What to do when you hire someone better than yourself | Hacker News Reader

What to do when you hire someone better than yourself

tomtancredi.com

41 pointskjagirdar25 comments

As the head of engineering in my organization, I am responsible for hiring decisions within our team. I'd like to start by saying that hiring people smarter than you is the best problem a manager could hope to have; the alternative, since intelligence is always relative, is hiring someone who isn't smarter than you.

Part of being a manager is wanting to see your team succeed. It doesn't matter if you're the founder of a fledgling startup just trying to make it or the CEO of a Fortune 500 organization trying keep your shareholders happy: as a leader, your success depends heavily on the success of your team.

I agree with the tenets of the article; there's no veiled argument coming from my direction. My point is a slightly broader perspective: if you're going to be in a managerial position, you shouldn't need an article telling you how to deal with hiring people smarter than you. You should strive to surround yourself with geniuses. Be proud of the organization you're growing. Is there a chance that one of them will one day oust your position because they could do a better job? Sure, of course there is... but that would still be what's best for the business.

I think a major problem with how many businesses are being run today is that managers want to hold their positions so that they have power. They want to be "the boss." While there's nothing inherently wrong with having ambition--in fact, I'd say it's a positive trait--it's a harsh contrast when compared to, say, programming. Very few people want to be programmers for the power and glory it provides; people build software because of an inherent desire to create, or a passion for the subject matter. In my opinion, passion leads directly to success on the job.

When people take promotions for "career ambition" or a higher salary, rather than actually doing a job they would enjoy, it leads to cascading problems within an organization. Not everyone is cut out to be a good manager, and not everyone would enjoy being a manager. When you take positions for the wrong reason, you end up thinking that you're not doing a good job (you may be right), and instead of doing what's best for the team, you do what's best for your own job security... such as fearing the great new engineer you just hired, or even worse, not hiring her at all.

This comment got a little long-winded, but I think that it's important to think about the greater issues that cause anxiety for technical managers. They're problems that are easily solved with an open mind.

I find this entire premise odd. The question ought to be "Why aren't you consistently hiring people better than yourself?". That is a big part of the reason you hire somebody in the first place. If I were brilliant at every imaginable task I suppose I could do everything myself given enough time. When I get a chance to bring in talent I go out and try to get people that I know are more brilliant, more focused, and more experienced than myself.

I don't think you're contradicting the author... he's warning about some of the interpersonal issues that can arise. He certainly wants to attract brilliant people to take over things he doesn't do as well. It's just that people can hand off duties badly, or undermine their "replacement", even though they need to delegate those responsibilities - intentionally or accidentally

The issue with saying I'm not going to hire someone if I can do their job given enough time is that time is a very valuable resource. Ideally you would be hiring the best person on the planet with every hire but that is unreasonable and sometimes you just don't have enough man-hours in a company to be able to keep up with demand. Sometimes you need to make a hire in order to keep up the speed and if the only person available is good, but maybe not better then you would you still make the hire? I think both decisions have merit depending on situation.

This would run completely counter to my intuition. I mean telling the existing people beforehand that a super awesome person will join them soon. Wouldn't that make the existing employees hate the superstar before they even know him/her? Also, way to build up pressure for the new person.

If they are really super, surely the existing people will find out without being primed?

I was thinking exactly the same, but also, wouldn't the current employees afraid to be fired? They are not founders after all.

I've frequently heard the story of people being asked to slow down because they make their colleagues look bad. Also the premise of the movie "Hot Fuzz" :-)

Yes but we're talking about a startup, not an administration...And if every hire is someone with talent, then when someone new comes they shouldn't be afraid. Especially if it's a talent that comes and complete the team (or replaces the CEO on some of his tasks).

It also puts a lot of pressure on the new hire.

Another question: What do you do when you hire people worse than you?

It's hard being around people smarter than you though, even if we all know it's a good thing and important. It's easy to say that we want to be the dumbest person in the room, much harder to actually believe that. I consider myself a passionate and disciplined programmer, but I meet people on occasion who are objectively far better programmers than I could ever be. If I spent my whole life trying, I wouldn't be as good as these people. And while the objective side of me says "hey, I'm productive too, and the world needs all of the smart people it can get.", it does make me question sometimes the purpose of what I'm doing.

But you know, fall seven times, get up eight.

