Always love Zach's writing. Personally, with hiring and growing an engineering team I've found the key component is to just not hire anyone toxic. Beyond a cert

Always love Zach's writing. Personally, with hiring and growing an engineering team I've found the key component is to just not hire anyone toxic. Beyond a certain size, teams have to have well-defined processes to function, and toxic people will rail against and subvert the process. I was actually thinking a lot about this the other day, and it's one of the big differences between say a 5 person engineering org and a 20+ person engineering org. In a 5 person org it may be super valuable to have an independently minded superstar who avoids process but gets things shipped fast while a larger org will actually turn that person toxic by imposing too many restrictions and process on them for them to follow their normal patterns. This is why I think there are some folks that are really good that just jump around from one early stage startup to the next, so they can be mostly free from the bureaucratic politics of large organizations. I wanted to think with the right culture that bureaucracy and politics can be avoided, but my experience has been that eventually these things will shape how your org works, and like Zach says, that's not a bad thing if that org is filled with average people, as long as the process is designed to help those people do the best job they can at large team scale.