Marc Andreesson wrote (about hiring suits, not engineers): "if you know what you're doing, the odds of a given executive hire working out will be about 50/50. T

Marc Andreesson wrote (about hiring suits, not engineers): "if you know what you're doing, the odds of a given executive hire working out will be about 50/50. That is, about 50% of the time you'll screw up and ultimately have to replace the person. (If you don't know what you're doing, your failure rate will be closer to 100%.)" http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-startups-part-8-hiring-ma http://pmarca-archive.posterous.com/the-pmarca-guide-to-star... From my own experience, the best team I ever worked on was one where we had a rigorous interview process... and fired 2 of the first 6 engineers, i.e., one third.