[HN Gopher] Don't hire top talent; hire for weaknesses
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       Don't hire top talent; hire for weaknesses
        
       Author : benjiweber
       Score  : 32 points
       Date   : 2021-04-10 19:41 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
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       | wccrawford wrote:
       | >Instead of "how can we find the smartest people?" think about
       | "how can we find people who will make our team stronger?"
       | 
       | I would have thought that was obvious? Why would you hire someone
       | unless you had a need for their talents?
       | 
       | I guess I'm probably thinking small-business. At the biggest
       | companies, they probably just hire and hope to fit them in
       | because hiring for exact needs doesn't really scale.
        
         | musingsole wrote:
         | My experience is this obvious perspective vacates with any
         | level of moral maze. The hiring processes kind of require it
         | --> getting headcount approval requires defining a role and
         | arguing how it will lead to better outcomes and then
         | finding/interviewing candidates takes months of time. If your
         | priorities shift in that time...well now you have to shoehorn
         | whatever candidates you get into the role definition you gave
         | before even though you know at that moment they'll be working
         | on something different.
         | 
         | And then priorities shift again before they start. Leaving you
         | not knowing what they'll be working on, but also certain you'll
         | need extra hands on something sooner rather than later...
         | 
         | AND SO: "give me a smart generalist that specialized in these 8
         | technologies that make up the entirety of our product" becomes
         | the only viable hire.
        
       | AdrianB1 wrote:
       | If you want a competitive advantage and having a better team than
       | the competition helps with that, then you are looking for a team
       | that is better than the competition's. This is what you hire for.
       | If the competition is very good, you need to perform better -
       | that does not mean every member of your team needs to be better
       | than every member of the competition's team, except when it has
       | to. For example, take professional tennis players: they need top
       | trainers, top physicians and top managers to be #1. Hiring
       | someone that is not experienced just because they can ask the
       | right questions... will not work. Even asking the right questions
       | require very good knowledge, otherwise they will ask random
       | questions. You don't want to fly in a plane built by someone
       | without experience, but asking smart questions.
        
       | andrew_v4 wrote:
       | Two personal counterexamples, whether right or wrong:
       | 
       | Management consulting
       | 
       | - you want to be perceived as hiring the best
       | 
       | - project work that is not known in advance, you need very
       | versatile people
       | 
       | - looking for demonstrated desire to jump through the hoops and
       | do the marginal work that makes you the "top"
       | 
       | Software Engineering
       | 
       | - some overlap with the reasons above
       | 
       | - adds to the moat: if they're happy working for FAANG et al,
       | competitors are priced out of getting the best
       | 
       | - the economics of many technologies are now defined by whether
       | they can return enough to pay people competitively vs big tech.
       | E.g. there are lots of cool deep learning applications that are
       | tougher to try when you need to pay 300k / year for someone
       | really good to run with them
       | 
       | - I'm interested in the sibling post referencing moneyball, this
       | would be very cool to see applied to software engineers
        
       | SMAAART wrote:
       | Did you see the movie MoneyBall?
       | 
       | That's the point.
        
       | void_mint wrote:
       | Knowing to hire for weakness instead of "top talent" implies a
       | level of reflection almost no medium+ sized company actually has.
       | Most companies don't need top talent, and the talent they have
       | isn't anywhere close to the top.
        
       | xyzelement wrote:
       | Exactly. Some traits are always good, some always bad and yet
       | others depend on context.
       | 
       | For example I currently work with a team with a lot of very hard
       | working technical people but not enough concern for questions
       | like "what's valuable for us to work on?". So I need to hire
       | people who will ask those questions.
       | 
       | On the other hand, if my team was full of big picture
       | pontificators, I'd be looking for someone who's shut up and code
       | for a change.
        
       | motohagiography wrote:
       | Too complicated. Tell weaker performers they're top talent and
       | let their impostor syndrome do the rest.
        
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