[thr_ddv]

The budget I have for hiring is tiny and no one on the board believes 10x engineers exist. The choise is between not shipping anything at all or having to deal with said talentless hacks who happen to know more than me about tool X but otherwise slow development to a crawl.

Turns out reading HN comments is not a good way to run a company. Who would have thought?

[majormajor]

I mean I also sure hope nobody is reading your comments to learn about running a company! They'd learn about "not answering the question," though, I guess.

Remind me, whose job is it to convince other execs and the board of the most appropriate talent strategy? Maybe lesson 1 here is "if you're running a company and don't trust your CTO, look for a new one"?

[jstarfish]

It sounds like you hired a personal mercenary, not a 10x engineer. Everybody is more productive when they ignore the rules everyone else is expected to follow.

There's probably nothing wrong with your existing team except it being too large and democratic. One guy can bounce ideas around in his head faster than a dozen negotiating them with each other. I've seen teams like yours, and IME the issue isn't always incompetence, sometimes each of them thinks they're the rockstar. Anytime one of them doesn't get their way, they jam everything up for everyone else.

We've become too democratic as a whole. Nobody follows orders from above; everybody expects to have a say in things they don't even have a stake in. Whenever you get to hiring again, try stacking your team with 2-4 ex-military types and see how it works out for you (it works well for UPS well beyond that scale). You don't get bleeding-edge experience (and never a 10x-er), but you get tax breaks, competence, obedience, people trained to work as a cohesive unit, and you can wave the flag and call yourself a patriot (which helps with government contracts if that's your business).

[cjg]

This: "Everybody is more productive when they ignore the rules everyone else is expected to follow"

[muh_gradle]

> Turns out reading HN comments is not a good way to run a company. Who would have thought?

Literally everyone thought this, and probably even the talentless hacks that you hired. Strange that you had to create a throwaway account to figure this one out.