"Hire People Smarter Than You" is bad advice (2018)
benkophone.com
benkophone.com
Yes let's create an outside dependency on mission critical elements with a business who makes money on billable hours. Meanwhile the smart people you didn't hire took a job at your competition.
Also it’s not only about smart, it’s about owning and believing in what you do.
A good consultant is a part time adjunct who gives you the hints you need at a price you can afford and then gets out of the way.
I think the more frequent problem is that it's HARD for a small business to pick the right consultant. After that, it's hard to establish what is the right question (so that the answer has a chance to be the right answer.) And then it's hard to understand the answer.
Still a good idea simply because you can't afford "one of everything".
(And then there is the consultant as a justification for something that would be hard to accept otherwise.)
Company gets an answer they don't like from employees. They spend at minimum upwards of six figures on consultants(or millions). The constants provide either no value or set them selves up an income stream at several times what it would have cost to listen to the employees.
I think most upper mgmt assumes that if you work for them you are by definition a dumb loser that cannot do "business"
I've even seen one time where the consultancy blatantly used it as a foot in the door to steal high value customers to their own businesses. The business owner was warned by his business development director and he blew it off as not understanding how this wall street money stuff works.
Two effects combine to create this reality:
1) Ass-covering. If Important Manager makes a Big Decision based on his own wits, they are risking their own judgement being revealed as less than what is expected from their position. If they can point at a “reputable” outside party, then they can claim that “even expert advice was unable to see this coming, so shouldn’t be expected to either.” They can’t get this kind of protection by listening to subordinates because even if they’re right, they have no reputation.
2) Hunter-gatherer tribe dynamics. We’re barely more than strategically shaved apes in suits, genetically speaking. The last ten thousand years of civilisation is a blip in evolutionary terms and hasn’t changed our behaviour much at all. Big important alpha male leader can’t be seen to accept advice from subordinates! That would not be “leadership” and would undermine their position in the tribe as a trusted elder. This makes all humans in such positions (but especially older men) incredibly resistant to even the most blindingly obvious advice if it comes from someone younger in the same group. External guidance is not subject to the same social constraints and is often accepted.
I’ve seen both of these play out over and over, separately and in combination. It’s my job to talk to the junior underlings, collect their complaints, and then present it to their manager so they can have an acceptable source for the same advice.
It’s nuts, but it is what is is, and I don’t expect it to change for 50K years or more. Evolution is slow and human nature is wired into us deep.
My job was essentially this "talk to the junior underlings, collect their complaints, and then present it to their manager so they can have an acceptable source for the same advice."
Although to even start that job, I had to build a connection with them, so they would tell me their complaints. Because they thought I was there to waste their time, instead of actually just presenting their advice.
And who is it aimed at? The CEO job is different depending on the size and qualities of a company.
I've worked with people who have far more "raw processing power" than me, people who have the ability to focus harder and longer than me, but in most cases they displayed really poor business judgement and often over-engineered solutions.
Also, it's very hard to figure out during interviews if the person is "smarter". What does that mean? They can solve more Leetcode problems?
Not at all. "Smarter" and "spent enough time grinding leetcode" are almost entirely orthogonal. Trying to measure "smarter" by leetcode is even more misguided than trying to measure "good candidate" by leetcode.
I've interviewed a fair number of people. During the interview, we ask them questions, trying to figure out what they know. With this one candidate, though, halfway through the interview we changed - we started asking questions because we wanted to learn things.
But it's a bit challenging to conclusively measure someone's level of "smartness", especially with the usual time constraints of most hiring processes. More importantly, it also depends on what "smart" means to you, the company, etc.
Probably not yet in an automated, 200 applicants per day way. Though I can see LLMs changing this.
Reminds me of PG’s blub paradox:
“As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the power continuum, he knows he's looking down. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub.”
If being smarter is like being tall, then it is easy to identify someone that is smarter/taller than oneself. But if there is some threshold where smartness becomes a difference of kind rather degree, it may not be possible to identify people who are significantly smarter than themselves.
Like the blub programmer, we may mistake people who are smarter than us as… merely weird. They think differently, which we mistake for thinking wrongly.
Add into the mix that there are probably multiple types of “intelligence”, each suited to different domains, and the problem is compounded.
Speed of thought is different than correctness of thought. The first is easy to identify. The second is a problem that I don’t think we should assume is solved.
Not because you should follow or believe everything in it, but it does really allow you to get into the head of how people in these sorts of powerful leadership positions think and operate.
It would seem insane to worry about hiring people "too smart", but when the first lesson in 48 Laws of Power is "never outshine the master" I'm not entirely surprised.
I want somebody who is good enough for what I hire them to do, and who is pleasurable to work with.
This does not mean agreeing with everything I say or do btw.
Data backing that claim? There’s a ton of very talented people who don’t want to start their own business, don’t want to be a peon in a large corp and join solid startups instead. Come on.
Well, the entire thing is anecdotal because I haven't conducted any research.
But what I can tell you is that when I was in my 20s I hired some very talented people in their 20s.
We are now all in our 40s, and none of us are available for hire by the type of person I was in my 20s.
To the extent that we (ie. myself and those with whom I worked) are more skilled and experienced now than we were in our 20s, and to the extent that this career trajectory can be generalised at least enough to make it quite difficult to hire people more skilled and experienced than you are I stand by the claim.
Yes there are outliers, but I posit those to be the exceptions that prove the rule.
I'm guessing HN is more of the scrappy actual small business you start yourself that most people think about naturally as starting a business.. It is probably really hard to get someone smarter than you to work for when you cannot pay top rates. Why would that person work for you rather than become a better competitor themselves? I'm sure there are lazy smart people out there but I'm guessing its a thin pool and they are probably friends of the already rich entrepreneurs so they will stay in that circle. Again they are lazy so they are not going to want a company that has high risk of going out of business and needing to do the work of looking for a job.
You are probably better off as a real self started business finding diamonds in the rough, people that are not generally good but have one or two strong skills that you can offload you own mental/time burden to and get at budget rates.
One end of the spectrum is line staff for fast-iterating low-innovation, low-margin businesses, the talent pool is often commodotized, hence hiring can be be made on cost-efficiency grounds alone.
The second end is moonshot winner-takrs-it-all businesses. The risk in not having resilient, mentally flexible, over-qualified core team is abject failure.
I wish the article had confronted this subtlety.
All things in moderation. I've seen most of the spectrum at this point of practices.
Let's look at the opposite end. Hiring 'cogs'. Every time I've seen this attitude, the result Conway's law being expressed in the business; rube-goldberg type business processes and software that often require 'lots of bodies' but doesn't give optimal results. Even -worse- is when an org has 'cogs' in higher echelons. [0]
TBH the most 'productive' places I worked at was one where 'the smartest person in the room' depended on the specific topic.
[0] - I'm just saying, you don't get ahead of your competition by starting to do what Gartner says your competitors have already been doing for the last two years.
The problem with a system that can be operated by idiots, is that eventually the idiots become the one designing the system!
Otherwise you're going to have quite a few folks taking space, holding titles, and collecting paychecks. Even worse they could mess up development processes that only really start to show their costs after a major release or two.
Everyone hated this guy. He destroyed team morale by being rude and unfriendly at each chance, told us team meetings for building cohesion was an excuse to not work, and it got very bad when members of the community who use the software started complaining about how cold and outright pompous he was.
He was a disaster. He would not listen to others. He would not code with others. He would not get behind ideas he had any inking of not liking. He just was awful. Awful. God it was awful.
Anyway, yeah I want an intelligent person, but the idea if you just surround yourself with smart people and delegate, then things go well is utter nonsense.
what now?