Why would I recommend a standout performer for a position at my company? So they can outshine me? I never recommend the "true believer" tool, always the average performer I got along with.
"A players hire A players and B players hire C players”.
I’m not saying I am necessarily an “A player”. But I am secure in my skills and the ability to convince someone to pay me for my skills. I was instrumental in hiring three people at a job who were all better than me at the time. I learned so much from them while I was there, it helped set me up for my next job that was my first job as a lead.
Why would I want someone that can’t help me be successful at my current job and whom I can’t learn from?
Even there I would ask my then former coworkers first advice.
If you think so, I'm sorry for wherever you've worked.
A vs B vs C isn't some fixed thing we're assigned at birth: it's a matter of learning, investing in ourselves, having both humility and pride in our work, maintaining our boundaries and building up our coworkers.
People who have fully replaced intrinsic motivation with extrinsic motivation won't ever get to A level, because the incentives are non-linear. Actual A players keep investing and collaborating, whether they get rewarded for it now or later or never, just because it is the right thing to do.
It's a simple numbers game - the A teams hire rarely and don't turn over staff constantly and when they do hire they pick up talent internally if it exists.
The rest hire as per the quote previously, turn over staff, build empires for their own egos etc. This makes up the bulk of market facing hiring.
This is utterly false. My motivation and I assume most people who go to work is their insatiable addiction to food, clothes and shelter. “Passion is Bullshit”.
Everything I do at work is and has been since 2008 (I have been working a lot longer) is to feed those addictions. While we did get off the hedonic treadmill and downsized a couple of years ago and I focus much more on work life balance, I work hard now not for the maximum comp. But to maintain my autonomy at work and be trusted and because my current job is pretty straightforward (for me at least) and has unlimited PTO and allows us to pursue our travel hobbies.
The reality that nobody wasnt to say out loud is that the top 10-20% of the people you interviewed for a role would all have been just as great as the "best" candidate (and often enough the amazing candidate turns out to be terrible anyway).
If you are hiring for your standard enterprise CRUD developer or “full stack” developer, once you have a few seniors (real seniors not “codez real gud” seniors), you can go down to the top 50%
Or you can hire juniors, and after a couple of years have a whole team of A-players.
It's like the story about the coach who watched two runners run the same time, one with perfect form and the other a total mess. He let the total mess onto the team, and the runner with perfect form got mad, "but I ran better than he did!!!" The coach replied, "I can't help you go any faster than you are, but the total mess is going to be incredibly fast with just a little form."
It should be about raising the bar, not lowering it. You’d grow if you weren’t the smartest person in the room. Unfortunately this stance prevents one from seeing that.
Even if I am,
and I’ve been hired multiple times to be the “smartest person in the room” , I want to hire people who can outshine me because that means I can just delegate high level concepts and they can run with it so I can move on the other initiatives.
While doing that was half the reason that I got let go from my last job, I delegated the work I was doing to the person I hired and moved on to a newer initiative that was pulled, I still have no regrets.
I got a chance to put leading an impressive “AI” project on my resume and it helped me get my current much better job.
Before anyone starts groaning , it was a framework to do better intent based bots for online call centers (Amazon Connect and Lex). The perfect use case for it.
Yeah... the overenthusiastic tool bringing up labor intensive ideas for minimal gain just means I can't hit the gym at lunch. Not putting up with that so a meaningless metric can go up by 0.5%.
true corporate strategist here...
i recommend people i trust and beleive in and want to work with. if they can outshine me i can get better by working with them. i dont give a rats ass about my performance reviews. just quality of work and nice collaboration , preferably with people better than me.
I’m not saying I am necessarily an “A player”. But I am secure in my skills and the ability to convince someone to pay me for my skills. I was instrumental in hiring three people at a job who were all better than me at the time. I learned so much from them while I was there, it helped set me up for my next job that was my first job as a lead.
Why would I want someone that can’t help me be successful at my current job and whom I can’t learn from?
Even there I would ask my then former coworkers first advice.