The thing to really fear is the toxic hire, the /10 or /100 worker. He'll ruin your business while deflecting blame to others, driving away your best employees.
Don't fear the mediocre worker, fear the toxic worker.
And it's not either-or. You can be a 10x worker and be toxic. Sometimes those are the worst to have.
You think you need them because they do X, Y, and Z beautifully, but in reality they're destroying morale and tanking everybody else's ability to do A-W.
It's very, very easy in this situation to try to put a band-aid on things and hunker down, try to encourage the other folks to just give the toxic person a little more space. But it never works, and the longer you drag it out the more the A-team folks who aren't toxic will jump ship.
Yes, it's much better to hire a team of OK people who will work together as a team than it is to hire a team of superstars who's egos are too big to fit through the door.
I have been watching teams form and succeed -- or die -- for a long time.
I'm very close to believing that you'd be better off with hiring smart people right off the street who have never worked in IT -- but get along great and truly care and help each other out -- than you would trying to screen out folks who know algorithms and/or data structures and then filter a second time for not being a douchebag.
I have seen a lot of average ability teams who had social skills kick ass. I've never seen a team with tremendously smart people without them do so. In fact, I continue to be amazed at the brilliant people I meet sometime whom I wouldn't want bagging groceries for me, much less creating an web application.
ADD: If anybody's interested in running an experiment where we create teams basically out of thin air, hit me up. I've been kicking around some ideas in this space for a couple of years or so.
I have no personal desire to start or run a project services company, so it's not something I would fund. My interest is from the standpoint of understanding and accelerating how teams perform. (Or don't)
Also there's an interesting relationship between the people, the team, and the company. As it turns out, all are important equally, just in different ways. You really need a pre-existing company to do this.
Finally, I don't care what anybody tells you, work in this area is experimental. Everybody and their brother has a pet theory and most of it is based on limited/non-existent sample sizes or the conflating a plethora of data with an abundance of understanding. If people were robots, we'd just hire robots.
Apologies my HN response time drops when I go on holiday.
I was not meaning you should start a "normal" project services company - more that most such companies just grab semi-random contractors and throw them into the latest contract, meaning a company that made experimentation the basis of its allocation may have a both a commercial attraction and greater scale than ordinary lab-scale experiments.
Not that I know what you are planning so it's likely to be off target. (Well actually your second sentence suggests taking existing teams in existing company)
Yes. You can even have a team of 1/10 folks who, put together, work at 10x.
More counter-intuitively, you can take a 10x team full of folks everybody agrees are brilliant, stick them in other teams, and have the other teams tank and folks in the other teams think those folks are losers.
It's a humbling (and enlightening) thing to watch.
ADD: A lot of the myth of the 10 or 100x developer is just a really, really capable guy with a supporting team that is able to meet all of their needs and clear all of their obstacles. The team (including our star) is the cool and irreplaceable part, but the "genius" or "boy wonder" gets all the good press.
> ADD: A lot of the myth of the 10 or 100x developer is just a really, really capable guy with a supporting team that is able to meet all of their needs and clear all of their obstacles. The team (including our star) is the cool and irreplaceable part, but the "genius" or "boy wonder" gets all the good press.
I would argue this is almost always true especially in todays world of ever increasing software complexity. Building services, handling ops, fixing bugs, high level architecture, low level architecture, front end, back end, etc... are just impossible for a single person to ever be 10x at across the board. It takes a team to deliver software.
I look at it a lot like Michael Jordan and the Bulls in the 90s. MJ was the 10x player, but without the other hall of famers and all stars on the team they would not have won like they did. The same also goes for the rest of the team.
If you ask me, this phenomenon is the reason we see a lot of incredibly successful founders flail at a second startup -- and it's also the reason we see some folks continue to kick ass year after year. The first guys started believing their own press (One wag said that in SV, you either grow into the CEO role or you swell into it). They flipped, then started over -- leaving folks from the previous team spread here or there and not realizing they destroyed the magic. The second bunch just keeps honing a better and better team, moving the team into high positions of leadership. Each team member becomes a CEO, but the team survives (and continues to improve).
"You're looking for three things, generally, in a person," says Warren Buffett. "Intelligence, energy, and integrity. And if they don't have the last one, don't even bother with the first two."
It's a favourite quote of his, mentioned in this speech[1] as well, around the 1:55 mark.
I've seen several cases that looked like this superficially, but never a case where it turned out to be true when more closely investigated. Every single time, it has turned out that the "10x worker" who "writes all the important things and knows everything" has been doing essentially nothing for a very long time. Every single time, the primary features of these people have been:
* They have an opinion on every subject, and express one in every discussion ("leadership")
* For any proposed task, they can give a list of plausible-sounding reasons why it should not be done ("technical expertise")
* Nobody challenges them because doing anything that sounds even a little bit like a challenge results in you getting shouted at ("respected by their peers")
Words in parentheses are what management sees.
Every time I have seen a case where these people have persisted, it has been because a clique of them back each other up and the rest of the people in the company are essentially docile. Every competent engineer who finds themselves in this scenario then discovers that they are (a) outnumbered, and (b) able to find a better job somewhere else, so that's what happens.
I'm going to disagree here, based on personal experience.
I've not met a single individual whose contributions were so amazing to make up for their toxic personality. Most all of the toxic people I've worked with have had poor productivity, precisely as a function of their toxicity.
I mean, its totally fair that that's your experience. But I personally know at least three individuals who fit the archetype of the "10x(-ish) developer" and all of whom have toxic personalities I'd never work with. They may be able to code from scratch in a couple weeks what another team would take months to do, but in terms of the organization they are a loss, because no one can work with them.
Certainly, there are developers who fit the mold of what you're talking about. I'm not suggesting that all toxic developers are 10xers. But the ones to really fear hiring are the ones who produce lots of code while they corrode your organization.
If that's true, then they are not "10x developers". Being super-productive, but only by yourself in a vacuum, is next to useless to any company with more than 1 employee.
If you're a 5-10 person startup, don't you want to have the person who can write version 1.0 of your product by himself in a couple of weeks? Then, when you start having customers, have a bigger team and redo things cleanly.
There's another important fallacy.
From the viewpoint of a 10x worker, the /10 worker is toxic.
From the viewpoint of a /10 worker, the 10x worker is toxic.
Not if that person is toxic and awful to work with. I don't care if he's 10X, 20X or 100X (Not that I even believe in the myth of the "10X developer").
10x in this context usually refers strictly to their programming ability. I've certainly known people I'd consider 10x programmers, who I'd never hire without a specific difficult task that doesn't require collaboration.
I can relate to this. I once worked with two very smart people, extremely brilliant and could do amazing things. The only problem is they fought, were ill mannered and chased away every single person who every worked in the team. The manager was powerless because both of them had connections in the higher management and got anything they wanted.
The net result was there was never a stable team to get anything significant done. The project never did release anything. Needless to say they blamed everybody else apart from themselves. The last I heard, they did two more projects and met the same fate.
Don't fear the mediocre worker, fear the toxic worker.