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Comment by havelhovel | Hacker News Reader

I've never been on a team where we've needed a new IC to come in and assess our inefficiencies, question priorities, and lengthen meetings with debates we've already had. There are plenty of management consultants available for that. What we wanted was for an IC to come in and help us meet our goals by churning out more code. There's lots of talk about reputation but no mention of value.

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The existing team tends to be blind to stupid things they're doing. There's a period of time where the new guy sees things and thinks "wtf are you doing that for". Shout him down and you solve the annoyance problem and add him to the list of people who no longer notice the stupid things, or at least no longer try to fix the stupid things.

Maybe your team is only doing sensible things and all is perfect. Maybe you're blind to things that could be better. Heuristically, if you're writing software, it's not likely to be the first case.

My professional project moved to GitHub recently. It is terrible. The pull request / review system is borderline unusable. But already I can feel myself adopting clumsy workarounds and losing sight of how much better it should be.

I've seen plenty of teams who didn't think they needed someone to evaluate what they're doing and just thought they needed someone churning out code.

If they'd had someone do the former, most of the time they'd not have needed the latter quite so much.

What's more likely: a team of equally experienced engineers is waiting on a new hire to identify and fix significant blind spots or a team just needs more bandwidth to get things done?

in my experience, while teams are rarely “waiting around” for a new hire, it’s the outside perspective that makes the most significant improvements to process, tooling, and impact, and teams that resist the notion of blind spots that suffer from them the most.

but maybe that’s just me.

Removing technical debt and improving tooling is often a good way to add value. Sharpening your tools makes you work faster.

These things can add value, but no one needs a new hire to point that fact out. I'm also skeptical that a freshly hired IC's values will align with business values, even though the latter is what shapes the tech debt and tooling you're referring to.

The point being is that new hires will bring fresh eyes to an organization, whereas the team in place might be numb to some of the issues.

You don't need a new hire to fix those problems, but it certainly helps shed new light on some problems. Especially if you are hired as a senior dev or a team lead, you will be expected to fix some of those things.

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