I find the idea of "someone better than yourself" as a skewed perspective. It's hard to say someone is better than anyone else for most people. Everyone will

I find the idea of "someone better than yourself" as a skewed perspective. It's hard to say someone is better than anyone else for most people. Everyone will generally be better than you at some things, and worse than you at others. Consider why you're in the position to be hiring them in the first place, perhaps you're better at managing, or becoming well connected, or organizing talent. In terms of programming maybe he's leaps and bounds ahead of you, but he still came to you looking for a job. That's not to say I disagree with any of the authors points individually. Just that I think that if you think of it strictly in that the new hire is better than you are, you are selling yourself short. If instead you think that you are more management or entrepreneurial focused, and the person you're hiring is more technically focused and allows you to focus on your other skills then you don't even need that list. You're automatically working as a team. Programmers don't necessarily want to be managers. If your role is becoming essentially a manager with minor programming duties, and you want to focus on business issues instead of technical challenges, when you hire an awesome programmer that gives both of you the best of both worlds. You bring a lot to the table by being the guy that starts the business and secures the capital needed to be able to hire the programmer. Regardless of your programming skills, this has no bearing on whether you are better or worse than the new hire. But quantitatively you're probably better :) You can always hire a different programmer, but if they thought they could make more money on their own they probably would have done it already.