All good! I agree with you, at the time I wasn't one of "the best". But I think there's a couple key things, one of which you touched on.
The first is that "the best" is subjective. To me, the best engineers _are_ the ones who you enjoy working with and don't cause drama or bikeshedding. Some 10x programmer who everyone hates working with isn't "the best". So perhaps it all depends on what traits others are looking for.
The other is that as a startup you can try to hire "the best" engineers today, _or_ hire people who you see potential in and can grow with the company. I'd put myself in that latter group, along some of my extremely talented coworkers I mentioned. Having that growth opportunity is part of what attracted me to Faire in the first place, and is a way to compete for talent on more than just comp like the original comment implied.
I was the first backend engineer hired at Faire joining 2 of the cofounders in early 2018. I can assure you I wasn't getting paid anywhere close to $200k when I started, and neither were my extremely talented colleagues.
I'd be curious which annoying bugs you ran in to. I introduced Kotlin to my current company (Faire), and we've been very happy with the decision. Better type system, amazing Java interop so we could keep using all our favorite libraries, and cleaner syntax around things like map, filter, etc.
We've since grown the backend team to around 40 developers without issue, but perhaps your requirements were different? Were you using Java before Kotlin?
Awesome read! I was actually an intern on Cees' team when we started writing db2kafka (https://github.com/PagerDuty/db2kafka), and got to contribute a fair amount. It was a really fun language to work with, especially if you enjoy the Actor pattern, and had some nice debugging tools. I'd definitely encourage anyone interested to give it a shot, especially anyone with similar requirements as Pagerduty!
The first is that "the best" is subjective. To me, the best engineers _are_ the ones who you enjoy working with and don't cause drama or bikeshedding. Some 10x programmer who everyone hates working with isn't "the best". So perhaps it all depends on what traits others are looking for.
The other is that as a startup you can try to hire "the best" engineers today, _or_ hire people who you see potential in and can grow with the company. I'd put myself in that latter group, along some of my extremely talented coworkers I mentioned. Having that growth opportunity is part of what attracted me to Faire in the first place, and is a way to compete for talent on more than just comp like the original comment implied.