> They hired the first developer, and he vetted the second developer, and so on until they had a development team This is hard for a startup in their early sta

> They hired the first developer, and he vetted the second developer, and so on until they had a development team This is hard for a startup in their early stage. Not sure how mature the company was, but let's assume it was young enough to have this very problem. Direct team hire is a double-edged sword. It works well when your team is very competent and good at weeding out false positive. Basically, when you have a bunch of senior people with maybe a couple junior and mid-level teammates. A normal distribution is actually perfect for a team. Having a direct contact with your future teammate allows you to know the person ahead of time, especially for a very team. Furthermore, direct hire means you are hiring not just a generalist. Your SWE may not know what to ask a network engineer, even from a coding point of view. The downside is what happened in the story. The way I'd like to go about it is to make sure we have two interviewers per round, even from the same team would be far better than one person vetting.