The most important problem

One of the most valuable skills for architects and an absolutely critical one for CTOs is the ability to locate the most important problem.
Because solving the right problem is what creates real outcomes.
A simple metaphor.
Imagine you’re in a small boat and water is coming through multiple holes.
➕ The truly important problem: reach the shore.
➖ The misleading problem: water is leaking through the holes.
If you focus on plugging holes, you’ll spend all your time fighting symptoms. New holes will appear. You’ll burn out or sink.
If you focus on reaching the shore, you install a pump, ignore the noise, and solve the real problem.

Now let’s translate this into hiring.
➕ The real goal of hiring: find the strongest candidate.
➖ The fake goal: eliminate cheaters at all costs.
Optimizing for the wrong problem leads to heavy pipelines, unnecessary tests, long loops, frustrated candidates and, as a result, losing the best people.
Ironically, by trying to remove cheaters, companies often create a process that scares away top engineers instead.
This is exactly why so many hiring pipelines are broken.

We should aim to solve the important problem, not drown in the unimportant ones.