Whom Should You Hire at a Startup? (Attitude over Aptitude)
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Well, I'd often get people sent to me, that my VC claimed were amazing and that I should to hire (they usually held senior roles at big/successful companies before). But, without fail, every single one I talked to was a technical idiot. They could talk a good game, and had lots of thoughts about process and structure, but couldn't code their way out of a paper bag.
To be polite, I'd usually tell the VC that there wasn't a good fit, or we didn't have a role for someone so senior, or management focused, or X right now. Would you tell the VC who just wrote you an $N million dollar check that the candidate he thinks is Einstein is an idiot because he claims he's a programmer who 'loves to get his hands dirty' but doesn't understand the difference between a hash table and a linked list? In hindsight, maybe I should have. But I suspect a lot of people won't.
And this was when I was literally the only coder in the company. We didn't need an engineering manager, we needed an engineer. And non-technical VCs couldn't see the difference. (Of course, in an ideal world, you hire someone who is both).
More likely than not, they are going to doubt your ability to recognize talent instead of their own.
Hah. I just met someone who has some money and an outsourced "team of 10, programmers plus support" in an eastern european country, yet he doesn't know enough about technology to describe things in terms other than web pages, and can't differentiate between what's a solved problem and what's still being researched at Google.
He told me that the thing he called me to talk about, he had requested of his team, and they basically told him, "Well, if you can diagram it, we can build it."
I asked him if he had someone who was technical, not an underling, who he had rapport with and could hash these things out like we just had. I suggested that if he didn't that he would benefit greatly if he could find such a person. (And that it wouldn't necessarily be me.)
I hit him with this to see his reaction, which, sadly, was to puff himself up with his sales. Wrong. I guess continuous improvement is good enough for his employees, but not good enough for him.
"At the moment, we're a credit union who only does banking in Japan. We'll expand to loans in English one day. You send us an English speaking loan dilligence expert. He's VERY talented, but at the moment we can't use his skills AND he'd have to learn a whole new language to be able to interact with the rest of our business, none of which he's familiar with."
"The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their own abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
The bit in this article about:
"B players tend to have slightly more self-confidence issues." suggests to me that the many so-called B players are actually A players, and the so-called A players are F players.
Note, the Dunning-Kruger effect isn't an absolute law like the Laws of Thermodynamics.
Also, if someone has certain attributes like an "A Player" but is debilitated by self confidence, are they really an "A Player?"
The Dunning-Kruger effect is how people who are involved with startups come to think you must be an "A-player" to be successful.
Steven Berglas has written a pretty good amount on this issue: http://hbr.org/2006/09/how-to-keep-a-players-productive/ar/1 ...There used to be a free version of this, but I can't find it anymore. Still, the introductory text is informative, and it's worth the $7 if this is a subject that's important to you.
To summarize though, "A Players" are often driven by an inferiority complex that constantly manifests itself as an external egotism because they're constantly trying to seek approval from others. When you work with them, your first reaction will probably be that they need to be "brought down a notch", but this is a mistake that will only make things worse. The key is helping to build confidence and show that you trust their abilities.
"document title in quotes" filetype:pdfAs for the other errors people can make in judging the skills of others, well, that is what A/B/C is about.
I've had this related to me a few times and generally found it to be true.
A person who is an 8,9 or 10 will try to hire 8s, 9s or 10s, because they recognize that you need to best people on your team and can overcome their egos to hire people that could potentially replace them.
7s will hire a 7, because, while they don't want anybody under them who are better than them, they recognize you don't want people who are worse than them.
6s will hire 5s or less, 5s will hire 4s or less, etc...anything to make them feel they are better than those that work for them.
Also agreed that a lot of co-called A players aren't. Cultural and gender issues make it even more complex. In general I try to stay away from the whole notion of "A players" because of the connotations of grading (bleah) and a single scale. That said, I also think it's a mistake to hire somebody who think can't do a good enough job on your current needs; that's seting yourself up for failure.
A: They all get frustrated and leave B: Your technical company becomes a strange monster of convoluted processes achieving the same goal in a much worse way.
For instance, if you do scheduling for classrooms, you'll end up with a group of people who take orders for bookings on line, then manually try to fit them into a diary for an organization, and occasionally make mistakes.
Attitude is a luxury.
The definition I perceive from the investment world is - 'Person X is an A player because both myself and other investors I respect pattern match that Person X is an A player'. The attributes of that pattern match vary, but include things like work that is well known, educational and professional pedigree, strong references from long trusted sources in industry, peer reputation, etc.
I've read the book Topgrading, which gives a definition of 'an A-player is someone in the top 10 percent of talent available at all salary levels for a well defined organizational role'.
I've perceived that many modern engineering cultures will bias towards calling an engineering candidate an A player if that candidate has worked with other engineers that are considered to be A players by the same culture. Of course, nearly all organizations have their own methods for assessing technical ability and previous experience as well.
What is the most useful definition of an A-player in a tech startup?
- Can they get things done?
- Can they act on their own initiative?
- Can they think 2 steps or more ahead?
- Can they code? Can they code well?
- Can they think and think well? Can they think *independently*?
The last two are the trickiest. For one thing, it's going to be very difficult for someone who doesn't code to be able to tell reliably if they can code. One can, however, watch someone code and observe their results. Likewise, it's sometimes going to be hard for someone who doesn't yet know how to code well to judge good code.
One can also listen to another's thoughts. However, someone who doesn't yet know how to think independently won't necessarily know what good independent thinking is. They'll only know what someone else tells them is good independent thinking.
I propose an adapted definition based on your definition (numbers relate to the order listed above): A players understand a problem in terms of stakeholders[5], and takes initiative[2] to quickly build a solution in code[4] that will impress these stakeholders both in the short-term and over time [1, 3].
Sales of everything including hiring talented people is all about the under promising and over delivering. You do that with your customers and with your potential team mates.
Here is a discussion from long ago about the phrase's origins: http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.50837.1...
I think a lot of people get too fixated on "hire only A players" and forget about "attitude over aptitude" and "culture matters". If the only A player you find for a role is an asshole, keep looking -- or be more flexible in your definition of the role.
Though, I know many CXOs who are firm C-Players.
Sometimes, the problem is the definition of "asshole." For some people, this is "anyone who tells me I'm wrong, even if they do it nicely." Such people are not A players.