> Hire great people, trust them, Hoo boy. Reality is so much more complicated. When you hire someone, you think that they're great, you hope that your estimat

> Hire great people, trust them, Hoo boy. Reality is so much more complicated. When you hire someone, you think that they're great, you hope that your estimation of them proves out, but it's not really possible to know. Even people who come with great portfolios, great recommendations, the fact of the matter is that your company has its own culture and its own people in different roles, and it's simply not possible to know with 100% certainty that people will truly fit into your organization until you place them into their new role and see how things play out. Furthermore, nobody comes in with full expertise on every level of the stack. Nobody is an expert also in UX, also in your frontend stack, also in your backend stack, also in your datastores, also in security, also in compliance concerns, also in observability. You must build a collaborative culture if you want to ensure that all concerns are handled. You can build a culture where you trust the people you hire in general. But "trust" is not a euphemism for "let people go play cowboy from their desk in the corner and it doesn't matter that we don't know what they're doing because we trust them." The key foundation of that trust is knowing in which area the organization trusts you to be proficient and, in turn, trusting others in the organization with expertise in other areas, at least until a "great" hire proves to be unworthy of that trust. > more meetings... don't give them any ownership or empowerment You can do both. You can build a culture where you split a typical eight hour workday for individual contributors into no more than 2 hours (i.e. usually less) in meetings, 4 hours for planned issues discussed in those meetings, at least 2 hours (i.e. when meetings take less than 2 hours) for unplanned concerns which may include any number of the following: planned issues taking longer than planned, production outages, talking to customers, working on stuff the individual contributor thinks is important ("ownership/empowerment"), etc. Hire people who are arrogant enough in their area of expertise that they will loudly and energetically share that strength with others, and humble enough to listen to others with expertise in other areas.