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> The Lake Wobegon Strategy famously coined by Google and Peter Norvig claims that you should always hire above your team average. Doing so increases the qualit

> The Lake Wobegon Strategy famously coined by Google and Peter Norvig claims that you should always hire above your team average. Doing so increases the quality of your team. Ugh, not this again. Obviously don't hire people who aren't good at their job. But most improvements come from investing in your team. > are they putting their code up for review [...] Missed one: Are their code reviews/pull requests high quality? I.e. do they go out of their way to document how they tested it? Reproduction steps? Do they invest time in making code reviews as easy to review for other people as possible? Or does their code reviews always take multiple rounds of review due to sloppiness?

kevan 7y ago
You could reasonably argue that the highest impact investments a manager can make in a team are hiring better people and firing worse ones.
- uwuhn 7y ago
  Hiring better people doesn't mean much if you can't get them to stick around for more than a year.
- JamesBarney 7y ago
  Not having a team because you can't staff it, and having terrible moral because of frequent firings also impact team performance.
- jimbokun 7y ago
  Why do you say that? Hiring people is very expensive. Finding and qualifying leads, creating job description, interviewing, on boarding, orientation, training, introduction to and getting familiar with the existing code base. Firing requires distributing that team member's work to other team members. This can take months and a big investment from existing team members, to go from wanting to hire someone to a fully productive team member. And that's assuming your hiring process never accidentally hires someone even more incompetent than your "poor" team members. Compare that to investing in improving existing team members to help them improve. Is that really more expensive than hiring and firing?
  - ses1984 7y ago
    Attrition is a thing. You have to always be hiring, or very ready to hire, anyway. Also accidentally hiring the wrong people can be devastating. It's better to identify and get rid of bad hires right away.
    - wolco 7y ago
      Why.. getting yourself out of accidentally hiring someone who has a standard 3 month trial period is easy.
      - goatinaboat 7y ago
        Exactly. Spolsky did enormous harm to us all with his assertion, blindly accepted, that a single bad hire will destroy your company overnight. All the toxicity in the current hiring process should be laid at his door.
        wolco 7y ago
        This Spolsky quote is so outdated. The average great developer will apply for 4 jobs unless he is trying to work remotely which will require 100 aplications / 50 tests / 75 take home assignmennts / 14 interviews per position and one job offer for below market rate for the third world. "The average great software developer will apply for, total, maybe, four jobs in their entire career."
      - ses1984 7y ago
        I don't think it's trivial to identify a bad hire in 3 months. Some are obviously bad, some are not.
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  > hiring better people You say that like it's some sort of epiphany, but do you honestly believe that there's anybody who wasn't trying to hire better people in the first place? If the problem is the quality of the people you've been hiring, maybe your boss should consider replacing you with somebody who's better at finding better people to hire, eh?
  - wolco 7y ago
    I wonder if that happens. Some hiring processes are flawed so they filter out the better candidates at the HR levels and the engineers filter out the candidates who are left over. This can go on for a long time until the company is so understaffed they hire anyone and it works out..
  - brianpgordon 7y ago
    I've been on many interview debriefs where the discussion came down to a question of our team's appetite for taking on a more relatively junior hire vs holding out for a more solid candidate. Some "weaker" hires can be OK, but in order to be fair to them (and the team) you have to make sure you have the resources to develop them by giving them the opportunity to work with more experienced people and get one-on-one mentoring. So yes, the extent that you want to "hire better people" is very much an intentional judgment, and you can calibrate your hiring process accordingly based on your current team composition and the work on your plate.
- yowlingcat 7y ago
  Careful. How did the team get there in the first place? Why would better people want to join if the manager can't coach an existing team? You can argue that it doesn't matter and you just need to clean house. But that runs the risk of cover up the root cause and not addressing it.
tracer4201 7y ago
> “But most improvements come from investing in your team.” I agree on this but you have to cut your losses at some point. Some people just aren’t motivated. A surprise pay raise, catering lunches, taking them to an offsite, etc whatever motivational strategies you have may provide some short term result, and that could be sufficient if your goal is just X and it’s in the line of sight, but sometimes raising the bar on your team means finding a different spot for the unmotivated folks, and if they’re not investing even in that, then cut your losses and let them go.
- mieseratte 7y ago
  Absolutely agree. Some people are just beyond saving. Sometimes this a matter of skill, and sometimes a matter of will but the result is the same. If you're hiring pipe-hitters and grafting them onto a JV squad the results will often not be what you'd hoped for, unless you have a particularly high-tolerance for projects being over (time-)budget. Having personally burned myself down in such an environment, a good interview question to ask is if everyone has gone through the same hiring process and if not ask what the previous process was and why things have changed.
- jimbokun 7y ago
  > A surprise pay raise, catering lunches, taking them to an offsite I don't think any of those things will increase team productivity at all. Mentoring and training and encouraging learning new things and constantly giving new challenges and expanding responsibility and tying company financial success directly to employee paychecks, are the kind of investments that can improve a team's performance.
- rifung 7y ago
  > Some people just aren’t motivated. Is it really that people aren't motivated or that they aren't motivated by the incentives you're offering? > A surprise pay raise, catering lunches, taking them to an offsite, etc whatever motivational strategies you have may provide some short term result I imagine what might be more effective is actually talking to them and figuring out what they actually care about.
srikbs8095 7y ago
"Most improvements come from investing in your team" Very well said. Completely agree. Which is why I think the ability to "learn" as you go is so valuable. You don't want to hire a Know-it-all. You want to hire a Can-learn-it-all.
Consultant32452 7y ago
Investing in workers is hard. I'm in a mentoring/leadership position. I approach this in two ways. One is the general mentoring everyone gets during regular stuff like code reviews. The other way is sometimes I see someone who I think has real promise and kind of take them under my wing, give them lots of 1on1 attention, etc. They improve exponentially and then leave. One guy I mentored had been with the company for over 10 years. No one had ever "invested" in him. He had a great attitude and work ethic, but terrible skills. I taught him how to program. He left the company and doubled his salary. That was a year and a half ago. This week he called me to thank me because he was changing jobs again and doubling his salary again. So my current employer went from a low skill high dedication worker to no worker because I invested in him. I'm going to continue help/mentoring people because I find it fulfilling, but if I'm honest it's bad for my employer. They currently pay good salaries in line with the market. There's no way they can justify giving a person who's been with the company for 10 years 4x salary growth in 2 years. How could they even reasonably measure the market value of his skills changing so much so quickly?
- jvagner 7y ago
  But this isn't usually the norm. If this dev's trajectory is true, it's also something worth discussing with your management. There might be candidates for this kind of trajectory in your current dev pool, and any feelings contrariwise are to the detriment of your company. Too often there's an emotional component to how employees are viewed. The employee today will be the same employee forever, if seen through the lens of a limited manager. I'll say this: if you can do this 2-3 times, you should find your way to an org that can support and appreciate the lift you're able to provide. You shouldn't be holding yourself down to the poor standard of your current employer.
  - Consultant32452 7y ago
    Honest question: are there places where you can be a mid-level developer making $80k/yr and over the course of two years get raises and promotions lifting you up to $300k+? I've never heard of such a thing happening. In my experience, industry-wide, the only way to make that kind of raise is to leave.

