The candidate was impressive.
Strong technical skills. Good communication. Solved the coding challenge elegantly. Had worked at companies we respected, on systems we admired. Everyone agreed: this was exactly the kind of engineer we wanted.
Six months later, they were struggling.
Not with the code. The code was fine. They could build anything we asked them to build, quickly and correctly. The problem was that we'd stopped asking them to build specific things.
The company had changed. We'd moved from a phase where the roadmap was clear to a phase where the roadmap was uncertain. We needed people who could figure out what to build, not just build what they were told.
The candidate we'd hired was excellent at execution. They could take a well-defined problem and solve it. But when the problem wasn't well-defined — when the first step was figuring out what the problem even was — they froze.
This wasn't their fault. We'd hired them for one thing and then needed another. The job had changed, but the person hadn't.
I've seen this pattern repeat. Companies hire for the skills they needed last year, not the skills they'll need next year. They optimise for execution because execution is easy to test. Can you write code? Can you solve this algorithm? Can you design this system?
Judgment is harder to test. How do you evaluate whether someone can figure out what to build? How do you assess taste, intuition, the ability to navigate ambiguity? These things don't fit in a coding challenge.
So we default to testing execution, and we end up with teams that are very good at building the wrong things efficiently.
The best hires I've seen weren't always the strongest executors. They were the ones who asked uncomfortable questions. Why are we building this? Who is it for? What happens if we don't build it? They slowed things down in the short term and saved enormous amounts of time in the long term.
The candidate eventually left. They found a role at a larger company with clearer requirements, where their execution skills were exactly what was needed. It was the right move for everyone.
We learned to hire differently after that. Not just for what people could build, but for how they thought about what to build. It made the interviews harder and the outcomes better.
Execution is table stakes now. The scarce resource is knowing what's worth executing in the first place.