Hiring people is very expensive. Finding and qualifying leads, creating job description, interviewing, on boarding, orientation, training, introduction to and getting familiar with the existing code base. Firing requires distributing that team member's work to other team members.
This can take months and a big investment from existing team members, to go from wanting to hire someone to a fully productive team member. And that's assuming your hiring process never accidentally hires someone even more incompetent than your "poor" team members.
Compare that to investing in improving existing team members to help them improve. Is that really more expensive than hiring and firing?
Exactly. Spolsky did enormous harm to us all with his assertion, blindly accepted, that a single bad hire will destroy your company overnight. All the toxicity in the current hiring process should be laid at his door.
This Spolsky quote is so outdated. The average great developer will apply for 4 jobs unless he is trying to work remotely which will require 100 aplications / 50 tests / 75 take home assignmennts / 14 interviews per position and one job offer for below market rate for the third world.
"The average great software developer will apply for, total, maybe, four jobs in their entire career."
You say that like it's some sort of epiphany, but do you honestly believe that there's anybody who wasn't trying to hire better people in the first place? If the problem is the quality of the people you've been hiring, maybe your boss should consider replacing you with somebody who's better at finding better people to hire, eh?
I've been on many interview debriefs where the discussion came down to a question of our team's appetite for taking on a more relatively junior hire vs holding out for a more solid candidate. Some "weaker" hires can be OK, but in order to be fair to them (and the team) you have to make sure you have the resources to develop them by giving them the opportunity to work with more experienced people and get one-on-one mentoring. So yes, the extent that you want to "hire better people" is very much an intentional judgment, and you can calibrate your hiring process accordingly based on your current team composition and the work on your plate.
I wonder if that happens. Some hiring processes are flawed so they filter out the better candidates at the HR levels and the engineers filter out the candidates who are left over. This can go on for a long time until the company is so understaffed they hire anyone and it works out..
Careful. How did the team get there in the first place? Why would better people want to join if the manager can't coach an existing team? You can argue that it doesn't matter and you just need to clean house. But that runs the risk of cover up the root cause and not addressing it.
Hiring people is very expensive. Finding and qualifying leads, creating job description, interviewing, on boarding, orientation, training, introduction to and getting familiar with the existing code base. Firing requires distributing that team member's work to other team members.
This can take months and a big investment from existing team members, to go from wanting to hire someone to a fully productive team member. And that's assuming your hiring process never accidentally hires someone even more incompetent than your "poor" team members.
Compare that to investing in improving existing team members to help them improve. Is that really more expensive than hiring and firing?