Recently Mark Suster presented a writeup at TechCrunch here: Whom Should You Hire? Of interest is the following extraction:
“ If you’re doing a great job at continually recruiting and if you have a company ready to hire several people, at some point when you have enough of a pipeline of talented people you need a way to separate them. I have a long-standing mantra, “attitude over aptitude.” This is assuming a raw minimum of MIPS in the candidate. They need to be seriously smart / talented in their field to make the minimum grade.
But within this “minimum acceptable talent level” you still have a wide variance of “employee types.” Let’s be honest – some uber talented people are PITAs. I never hire them. One bad apple spoils things for everybody.
You don’t see it coming. You figure, “sure, they’re a pain but they produce such high quality work I’m willing to put up with them.” Don’t. The last thing you need is some rat bastard fomenting trouble.
They’re the ones who are talking pop at cocktail parties when they’ve had one too many. They’re having private lunches with other employees talking about how they’ve lost faith in your vision.
When you hit internal moments of doubt you need the team members who say, “Guys, we can do this! We’re up against the ropes but we’re not down. Let’s dig in.” You need team members who do that when you’re NOT there.”
Truer words were never spoken. We haven’t really changed much in our habits via our short time of evolution here on Earth. Our survival instincts kick in and usually people freak out and do weird stuff. I could write tomes on the things I have seen people do within times of tech world crisisdom. There is an old adage “Do Not Panic and You Will Live.” Most panic and freak out – but those that adapt and hang in there usually win out. I wrote sometime ago about the The Three “T”s of a StartUp. I also wrote sometime ago about the companies bidding on talent way before Zuckerburg bid on twitter for teams: Revisiting The Three T’s. I then wrote about the obvious talent shortage and how how we are going to see a swarming affect of teams much like the days of clans in Quake: Mercanaries For Hire.
Yet even with the best of the best of the best. One thing still stands true: At some point the attitude does over shadow that compiler count.
Go Big Or Go Home.
@jaxsoncreole