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Hiring the best developers is rarely a good idea

3 points by nilanp ↗ HN
Great blog post by @joestump on hiring diversity.

http://blog.sprint.ly/post/58342376145/diversity-is-an-advantage-in-business-product?utm_content=buffer3c7fe&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Less about diversity and stats - but more why not optimising for tech proficiency is important early stage. "Hiring the very best developers is like premature optimisation". Early stage you need so many many more skills - "Delivering fantastic customer service and designing a great product require a tremendous amount of empathy. Empathy requires context. Context requires experience"

This line I thought was pretty insightful too:

" If you go all in on top 10 CS school graduates, you’re likely going to find your sales and marketing funnels are empty, basic user documentation and on-boarding is missing, and customer development is lacking."

3 comments

[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 8.2 ms ] thread
PaulHoule
I don't think graduating from a top CS school makes you a great developer. It makes you great at CS, but not necessarily great at software engineering.
dennybritz
That doesn't quite make sense to me.

The fact that someone is a "good" developer makes him bad at marketing, customer service, and user onboarding? And "not-so-good" developers are better at this for some reason? Maybe hiring a sales/bizdev/design person instead of a bad developer would be a better idea ;)

tptacek
This isn't the right way to to submit this story to HN. You've probably allowed the submission to be penalized by not simply submitting the Joe Stump post. That's because HN actively doesn't want you to use "Ask HN" this way. What you're doing is effectively writing a submission with your own comment bolted to the top of the thread.

In the future, there are two better ways to submit something like this:

* Simply submit the URL and then write a good comment about why you liked it.

* Write a blog post about the story, and submit the blog post.

There are pitfalls to both of the right approaches. You probably submitted this way because you anticipated that the story wouldn't hit the front page if you did it the normal way, and that's probably right.

And if you write the blog post, there's a good chance the story gets rewritten to point to the original source. But that's not much of a problem, because your goal is to get attention for the original story, not to showcase your own comment.

As it happens, you've done one of these already; you submitted the story, and then an "Ask HN" style submission. I upvoted the original submission, but am flagging this one.