In my experience it does. "Hire people smart than you" is a management ethos, which translates to delegate the hell out of a task. But software development spe

In my experience it does. "Hire people smart than you" is a management ethos, which translates to delegate the hell out of a task. But software development specially in small teams doesn't work that way. Many a times, junior programmers require direction and even help in completing their tasks. So it comes down to two problems (three, third one later) 1. Either you give someone sub-standard work to maintain that you be able to help them. This will lead to demotivation eventually 2. You accept you are not in position to help them. This generally leads to friction and a bad boss will try to hide incompetence by architecture discussions, meetings etc Smartness is subjective. Which leads to the third problem. How can you assess skills of someone better than you? You can only go as far as grilling a candidate to your own competence. So a B, C player will only be hiring other B, C players and that will soon degenerate the organization.