Cracked is Dumb

If you scroll through twitter in the Silicon Valley bubble you’ll immediately see references to “cracked” engineers. It’s a lazy shorthand denoting that the company only wants to hire the top 1% of talent, just like the so-called “jQuery ninjas” of 10 years ago. It’s pretty fucking dumb.

Most of the people these companies hire aren’t truly in the top 1% of talent. Even if they only hire the top 1% of talent on the market, the talent on the market is self-selecting. Most competent startups know who their top performers are and will do nearly anything to keep them engaged— heavy pay bumps, a constant stream of engaging projects, tons of autonomy, etc. Top talent in the market is not the top talent globally.

Still, top people do come on the market occasionally. But after years of special treatment from their company, they’re going to have sky-high expectations that most companies can’t (or won’t) meet. How many places are really going to trust a brand-new 26 year old with 4 years of experience to lead a critical business line? They’re far more likely to shove them through their standard technical interview and then pair them with a PM and designer to run two-week sprints.

And there’s nothing wrong with that! It’s often a more durable method of constructing and running a team than shooting for the stars. But you don’t need that top 1% of talent to run it effectively, you just need people who can be great in the few specific dimensions you care about. And so “cracked” ends up as pure virtue signaling and a way to make your new hires feel good.

But let’s say that’s not the case and you truly are trying to hire the crème-de-la-crème. Guess what: so are OpenAI and Anthropic and Stripe and Meta and… Sure, you think you’re special, but will those top people look at your 20 year old CEO who just crawled out of the YC womb and think the same? Probably not, especially when those other companies can probably pay more and offer clearer growth paths.

To win, you can’t fight on level terms. You have to counter-position yourself differently than the incumbents, just like you would in a product. Don’t race everyone else to hire the ex-OpenAI engineer to build an agentic ERP stack, compete in a different pool entirely.

Most of the best engineers I worked with at AngelList were pretty far from the “cracked” stereotype. An ex-PhD without any brand-name companies on their resume who took over massive swathes of our infrastructure. A former data engineer who’d recently transitioned into full-stack work yet took over a critical product and business line. And several new-grads so early in their career that others hadn’t noticed their potential yet who instantly became essential once handed real responsibility.

Even when I did try to pursue star senior engineers, I had far more luck pursuing people who were already obsessed with startups, or angel-invested on the side, or were already fascinated with accounting. They already got how AngelList was a special opportunity for them, rather than being wooed by the fattest check.

Every company has some weird melange of product, culture, ambition, and dysfunction that is a perfect fit for someone. Spend your energy figuring out what that cocktail is for you, and then finding people that match that. Not finding the same engineers everyone else is.