kevan 7y ago

You could reasonably argue that the highest impact investments a manager can make in a team are hiring better people and firing worse ones.

uwuhn 7y ago
Hiring better people doesn't mean much if you can't get them to stick around for more than a year.
JamesBarney 7y ago
Not having a team because you can't staff it, and having terrible moral because of frequent firings also impact team performance.
jimbokun 7y ago
Why do you say that? Hiring people is very expensive. Finding and qualifying leads, creating job description, interviewing, on boarding, orientation, training, introduction to and getting familiar with the existing code base. Firing requires distributing that team member's work to other team members. This can take months and a big investment from existing team members, to go from wanting to hire someone to a fully productive team member. And that's assuming your hiring process never accidentally hires someone even more incompetent than your "poor" team members. Compare that to investing in improving existing team members to help them improve. Is that really more expensive than hiring and firing?
- ses1984 7y ago
  Attrition is a thing. You have to always be hiring, or very ready to hire, anyway. Also accidentally hiring the wrong people can be devastating. It's better to identify and get rid of bad hires right away.
  - wolco 7y ago
    Why.. getting yourself out of accidentally hiring someone who has a standard 3 month trial period is easy.
    - goatinaboat 7y ago
      Exactly. Spolsky did enormous harm to us all with his assertion, blindly accepted, that a single bad hire will destroy your company overnight. All the toxicity in the current hiring process should be laid at his door.
      - wolco 7y ago
        This Spolsky quote is so outdated. The average great developer will apply for 4 jobs unless he is trying to work remotely which will require 100 aplications / 50 tests / 75 take home assignmennts / 14 interviews per position and one job offer for below market rate for the third world. "The average great software developer will apply for, total, maybe, four jobs in their entire career."
    - ses1984 7y ago
      I don't think it's trivial to identify a bad hire in 3 months. Some are obviously bad, some are not.
commandlinefan 7y ago
> hiring better people You say that like it's some sort of epiphany, but do you honestly believe that there's anybody who wasn't trying to hire better people in the first place? If the problem is the quality of the people you've been hiring, maybe your boss should consider replacing you with somebody who's better at finding better people to hire, eh?
- wolco 7y ago
  I wonder if that happens. Some hiring processes are flawed so they filter out the better candidates at the HR levels and the engineers filter out the candidates who are left over. This can go on for a long time until the company is so understaffed they hire anyone and it works out..
- brianpgordon 7y ago
  I've been on many interview debriefs where the discussion came down to a question of our team's appetite for taking on a more relatively junior hire vs holding out for a more solid candidate. Some "weaker" hires can be OK, but in order to be fair to them (and the team) you have to make sure you have the resources to develop them by giving them the opportunity to work with more experienced people and get one-on-one mentoring. So yes, the extent that you want to "hire better people" is very much an intentional judgment, and you can calibrate your hiring process accordingly based on your current team composition and the work on your plate.
yowlingcat 7y ago
Careful. How did the team get there in the first place? Why would better people want to join if the manager can't coach an existing team? You can argue that it doesn't matter and you just need to clean house. But that runs the risk of cover up the root cause and not addressing it.

