Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses

How about just fire your whole HR department, and let team leads do the work of finding qualified engineers for their needs?

HR is the bane of the technology world. As a cultural phenomenon, the class of "HR" specialists are massive drag on the progress of the species. We would be better off without this role in our technological cultures.

So much technical debt accrues because the HR person doesn't have a single, frickin', clue what they are doing. If you don't know what "firmware" means, don't try to hire firmware developers, yo.

HR people should be required to demonstrate the basics of the technology they are hiring for .. if they can't do that, they're not qualified to gatekeep the technology teams.

Too often, HR is used to repress technological advances, out of fear of loss of control. That is a good thing: HR should lose control over technology groups.

To me, much more important in that phrase is expectation who will you be working with. It's fantastic to be surrounded by smarter* people and keep learning, but at some level it's hard and if you like what you do, then this seems to be the most important thing about the job.

You have your basic financial needs covered when you're a decent coder, even boring projects can have great and interesting implementations, it all drops down to people who you are working with.

Also, not just in IT, true masters tend to be interesting people in my experience. More often than not, they have humility and curiosity that allowed them to get that far.

But of course it often tends to be an empty phrase. If they do hire top talent you are more likely to hear specific names rather than this phrase.

1. smarter / more experienced / more knowledgeable / sometimes even having your level of expertise but coming from a different background

The article spends most of its words trying to convince the reader to do it, and only a few paragraphs on how to do it. I was convinced in the first paragraph.

My own experience shows that hiring for your team's weaknesses can make it more effective. In 2013, I went from an operations-heavy role to a new team with little operations experience. Our TL designed and coded a new service. He was not happy with the feedback I gave through the design & code review process. Before deploying the new service to production, we met with one of the company's top engineers (Sanjay Ghemawat) for a "production readiness review". The reviewer was impressed and found only a couple of minor issues. He said that it was rare for him to review a service and find no major issues. Many of the questions he asked during the review were things that I had brought up earlier and convinced our TL to fix. Although I had not written any code on the service, I contributed operational knowledge and filled a weakness of the team.

Our TL did not acknowledge my contribution and even gave me a bad review, costing me about $80k in compensation. Now, years later, I believe that he did that to get me to leave the team. I had often pushed to fix the major problems in our project. I think he wanted to keep control and continue working on fun things and ignore the problems. Our manager went along with him, building his own empire. I left and the person who took my place had the same problem and left as soon as they could. Honesty and respectfulness are important qualities of teams and team members because they develop trust. Trust makes teams more productive. An internal study at Google concluded that teams with members who trust each other are much more productive than teams with high technical ability and low trust [0]. Lack of trust is a team weakness that we can hire to improve. We can also intentionally train and practice skills that improve team trust.

I want a systematic way to identify the strengths and weaknesses of myself, my teammates, and potential teammates. I want a questionnaire like the one in Essential Enneagram which was tested in a study with 1,000 participants [1].

I wish the large tech companies would invest in this kind of work and publish it.

[0] https://rework.withgoogle.com/print/guides/5721312655835136/

[1] https://drdaviddaniels.com/enneagram-test/

Sure a big salary is nice but especially Google hasn't done much in the last decade to make it look there is exciting, or even just satisfying, engineering happening there.