Adam Mosseri (Head of Instagram) just admitted the hiring bar moved — and most people were never told

Adam Mosseri runs Instagram — 3B+ users, plus Threads. In a recent sit-down with Lenny Rachitsky, he said something that's quietly reshaping who gets hired.

Engineering used to mean 40–60% of your time writing code. Not anymore. Mosseri's own team gave up requiring a full technical hiring loop — not because they lowered the bar, but because the bar moved somewhere else.

He says it himself:

"I am not a good engineer. I'm a mediocre engineer on a good day."

That would've been disqualifying five years ago. Today it isn't, because the actual value now is judgment — knowing what a tool is good for, and what it isn't, right now, not next month.

Here's the part that should sting if you built a career on technical depth: nobody sent a memo when the rules changed. You find out the hard way — in a hiring loop, or a performance review — that the thing you spent a decade mastering isn't the thing being measured anymore.

The mechanism here isn't "learn to prompt better." It's that judgment is now a buildable, monetizable skill in its own right, separate from raw technical output.

Clip credit: Lenny's Podcast — DM for credit or removal requests.