| e.g. v1 of some key scalable infrastructure Just so I understand: You're always willing to trade intelligence and experience for someone who produces more, for essential key components of your startup. So you would hire a less experienced person who writes more code over a very experienced slow developer, do I have that right? All that does is trade the short term risk of not having as much developed with the long term risk of having a broken system. It means you're potentially betting your business on someone who isn't the best, just because they seem more productive. In summary, you risk making a Friendster instead of a Facebook. Let me know if I misunderstood your point. I hire on both: smart people who get it done. And getting it done is relative. Unless you're in consulting, velocity is almost never the issue compared to correctness, so a smarter, slower person is sometimes the right choice. A member of my team took a long time to come up to speed, and is now kicking ass and making the right decisions to keep things on track. |
I want candidates with all these things.
If someone is very very bright but not very effective, or terrible for the culture of my startup, I would not hire them.
If someone was an amazing culture fit, but not very bright, I would not hire them.
"Coming up to speed" makes sense. It is all about the context in which the person is working, what they did before etc. Productivity takes time to scale, as does trust in one another, working as a team etc.
But there are some people that you give a lot of time and attention to that just don't get a lot done.