Apply as an engineer

The best engineers are not on the market

The strongest engineer on most teams has never applied for a job and never will. They’re employed, paid well, and buried under messages written by people who haven’t read a line of their code.

The market can see them perfectly well, so this was never a search problem. The trouble is that it can’t send them anything they want to open.

Everyone knows who is good. Nobody is looking after them

Every field has its short list and the people inside it can recite it from memory. Almost none of them have somebody who knows their game before there’s a deal on the table, knows which rooms would waste them, and is thinking about the next ten years of their career.

Athletes worked this out a century ago, and so did musicians, actors and writers. Engineering, where one person can now decide whether a company exists in three years, has not. We wrote the long version of that argument in the best engineers are athletes now.

On being known before you need it

The worst moment to be found is when you need to be, because by then you’re choosing among whatever happens to be open, advised by people who met you last week, on a timeline set by somebody else’s quarter.

The alternative costs you two minutes and then nothing at all. You sit on a short list held by people who have been in the rooms. Most of the time nothing happens, and then one day something does: one company, and why we think it’s yours.

What you’re signing up for

Someone on the team reads what you send. There’s no screening software on the other side of the form.

We’ll tell you to stay where you are when staying is the right answer, and that will happen more often than the alternative. We’d rather send you nothing for a year than the wrong thing once, because that’s how we’d become the messages you already delete.

There’s nothing to keep updated, and we don’t run a sequence or a newsletter.