Podbit · Lex Fridman Podcast
Telegram hires almost exclusively through public coding competitions, tracking contestants as young as 14 who return across 10+ contests over years. The logic: why hire from LinkedIn people used to getting paid for doing nothing in Big Tech meetings? The best engineer is someone who has used Telegram obsessively and can rebuild it from first principles.
Where this was said
At 2:30:02 · chapter starts 2:29:02
Telegram's hiring process is as unconventional as everything else about the company. Rather than LinkedIn or traditional interviews, Durov relies almost exclusively on public coding competitions where anyone — from professional engineers to 14-year-old students — can demonstrate their skills on real Telegram engineering problems. The competitions generate data over years: someone who has competed 10 times since age 14, won eight times, and demonstrated excellence across JavaScript, Android, and C++ is a far safer hire than any amount of interview performance. The open-source Telegram apps also mean that competitors are solving actual problems, and Telegram can simply select the best solution rather than having to build it. The other half of the A-player philosophy is subtractive: removing underperformers can be more powerful than adding new hires [1] — Pavel Durov "I can recall a few instances in my career where firing an engineer actually resulted in an increase in productivity." 2:11:16 . Durov recalls multiple instances where a team of two engineers was struggling, a third hire seemed necessary, and the actual solution was firing the weaker of the two original engineers — after which performance improved without the addition. The mechanism is both direct (bad code creates technical debt) and psychological: A-players are demotivated by having to watch and compensate for B-players, and the frustration of not being able to reach their potential in such an environment is corrosive.
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