Stepping beyond the obvious, pay them a good wage. Filter at the door, look for people who give a shit, have a passion for the work, etc. Hire them, look to av

Stepping beyond the obvious, pay them a good wage. Filter at the door, look for people who give a shit, have a passion for the work, etc. Hire them, look to avoid people who got into it simply because it’s a fat paycheck. I wouldn’t confuse this with “I spend all day everyday in my off time coding,” but seek out people who have a reasonable articulable love for a tool, a language, or something and or can articulate why they don’t like a thing. I have opinions on, say, Java over NodeJS and can speak at length with passion about why I feel the way I do. Understand and manage them as human beings. I’ve been hired on to companies that experienced radical change within the first days, weeks, and months of accepting the job. I’ve walked into jobs such that what I interviewed for literally did not exist when I started on Day 1. I’ve worked at companies that have had serious pivots around product-market-fit such that the job I accepted radically changed, i.e. from Full-Stack SE to AWS DevOps. Those companies just offered no honest conversation or explanation around circumstances, just managers magically started assigning random tickets one day. Coincidentally, I hated those jobs and couldn’t have given less of a shit if they succeeded or failed. I’m not a cog, a fungible unit, or a human-resource. I’m a human, full-stop. The firms I’ve worked with that suffered turmoil but offered me the basic human decency of a conversation, however, earned loyalty out of me and enabled me to continue giving a shit.