"Hire People Smarter Than You" is bad advice (2018)

> When a small business needs expert advice, they can almost always get what they need by hiring expert consultants.

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.

I don't even know what this means. Smarter how?

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.

There is that danger of hiring people who turn a simple problem into an intellectual exercise, wasting everyone's time.

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?

The article isn’t as interesting as the idea that it is possible to identify someone smarter than oneself.

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.

For anyone who hasn't read the book "The 48 Laws of Power", I highly recommend you do.

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.

Why would I want “the best person”?

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.

> because the people with the most experience and skill are either starting their own businesses or working for the big companies that can afford them.

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.

I've always suspected this is simply power dynamic advice. If you look up stats majorityof businesses are started by already rich people or the relatives of rich people(ie a small $10m loan from dad). If you have that power dynamic to have people smarter that you can pay lots of money then it probably is a good strategy.

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.

TL;DR: the article makes a very general statement where common wisdom indicates a variance of nuanced approaches.

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.

> “investing in people” and “hiring the best talent” is as expensive as it is naive.

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.

Here's good advice: "Have the people interviewing hires to be smarter than the candidates."

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.

But everyone else is smarter than me. Now what?

That's kind of paradoxical. If a dumb CEO hires dumber people than them, that's smart. Umm, no wait.

We hired a genius once. Literally, had the whole over 160 IQ thing going for him. And man was he smart. Amazing memory. Could code circles around people.

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.

Single-sentence paragraphs really set off my LinkedIn hot take/BS detector, and this article has no shortage.