tracer4201 7y ago

> “But most improvements come from investing in your team.” I agree on this but you have to cut your losses at some point. Some people just aren’t motivated. A surprise pay raise, catering lunches, taking them to an offsite, etc whatever motivational strategies you have may provide some short term result, and that could be sufficient if your goal is just X and it’s in the line of sight, but sometimes raising the bar on your team means finding a different spot for the unmotivated folks, and if they’re not investing even in that, then cut your losses and let them go.

mieseratte 7y ago
Absolutely agree. Some people are just beyond saving. Sometimes this a matter of skill, and sometimes a matter of will but the result is the same. If you're hiring pipe-hitters and grafting them onto a JV squad the results will often not be what you'd hoped for, unless you have a particularly high-tolerance for projects being over (time-)budget. Having personally burned myself down in such an environment, a good interview question to ask is if everyone has gone through the same hiring process and if not ask what the previous process was and why things have changed.
jimbokun 7y ago
> A surprise pay raise, catering lunches, taking them to an offsite I don't think any of those things will increase team productivity at all. Mentoring and training and encouraging learning new things and constantly giving new challenges and expanding responsibility and tying company financial success directly to employee paychecks, are the kind of investments that can improve a team's performance.
rifung 7y ago
> Some people just aren’t motivated. Is it really that people aren't motivated or that they aren't motivated by the incentives you're offering? > A surprise pay raise, catering lunches, taking them to an offsite, etc whatever motivational strategies you have may provide some short term result I imagine what might be more effective is actually talking to them and figuring out what they actually care about.

srikbs8095 7y ago

"Most improvements come from investing in your team" Very well said. Completely agree. Which is why I think the ability to "learn" as you go is so valuable. You don't want to hire a Know-it-all. You want to hire a Can-learn-it-all.

Consultant32452 7y ago

Investing in workers is hard. I'm in a mentoring/leadership position. I approach this in two ways. One is the general mentoring everyone gets during regular stuff like code reviews. The other way is sometimes I see someone who I think has real promise and kind of take them under my wing, give them lots of 1on1 attention, etc. They improve exponentially and then leave. One guy I mentored had been with the company for over 10 years. No one had ever "invested" in him. He had a great attitude and work ethic, but terrible skills. I taught him how to program. He left the company and doubled his salary. That was a year and a half ago. This week he called me to thank me because he was changing jobs again and doubling his salary again. So my current employer went from a low skill high dedication worker to no worker because I invested in him. I'm going to continue help/mentoring people because I find it fulfilling, but if I'm honest it's bad for my employer. They currently pay good salaries in line with the market. There's no way they can justify giving a person who's been with the company for 10 years 4x salary growth in 2 years. How could they even reasonably measure the market value of his skills changing so much so quickly?

jvagner 7y ago
But this isn't usually the norm. If this dev's trajectory is true, it's also something worth discussing with your management. There might be candidates for this kind of trajectory in your current dev pool, and any feelings contrariwise are to the detriment of your company. Too often there's an emotional component to how employees are viewed. The employee today will be the same employee forever, if seen through the lens of a limited manager. I'll say this: if you can do this 2-3 times, you should find your way to an org that can support and appreciate the lift you're able to provide. You shouldn't be holding yourself down to the poor standard of your current employer.
- Consultant32452 7y ago
  Honest question: are there places where you can be a mid-level developer making $80k/yr and over the course of two years get raises and promotions lifting you up to $300k+? I've never heard of such a thing happening. In my experience, industry-wide, the only way to make that kind of raise is to leave.