Hiring on raw talent alone is a fallacy. All things being equal, yes, go with raw talent. But make sure you consider how well your candidates play well with oth

Hiring on raw talent alone is a fallacy. All things being equal, yes, go with raw talent. But make sure you consider how well your candidates play well with others. Would you rather have a pig-headed, anti-social, lone-wolf genius on a project, or an above average coder with a great attitude? Sometimes that 10x factor in raw coding productivity is offset by the side effects of any major personality flaws. One guy I used to work with was a brilliant coder who burned up any skill benefits by wasting time on investigating bleeding edge technologies (many of which didn't pan out), reinventing the wheel (look at me, I created a grid control from scratch, and I only wasted a week on it!), ignoring customer needs (you better spend 100K+ upgrading your servers and desktops so you can run our $15K app!) and being nasty to his coworkers. As much as I knock the guy for being an ass, he wrote nice, elegant code faster than everyone else... when he was coding. I'd never hire him in a million years.