[jseban]

Your goal is to enable your business to make more money, that requires hiring enough competent people that can do the work that needs to be done, to make that money.

Sometimes that work is really not especially interesting, or challenging. Nobody is going to love it, or be passionate about it, and it really doesn't require a person to be more than average in terms of skill, because it's just not that technically difficult.

And that sometimes is the majority of all salaried work, so statistically speaking, that's probably also you and your company.

Why pretend to be a unicorn and only insist on hiring passionate self motivated people who will be a bad fit anyway, and be bored after two weeks.

The hiring process is not for stroking the egos of middle managers who want to feel special.

[twawaaay]

I am not pretending to be unicorn by keeping high hiring standards.

It is a reflection on our strategy. Our strategy is that, long term, is better to have smaller, tight knit community of highly intelligent, capable and motivated people than try to throw masses of lower paid employees at the problem.

We are fighting complexity and having large team of constantly rotating people that never seem to bear responsibility for their decisions is one of the worst things you can do.

I prefer to spend more time on hiring, find people I am satisfied with and then pay them well so that they are not looking to change their job in two years as most IT seems to be doing nowadays. Retention is a hugely underestimated success factor.

[jseban]

Highly intelligent, (technically) capable and motivated people are probably not in any way correlated with the amount of complexity you are needing to fight with. And if it is, it's most likely negative.

Lack of intelligence is probably not your problem, the computer genius who swoops in and saves the day only exists in movies. You are probably in a much bigger need of accountable management who actually structures the work and aligns the team by making decisions.

There are plenty of reliable, mature, productive people with great team work and communication skills, who will get rejected because they say that they are actually passionate about playing guitar, not programming, and because they can't solve esoteric programming problems on whiteboards.

Your hiring process is not optimised to further business goals, it's optimised for acting out the big bang theory in the workplace.

[twawaaay]

> You are probably in a much bigger need of accountable management

> Your hiring process is not optimised to further business goals,

That's a lot of things you were able to figure out based on my comments.

[jseban]

Yeah, I'm speaking in general terms of the software industry, and common hiring processes, which according to your comments you seem to fit into pretty well.

I don't mean to criticise you but rather suggest that the hiring process should focus less on intelligence and coding skills, and try to hire people that have intellect. That can pair judgement with intelligence. That can relate decisions to goals beyond their own personal preferences.

I have too many bad experiences with highly intelligent, but myopic and immature software developers who are left to "self organise" and just end up being lose cannons of raw intelligence, that does much more harm than good.

Software development, is more an organisational problem than a technical one.

The organisation itself is already so vastly complex that no human being can comprehend it, and that's why you have a hierarchy of information and specialisation of roles. Even if your system by some miracle has zero accidental complexity, it's still going to overwhelm even the most intelligent person, just by the amount of essential complexity. So you will need an organisation of hierarchy and/or specialisation to manage this. And the biggest determining factor for how successful you are, is this organisation and how it works as a whole, rather than any individuals superior capacity.

I just think it's a really bad idea to try to hire "extra smart" people to try to solve these issues, because it won't work.

[twawaaay]

I think you have some good understanding of parts of the problem but the ease with which you generalise is dangerous.

Getting from "I have too many bad experiences with highly intelligent, but myopic and immature software developers" to "I just think it's a really bad idea to try to hire 'extra smart' people (..) because it won't work" is pretty poor logic.

I think much better and productive statement would be "Hiring intelligent people is not enough to solve the problem."

It is much more productive because from there you can go to actually discussing what else is needed to make good use of highly intelligent people.

[jseban]

What I'm trying to say is: it's a bad idea to hire extra smart individual contributors as a solution to managing complexity, because nobody is smart enough. The cult of genius makes the workplace dysfunctional and inefficient.

That extra intelligence is mostly irrelevant, and sometimes negative.

Managing complexity is done with hierarchy, specialisation and careful organisation of work from accountable managers. You want this organisation to work well, and then you want to hire people who can do an acceptable job and function well within that organisation. And if you are still finding yourself in a chaos of unmanageable complexity, the organisation of the team is to blame.

The hierarchy, specialisation and organisation of the work is not done well enough, and must be fixed. You don't need more horsepower when the steering of your car has broken, that's just going to get you in the ditch faster.