I talk about this when I do hiring. Our process isn't designed to find the best person for the job. We want to hire the first person who passes our bar for hiring. We just don't have the need or budget for the best and smartest people. But we often hire very excellent and very smart people!
It's kind of like the high jump. You get the same result whether you're an inch over the bar or a foot.
Just due to the law of large numbers, any company at or above the size of Lyft is going to have mostly very average engineers. There just aren't many "10×" engineers out there in the market regardless of how much you pay. The key to effective management is figuring out how to obtain extraordinary value from average people: this can be done but it's largely a matter of organizational culture.
Very average? How do you figure that? If you're paying top dollar, which Lyft did for most of its existence, you're going to picking from a pool of the top few percent. Even 1% of all software developers is many times more than Lyft's headcount.
I'm curious, who do you think is hiring the 10th percentile engineers? What are those people doing?
That's not how it works in the real world. There are a bunch of other companies also targeting the top few percent. Mathematically it isn't possible for them all to succeed in that goal regardless of their hiring process or compensation levels. If you actually talk to those engineers it's clear that beyond ability to solve "leetcode" type problems they are mostly pretty average.
Why not claim you have engineers that deliver the best value to shareholders? Employing the smartest people in the world to make an app to skim money off taxi going from point A to point B can't possibly be a judicious good value use of human resources, especially in the context of the extreme premium those at the absolute top demand.
