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Personality traits and motivation, especially high agency, matter more than existing coding skill when hiring — his best recent hire was an undergrad with little coding experience who can learn anything within a week.
NeetCode says his best recent hire was an undergrad with barely any coding background, but their high agency meant they'd learn whatever was needed within a week. ✦ AI generated
NeetCode (Navdeep Singh) · The Pragmatic Engineer · 2026-06-24 · original ↗
Neet’s best recent hire is still an undergrad with little coding experience, but does exceptionally well thanks to possessing high agency. Neet says: “even if they have no idea how to start it, by a week later, they’ll have learned everything about it.”
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- ·Best recent hire: undergrad, little coding experience
- ·High agency drove exceptional performance
- ·Traits and motivation matter more than existing skill
- ·No idea how to start, yet still succeeds
- ·"By a week later, they'll have learned everything"
- ·Learning speed outweighs starting skill level
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supports → Your ability to affect change in the world is gated by your ability to communicate with, soothe, and understand other human beings — not by mastering the computer, which is the opposite of what young engineers are promised.Kent Beck · The Pragmatic Engineersupports → Coding is only a small part of software engineering, and it's a part that AI won't erase the rest of: through your work you also build confidence, make connections with other people, and develop your personal understanding of the domain, none of which disappear just because coding gets automated.Kent Beck · The Pragmatic Engineerexplains mechanism → The leetcode-style interview process has persisted at large tech companies because it scales well for training hundreds or thousands of interviewers, not because it predicts job performance well.NeetCode (Navdeep Singh) · The Pragmatic Engineer