Once upon a time™, I worked for a big name university's bioinformatics department. They hired a visiting PI without management experience to be their software e

Once upon a time™, I worked for a big name university's bioinformatics department. They hired a visiting PI without management experience to be their software engineering manager for a team of 5 SWEs. He immediately implemented control-freak-level policies in an agro/anxious, abrasive manner and 2 SWEs resigned before the email ink was even dry. Basic rules of staffing university departments: 0. Generally don't hire your family or friends. The assumption of nepotism will be hard to shake. 1. Blind resumes and interview candidates and have a hiring committee rather than giving jobs out preferentially by a single hiring manager unilaterally, because there is a human tendency to hire people unintentionally reinforcing propinquity biases.