For my startup the answer to that is while I can't afford the rockstar. If you are bootstrapping then you are likely pretty budget conscious and it makes better practical sense to hire an intern or apprentice in this situation. I've actually took kindly to the idea of hiring people who are worse then me due to lack of experience and making an effort to teach them what I know. The downside is that eventually if they become better then me and leave I will have lost my investment, but at least I made an impact for them and I like to tell myself that for most people that is something that transcends financial gain so I'm also investing in karmic opportunities that I'm not aware of yet.

Being the dumbest person in the room gets real depressing real quick.

I went to MIT, you get over it (felt as the dumbest person in the room always). Its actually pretty great that anybody in the room can teach you something. Now that I left I hate it, I have to argue about things that seem trivial to me all the time.

I've always thought "being the dumbest person in the room" was a bit of overstatement to the truth. It's probably more accurate to say you don't want to be the smartest person. Not so much because you avoid having a target on your back if something fails and a scapegoat is needed, but more because you not only have the ability to teach those that know less than you, consequently reinforcing things in your head and giving yourself a better understanding, but also having people around that you can learn from.

I can say being the smartest person in the room gets really old fast because you always feel like you have your hands tied behind your back and as much as X may be a better solution to a problem you have to fall back to something the entire team can understand.

The general environment would probably make a difference too. If you in an environment with people that enjoy learning and sharing the knowledge they gain being the dumbest person in the room probably isn't as bad. I can't say I've met a work environment that is like that, though.

I find the idea of "someone better than yourself" as a skewed perspective. It's hard to say someone is better than anyone else for most people.

Everyone will generally be better than you at some things, and worse than you at others. Consider why you're in the position to be hiring them in the first place, perhaps you're better at managing, or becoming well connected, or organizing talent. In terms of programming maybe he's leaps and bounds ahead of you, but he still came to you looking for a job.

That's not to say I disagree with any of the authors points individually. Just that I think that if you think of it strictly in that the new hire is better than you are, you are selling yourself short. If instead you think that you are more management or entrepreneurial focused, and the person you're hiring is more technically focused and allows you to focus on your other skills then you don't even need that list. You're automatically working as a team.

Programmers don't necessarily want to be managers. If your role is becoming essentially a manager with minor programming duties, and you want to focus on business issues instead of technical challenges, when you hire an awesome programmer that gives both of you the best of both worlds. You bring a lot to the table by being the guy that starts the business and secures the capital needed to be able to hire the programmer. Regardless of your programming skills, this has no bearing on whether you are better or worse than the new hire.

But quantitatively you're probably better :) You can always hire a different programmer, but if they thought they could make more money on their own they probably would have done it already.

If you are dealing with a very talented developer you can not simply "hire a different programmer". People with high level talent are few and far between, and if you have managed to attract someone of this skill level you better appreciate it and hold on to them.

"Error establishing a database connection" -- a surprising bit of advice. Here's the google cache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:VK2HEZZ...

Not trying to brag.

I was hired for a short-term contract where i was clearly smarter than the manager. He admitted it in the beginning but then started defaulting. I got on very well with my peers and my associate manager pushed hard to get the CEO "out of the way" but he wouldnt budge. All he did was try to clamp everyone down and act from a place of fear. As you can imagine things didnt go so well. I had to leave.

I now have two guys working on a side project that are both smarter than me. I do my best to get out of their way.

Hi guys, thanks for the ongoing dialogue. I agree on a lot of your points: everyone's got strengths and weaknesses, and someone "better" than you in one area doesn't mean you don't bring more value in other areas. But that said, a great CEO-mentor gave me this advice: "hire well, so that when you go to the company parties you're the dumbest guy in the room." I like that advice. Keeps people humble and it keeps the founders eager to learn, when surrounded by smart, interesting, and capable people.

If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. Hiring people smarter than you is what you do as a manager, if you've hit the hiring phase you're not meant to be doing the frontline grind, you're meant to be letting your hires do what you hired them for.

Plus you'll end up learning new things by osmosis when you've got super smart people there and that's always good for a business.

If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room

+1. True power lies holding the keys to ulocking the smarts all around you.

This advice should apply to every hire, not just those who are better than yourself.

I always aim to hire people better than I am -- I want a high performing team, which is easier with high performing people!

Here's one more: treat them well enough so they don't feel that they need to leave.

I feel treat them well enough needs more clarity. You can speak nicely to your delegates, take them out to lunch, have a joke with them. But if you're not, involving them in decisions, accepting criticism from them, creating an environment for them in which they can flourish, you're not really treating them as well as you think.

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