There is some truth to this, but I would argue (with a considerable amount of data on both assessments and hiring behaviors) that it is less true than people might like to hope it is.
I very intentionally did not write anything about finding engineers who are just good at the things you care about and not at other stuff, because every bit of data I have says there is a considerable component of general engineering skill underlying most eng roles. No, it isn't totally one dimensional, but (in a principal-component-analysis sense) it is fairly low-dimensional.
There really are just better and worse engineers in the sense that eng A is better than eng B for virtually every job. But that's precisely why recognizing the competitiveness of hiring is important - the more you insist on narrowing your pool, especially in ways others also narrow theirs, the less likely you are to find the rare unknown great engineer.
Totally agree with this. I'm in consulting, where there's a significant client communication component to most of our eng roles, so it's a slightly higher-dimensional space than engineering for product orgs. Still, there is a pretty powerful "g factor," where someone who excels in one dimension will probably be pretty good at all the other dimensions.
Still, when we're staffing, there's a world of difference between the great engineer who is happy being mostly left alone and writing complex but well-specced SQL queries for 12 weeks and the great engineer who can balance software architecture, customer meetings, and programming for the same project.
I very intentionally did not write anything about finding engineers who are just good at the things you care about and not at other stuff, because every bit of data I have says there is a considerable component of general engineering skill underlying most eng roles. No, it isn't totally one dimensional, but (in a principal-component-analysis sense) it is fairly low-dimensional.
There really are just better and worse engineers in the sense that eng A is better than eng B for virtually every job. But that's precisely why recognizing the competitiveness of hiring is important - the more you insist on narrowing your pool, especially in ways others also narrow theirs, the less likely you are to find the rare unknown great engineer.