7 ms·

Why is this type of post upvoted to the front page on HN? I thought HN attracted folks sympathetic to the creation of startups. >The hip thing nowadays is tha

by jasode 11y ago

Why is this type of post upvoted to the front page on HN? I thought HN attracted folks sympathetic to the creation of startups. >The hip thing nowadays is that your software company should hire only A-players instead of B- or C-players, or focus on engineers that are ten times better than anyone else. [...], but I think the sentiment itself is the wrong question to ask. If people are starting companies, it's not the wrong question to ask. The first 5 programmers hired with fast dwindling startup funds all need to be ultra talented and smart. The competition will kill you with your staff of B & C programmers. When you get to the size of Microsoft with 128,000 employees, you can afford to have some deadwood C, D, F, and 0x employees wasting cubicle space. When you're a startup, you'll go bankrupt because the C players are floundering around not generating enough value in the product to help make the business succeed. It's not a matter of hip or not hip -- it's a matter of survival. [...]the average company is pretty average. Not everybody can hire exclusively top-tier people. And you know what? That’s fine. If the readership on HN is plugged into the startup scene, hiring mediocrity is not fine. EDIT to reply to the replies: Most of the replies think of "A players" as an absolute ranking on a world scale. Linux Torvalds, etc. That's not what I'm talking about. Hiring employees or finding a marriage partner is hill-climbing algorithm.[1] The startup would have some notion of an "A-player" suitable for the company's goals and business standing. It does not mean you try to lure AI expert Peter Norving away from Google Inc to code a bash shell script because you insist on the "best of the best of the best." Whatever pool of candidates your startup can realistically attract, over a constrained time frame, funded by a limited budget -- that's where you find your Local Optimum. To you, you hopefully find your "A-player" although others may view that same candidate as B/C player compared to to someone like Linus Torvalds. >, the reality was that most of the companies using our hiring software were most interested in finding people that don’t suck. That's totally opposite from my observations. Startups are most interested in finding great people. They only "settle" for people that don't suck as a consequence of reality. Their hill climbing didn't find their "awesome" programmer so they cross their fingers and hope it works out. The blog post is saying most companies actually prioritize "don't suck hires" over "great hires". The blog has it backwards and that is an outcome instead of the motivation. As a meta comment, the advice from Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Paul Graham, the YC Sam Altman startup school vids with the dozens of guest speakers (angel investors, VCs), etc all stress the point of hiring the best people you can. The only sources of advice for "just aim for hiring people that don't suck" are obscure writers of blogs. Why is that? And why does that sentiment have to be delivered as explicit "advice"? Since you can't hire all A-players, you'll inevitably end up with mediocre employees that don't suck even when you don't pursue "don't suck" as a primary goal. [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_climbing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_climbing

striking 11y ago
Especially because "One of the most important things that made Microsoft successful was Bill Gates' devotion to hiring the best people. If you hire all A people, he said, they'll also hire A people. But if you hire B people, they'll hire the C people and then it's all over." (taken from http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000072.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000072.html)
- logfromblammo 11y ago
  I have always disagreed with that. Microsoft also used stack ranking, one of the worst management practices from an employee perspective that I know about. It operates on the same principle: arbitrarily execute everyone at the bottom of the perceived bell curve. That leads me to a translation of a quote by Stalin: "Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." The counting method has a greater effect upon the outcome than the actual votes. How you measure the worth of someone may have little relation to the value they can actually provide. If you rank people by how quickly they can move 100m, and subsequently hire Carl Lewis and FloJo to manage Justin Gatlin, Tyson Gay, Mo Greene, Carmelita Jeter, and Tori Bowie, you're going to be disappointed when they try to do the same 5m 20 times, or 100m up a vertical rope, or 100m across the surface of a lake, or 100m while carrying a 50 kg backpack, or 100m across ice and snow, or 100m across a tightrope, or 100m on a flat, straight, level track, at local noon, in June, in the Sonora desert, with only 1 L of water. So that Gates quote sounds to me a bit like begging the question, defining an "A person" as "someone Microsoft ranks well", a "B person" as "someone Microsoft ranks neutrally" and a "C person" as "someone Microsoft ranks poorly". Without establishing the ranking metrics, all he's really saying there is that Microsoft hires people with a good cultural fit for Microsoft. That doesn't make them the best people. It makes them the best people by Microsoft's method of estimation. There really are no 10x or 0.1x developers. The worth of the worker cannot be meaningfully separated from the conditions of the job. Someone who is 10x while working alone on his own side project may be 0.1x on a team using a management-mandated process. You can't really know ahead of time how well someone will do when thrown into your unique variety of bullshit. (And pretending that your company has no bullshit does not make it magically disappear.)
11y ago

by jasode 11y ago

striking 11y ago

Especially because "One of the most important things that made Microsoft successful was Bill Gates' devotion to hiring the best people. If you hire all A people, he said, they'll also hire A people. But if you hire B people, they'll hire the C people and then it's all over." (taken from http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000072.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000072.html)

logfromblammo 11y ago
I have always disagreed with that. Microsoft also used stack ranking, one of the worst management practices from an employee perspective that I know about. It operates on the same principle: arbitrarily execute everyone at the bottom of the perceived bell curve. That leads me to a translation of a quote by Stalin: "Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." The counting method has a greater effect upon the outcome than the actual votes. How you measure the worth of someone may have little relation to the value they can actually provide. If you rank people by how quickly they can move 100m, and subsequently hire Carl Lewis and FloJo to manage Justin Gatlin, Tyson Gay, Mo Greene, Carmelita Jeter, and Tori Bowie, you're going to be disappointed when they try to do the same 5m 20 times, or 100m up a vertical rope, or 100m across the surface of a lake, or 100m while carrying a 50 kg backpack, or 100m across ice and snow, or 100m across a tightrope, or 100m on a flat, straight, level track, at local noon, in June, in the Sonora desert, with only 1 L of water. So that Gates quote sounds to me a bit like begging the question, defining an "A person" as "someone Microsoft ranks well", a "B person" as "someone Microsoft ranks neutrally" and a "C person" as "someone Microsoft ranks poorly". Without establishing the ranking metrics, all he's really saying there is that Microsoft hires people with a good cultural fit for Microsoft. That doesn't make them the best people. It makes them the best people by Microsoft's method of estimation. There really are no 10x or 0.1x developers. The worth of the worker cannot be meaningfully separated from the conditions of the job. Someone who is 10x while working alone on his own side project may be 0.1x on a team using a management-mandated process. You can't really know ahead of time how well someone will do when thrown into your unique variety of bullshit. (And pretending that your company has no bullshit does not make it magically disappear.)

11y ago