Hire B.
Skills can be learned, it will take some time but if someone is a real team player he'll make the effort.
Attitude is a lot harder to change than skill.
Skills can be learned, it will take some time but if someone is a real team player he'll make the effort.
Attitude is a lot harder to change than skill.
Disagree. _Both_ are hard to change. Don't hire a B expecting that practice and mentoring will make him a prodigy.
I've also been a boss, hiring both 'A's and 'B's. The 'B's worked out fine over time, all the 'A's caused more trouble than their skills ever made up for. Maybe I was unlucky, who knows.
Managing programmers has been compared to herding cats, for continuity reasons it is usually a very safe bet to get people on board that are not in the 'artiste' class because your company is a multi-year project and prima donnas have a very bad record when it comes to staying the course.
They also absolutely loathe to maintain their own code.
Unless your project is something one guy can do, is something that you don't plan to maintain long term get a steady performer.
I think this is completely wrong. See my reply to edw519 for my reasoning why, but the abstract is that I don't think potential is a constant across the population, or even a subset of the population -- like programmers. Aptitude = effort + potential. A good teacher can help, but won't overcome an incapable student, as much as the student may want to please the teacher.
Attitude is a lot harder to change than skill.
This has been said by a couple of others, and my first thought is really that it depends on exactly what people mean by changing a person's attitude. The theme seems to be that candidate A types are just antagonistic pricks who either want it their way or no way at all.
From the perspective I've gained, it's rarely that simple. When an employee gets branded as having an attitude problem, I'll see as often a problem manager as I will a problem employee.
In the cases of the problem manager, what I'll find is a manager who believes that the hierarchy is as hard as stone, and that employees have absolutely no place to question their judgement or the judgement of those above them. Any employee who might offer any sort of commentary or criticism are immediately branded as an attitude problem, and threatened into submission. The subsequent rebellion may take multiple forms, including them just going off into the weeds without listening to anyone about anything. Immature, perhaps, but in a pot and kettle sense. If you find disrespect going in one direction in a relationship, it's worth seeing if that same disrespect flows in the other direction.
Asserting more absolute authority, which seems to be the most common response, will only make this worse. Not everyone's value judgments are subject to overridding by fear and a desire to please others; I don't think we would want them to be, either.
Sure, potential is not a constant, but most people can go well above the level they're currently at, all it takes is time and effort.
The manager/employee issue is very true, probably there is a bit of both there, but the bigger issue than manager/employee is employee/other employees. If someone is disruptive to the team he or she is working in then their amazing skills are totally irrelevant.
A skilled person that is also a team player is of course ideal, but if you already know that you are going to be working on a team effort to take someone that would not thrive in that situation would be a mistake.
Managers that only select 'yes men' around them are to be avoided like the plague, no contest there.