Entire post can be summed up as "this is my answer, here is me rationalizing correlation=causation without any empirical evidence".
We could dissect the entire thing but really, if that is how it works for you, fine. Just don't push it onto others as the absolute truth. If this stuff was really so great, empirical research would've hammered it home decades ago. But it doesn't, and continues to struggle finding any meaningful correlations between these "whacky fun strategies" and actual job performance.
This isn't used widely because it is hard. But it's not but novel.
1. Companies want to standardize their hiring when really they should be looking to customize it to each candidate.
2. Lots of companies want to spread the blame of a bad hire across a committee of 4 or 5 people, but I think if you looked you'll find many startups doing it this way. They stop when they grow to a large size. They do it because frankly hiring good engineers is no longer the top priority (it's typically quotas AKA butts in seats).
> "My evidence isn't that great I admit. I've only helped build 3 unicorns (helped found one of them) and started 3 $1M+ companies as a solo founder."
Again with the awkward appeal to authority.
Cut straight to it. Your post's title is "how to hire actually good engineers". So how many of those have you actually hired? How many of them stayed there 2 years into their roles? How do you know you've actually hired "good" engineers, and not just people you yourself thought were good enough at the time you interviewed and hired them? Have you actually followed up on your hires 3/6/12 months into their roles, to check that they're still as good as you thought they were?
By the way - "$1M+" sounds like a particularly low budget for "actually good engineers", ironically enough.
We could dissect the entire thing but really, if that is how it works for you, fine. Just don't push it onto others as the absolute truth. If this stuff was really so great, empirical research would've hammered it home decades ago. But it doesn't, and continues to struggle finding any meaningful correlations between these "whacky fun strategies" and actual job performance.