4 ms·

The funny thing about "A players hire A players and B players hire C players" is that every company I have worked at that uses that mantra is full of B & C play

• phillmv 15y ago
  What I don't get about that rule is what prevents A players from hiring B and C players, and what prevents B players from hiring A players. I'm more than capable of recognizing someone who is smarter than I am, and as a rule of thumb I prefer to work with people who are smarter than I am.
  • munin 15y ago
    proponents of the mantra would say that this means you're an "A" player. there is some research that shows that your own competence directly affects how good a judge you are of your/others relative competence, i.e. people who are low competence will rate themselves routinely as 9-10 / 10 but people who are high competence will rate themselves 5-6 / 10 ...
    • sirclueless 15y ago
      If A players surround themselves with A players and B players surround themselves with C players then those numbers sound about right.
  • tuhin 15y ago
    what prevents A players from hiring B and C players They know it will not end up good for anybody. Also they understand hiring another A player or if possible an A++ player is good for overall health of the company. prevents B players from hiring A players Ego and in a big corporation, the fear of the hire going ahead of you. Also another deadly combination is the B player who hires another A player thinking they themselves are A+ player and spoils the fun for everybody.
  • sethg 15y ago
    I believe the theory is that the A players, secure in their own skills, want to be able to delegate work to people who are as competent as they are, whereas the B players want to surround themselves with people who make them look good by comparison.
    • zippy 15y ago
      A prospective hire who is an A (in whatever field) wants to work with their kind, and so is less likely to sign up at a company full of B-level people. Also, as mentioned above, it is harder for many B-level people to recognize and value an A level person in the hiring process. An A may come across as arrogant by describing things as good or bad to a B when they're simply knowledgeable and confident because of that.
      • nirvana 15y ago
        And by that mechanism, C players use the "only hire A players" rule to claim that A players are "not good enough", though such objections don't get raised about other C players. There were some A programmers at Amazon, and they were respected, but they weren't the ones who made the hiring decisions. Since any B or C can veto any hire, A people often didn't get hired in favor of B or C people. (and A people who already worked there, eventually, got excluded from hiring loops because they're "needed elsewhere.")
• bitmonk 15y ago
  I remember being "Top Graded" as an "A Player" when I was at Rackspace. In addition to everyone quickly beginning to hate me, I caught an article on Top Grading in the next few days which said that A players have an average tenure of 3 months, mostly due to the fact that we shake things up and are unafraid to challenge anyone, which eventually gets tiring. B players are loyal and anyone who has actually read on how all this is supposed to work realizes that C players are just in the wrong job, possibly even at the right company. They're unhappy and they stop trying, unless you can redeploy them.