The "high" in high bar is not a particular useful measurement. What is high? Unless you've defined what that means, and everyone involved understands and agrees what that means, it's just a word. What you can say is "we need someone who knows the internals of tool X, and we measure it via Y". Basically, avoid using adjectives to measure things (e.g. say 1 liter glass, don't say big glass).
The only "problem" with that approach is that it invalidates most hand-wavy advice:
"Make everything as simple as possible but no simpler." All well and good if your requirements are written in formal logic or if there is only a single axis along which complexity can be measured.
"Hire only the best." What if the best only want to work with the best pay and the most interesting work? But "hire only the best of the very few who are willing to work on your projects for the kind of pay you're willing to offer, who will consider it a blessing that they were hired at 20% above your minimum starting salary with no other career avenues than management, and who are naive enough to think of options as valuable rather than lottery tickets" isn't quite as snappy or happy.
"Don't be evil." And since you have that slogan anything you do is by circular logic not evil. Handy.
"Hire only the best." What if the best only want to work with the best pay and the most interesting work?
That's the interesting question. The hard choice, that I rarely see discussed, is what to do when "the best" won't work for you. Do you hire the "perfectly adequate" or do you not hire and not do that thing you want "the best" person to work on.
one idea is to put your candidate out of their comfort zone and ask them to get their arms around something new. Try to figure out if they have a process for teaching and improving themself. Maybe if you can't hire the best you can find someone with the potential to be one of the best.
> What is high? Unless you've defined what that means, and everyone involved understands and agrees what that means, it's just a word.
Yes, this is the right question. I think the reason there is no generic definition is because it's subjective. The most generally applicable part of this is the differences in hiring practices at large-scale vs tiny-scale (there was an article on HN previously explaining this particular area):
The main points were google-scale can afford high salaries and can afford to cut out good candidates from the hiring process in the name of automation, so easy to automate and standardise empirical testing works for them, but not for small-scale, because you wont be able to afford the same candidate. Instead small-scale either hire for the people who fall through the cracks of large corporate structures or they hire for potential.
In answer to your question, this difference affects (or should affect) the qualities being measured... for large scale it's whatever the job requirements are, measured there and then; for small-scale it's the potential for whatever the job requirements are e.g enthusiasm, drive, domain specific interest. That's just one dimension of a company, there are all kinds of other aspects that will also affect qualitative measurement of a candidate.
What defines a high bar, at BT our team had a DBA whose first boss was Dijkstra (yes that one) we was the unofficial database GURU for the entire engineering centre.
But we also had some one who was even more of a GURU IBM used to ask him for advice on large Mainframe database problems.
