[mvpu]

My personal bias matches your first point - I prefer candidates that are curious (to understand how things work), versatile (dabbled with more than one language), hungry (to build things) and accomplished (have built things they are proud of). I do not care about OCD. I don't think the next engineer should be better than the last engineer.

That said, I would hire one person that meets your bias, get them to do great things, and use that example to influence your peers. Once they start seeing results, they are more likely to use your bias. I would also opportunistically discuss the performance of people they have been hiring and trigger trigger thoughts.

However, I've found that hiring alone does not fix the core problem in engineering - which in my perspective boils down to building a culture of obsession. I've never seen a team full of rockstars. But I've been able to improve outcomes by constantly obsessing about some aspect of the product or code with engineers and getting them excited about it and take ownership and make things better. Get someone excited about UX, someone excited about code quality, someone about security, someone about unit tests, and constantly talk to them about it, and reward them for making it better. And over time you might see better results.

[bradknowles]

But the “O” in OCD comes from Obession. Well, Obsessive, technically.

I’m confused as to how you can say you don’t care about OCD at the beginning of your post, and yet by the end you are harping on the key requirement for obession.

Can you clarify this?