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Comment by jbverschoor | Hacker News Reader

You hire more "heroes". Pay what they're worth. Make them happy.

Or you just pay an order of magnitude on hosting, performance consults, bandwidth, etc. etc. etc. And STILL won't EVER get to the same result, because you can't always pay (I'd say almost never) your way into a stable and performant solution. Look at all the others.. Nothing works as well as whatsapp.

Good luck hiring 500 engineers who have no idea what happens throughout the whole stack.

I'd rather pay what you save on cloud providers and snowflakes to them. (not even taking into account the result of these "heroes".. the business value / dominance whatsapp has because of this)

You can hire 1000 people who can't draw, or maybe just a little bit, or you can pay an artist and get the result you'll otherwise never get.

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> You hire more "heroes". Pay what they're worth. Make them happy.

i dont think its as easy as you make it sound. these "heroes" generally are as productive because they dont sync and already have a clear idea of what they want to achieve/how to implement what they wish.

if you add a second person like that to the same team you run a massive risk of having two competing ideas which creates a lot of friction.

So make sure you're hiring a hero and not a primadonna?

The difference between hero or primadonna can be environmental. When there are multiple experts for a department/tech stack, you get heroes. If the bus number is one, a hero risks converting to a primadonna.

I find if you hire heroes with different skill sets you can avoid this dilemma. Or don't hire two Supermen. Hire Batman and Superman instead. But if a hero converts to a primadonna then they were never a hero. On the other hand if you're skimping a hero of the equipment and resources they told you they needed from day one, you're the a***.

I agree. I'd add that having multiple experts in competition with each other (due to bad culture, bad communication or even just bad personality) also has the potential of turning heroes into primadonnas.

Environments don't create primadonnas. It's a matter of attitude and maturity. Being an expert doesn't make a person insufferable.

In my experience, insufferable mid-level management can bring out the worst in the best people, and then accuse them of being primadonnas because they are absolutely incapable of any self-reflection themselves.

At my company, “heroes” are given their own projects with them given full creative control over every detail, including the people they work with. I think I’ve read somewhere on HN to never let any two person do the same thing, to avoid the conflicts you mentioned.

Benefit of this is that these heroes can each break new grounds, and their BKM shared amongst themselves making the team extremely productive.

> I think I’ve read somewhere on HN to never let any two person do the same thing, to avoid the conflicts you mentioned.

I’ve read this in Peter Thiel’s “Zero to one”.

> Nothing works as well as whatsapp.

Ehh, that's very debatable. Signal, Threema, and yes even Telegram (regardless of E2E enc, etc.) work well and are reliable.

Yes, you will always pay one way or the other.

I work as a contractor, thus I have read a lots of code from various different types of projects and the conclusion is always the same, if they had spent more money on skill to begin with I wouldn’t be needed.

> Nothing works as well as whatsapp.

I don't disagree with the rest of your post but Telegram does in fact work as well if not better than whatsapp.

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