[hyperman1]

As far as I understand the author, it's always obviously true. She just ups the baseline to genius level if you're on the Manhattan project.

Which makes the statement mostly tautological: Hire only people capable of doing the work.

Maybe she doesn't want you to hire overqualified people, and wants you to shift focus on what qualities the team as a whole is missing.

All of this never makes it out of hiring 101 teritory, of course.

Update: s/he/she/

[qsort]

I mean, is it true even then?

I know it doesn't work like that, but as a first approximation we can imagine that people working on the Manhattan project would be able to write some javascript or whatever given the chance, while the opposite isn't true. So you would still want to hire the best people you can get your hands on: maybe you underestimated the difficulty of the current project, or the next one will be harder. Anything else is just Pareto-inefficient.

[groby_b]

"You can get your hands on" is the imperative part.

All the article is trying to say (as far as I can tell) is "do not wait for the perfect hire if you have a perfectly good hire".

The "complex contagion" and "network effects" are what triggered the insight for them, but are not really necessary to understanding the principle.

[marcosdumay]

So, it's obvious that if there were some people much smarter than the ones working on the Manhattan project, they wouldn't be able to improve it on any reasonable way?

I could maybe agree that it's true, but I really don't agree that it is obvious, and don't agree that it generalizes to all less demanding projects done by less capable people. It probably is true for a lot of things, but claiming it applies to all seems ridiculous.

[titanomachy]

“She”, I think.