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Comment by varelse | Hacker News Reader

Just say no to these mental shortcuts and hire good people and trust them to do the right thing. If you need tenets just to stay engaged at your day job you are either incompetent or you're not at the right job.

Or in the language of this silly article:

"Hire good people and trust them."

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Maybe not tenets, but statements of certain things we hold to be true then - a simple one in one of the best teams I was a member of was - "we fix the yellow" (warnings).

Slogans are weak. Good people are strong. Great people even stronger. But again I don't get why we keep trying to find shortcuts around hiring people we can trust.

For every organisation with one 10x person there's another 9 with mediocrity.

No matter how much we may strive to hire better, overall there's a need to not only rely on having the best people.

This assumes you have no control over who you allow on to your team and that is an erroneous assumption. If you are in such a situation it is time for you to find a new team. Time is a luxury none of us have.

You seem to have missed my point. I was talking about all organisations, not necessarily the one that I am in and can control.

Even if there's little need for such tenets in my excellent organisation, that doesn't preclude their utility in less-than-excellent organisations, which are certainly more numerous.

What's an alternate to that which would make sense in a different context?

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