirements and this causes friction between teams. They are unable to mentor and guide high horsepower junior talent. They become intimidated and withdraw from management to do their own work (canceling 1:1's is a red flag). Over time, they are not respected for their contributions and so they bring heavy process and politics into the office and create a permission based culture as a way to avoid being revealed.

The danger is present. It is real. Beware.