In praise of “normal engineers”

Why building an engineering org that enables "normal" engineers to thrive is a bigger advantage than chasing top talent.

Speakers: Charity Majors

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June 25, 2025

The software industry is obsessed with hiring and recruiting “top talent”, “best of the best”, “10x engineers”, and so on. I think this obsession misunderstands the very nature of excellence, both for engineers and for teams, and gets the causal chain precisely backwards.

It’s actually a massive competitive advantage to build an engineering org where perfectly normal software engineers, with a normal amount of experience and skill, can consistently move fast, ship code, understand their software, respond to users, and push the business forward a little more every day.

Sociotechnical systems like these are how world-class engineers get forged.

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