Reality.
Your technical screen would eliminate your best engineers.
I ran a hiring loop last year.
The candidate had 15 years of experience. Led distributed teams. Shipped systems at scale. I could feel the depth in every answer... the scar tissue, the instincts, the judgment you only get from having been wrong enough times to know when something’s about to break.
He failed the technical screen.
The engineer who rejected him had 3 years on the job.
I’ve stopped being surprised by this. I’ve seen it too many times, from both sides of the table. And the conclusion I keep arriving at, the one I’ve been resisting because it’s a little brutal, is this:
If your top performer applied to your company today as an external candidate, they would not make it past your technical screen.
Not because they’re not good enough.
Because your screen was never designed for them.
What your technical screen actually measures
It doesn’t measure engineering judgment (that’s for sure).
It doesn’t measure the ability to lead a room full of conflicting opinions toward a decision. It doesn’t measure what someone does when the system they inherited is three months from collapse, and nobody wants to hear it.
It measures how recently someone practiced LeetCode.
Your top performer, the one carrying your most critical system, the one you’d fight to keep in a restructuring, hasn’t touched LeetCode since 2015. They’ve been busy. Building real things. Making real calls. Managing teams of 8, 12, 15 people. Fighting for engineering standards in executive meetings where nobody else in the room spoke their language.
A two-hour whiteboard exercise doesn’t capture any of that.
It captures who had time to prep.
Who actually passes
You want to know who consistently clears your screen? New grads who spent three months grinding before hitting the market. Candidates between jobs who had six weeks with nothing else to do. People who’ve run your exact format 10 times in the last year and know the patterns cold.
These aren’t bad candidates. Some of them are excellent.
But the signal you’re optimizing for, performance under artificial pressure on a contrived problem with a countdown clock, has almost nothing to do with the signal that matters at 15 years of experience. Which is: what does this person do when the information is incomplete, the deadline is real, and nobody in the room agrees?
Your top performers are exceptional at that second thing. They’re often genuinely terrible at the first.
The talent shortage story you keep telling yourself
Companies tell me they can’t find great engineers.
They spend two, three hundred thousand dollars a year on recruiters. They post everywhere. They talk about “world-class talent” and a “10x engineer” in all-hands meetings.
Then they run a technical screen designed in 2012 that would filter out 70% of their own senior staff.
I’m not guessing at that number. I’ve asked.
Go find your most respected senior engineer, the one who actually moves the needle, the one people go to when things are on fire, and ask them to sit your technical screen cold this week. No prep. No warning. Just show up and complete it.
See what happens.
Most of them won’t pass. Not because they’ve lost their edge. Because the screen was never measuring their edge to begin with.
What a screen should actually do
I’m not saying get rid of technical screens. I’m saying build one that measures what the job actually requires.
A take-home tied to a real problem your team has faced. A system design conversation where you watch how someone thinks out loud, where they ask clarifying questions, where they change their mind when you give them new constraints, and where they tell you what they don’t know. How they’re adopting AI into their workflows.
The best engineers I know treat ambiguity like a tool.
Build a screen that finds them.
Final word
But there’s a harder version of this that I’ll leave you with.
The worst part of this isn’t that you’re accidentally rejecting great external candidates.
It’s that the people who did pass your screen are already on your team.
And you’re wondering why the performance conversations are harder than you expected.
Humanly yours,
R.
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