<story><title>Hire For The Ability To Get Shit Done</title><url>http://blog.eladgil.com/2011/09/hire-for-ability-to-get-shit-done.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>I can relate to this, but I can also relate to the other side of the question. Sometimes it isn&apos;t me, its you. Take someone who gets things done and suddenly in your organization they aren&apos;t delivering. Could be them, but it could also be you.&lt;p&gt;I had this experience working at Google. I had a horrible time getting anything done there. Now I spent a bit of time evaluating that since it had never been the case in my career, up to that point, where I was unable to move the ball forward and I really wanted to understand that. The short answer was that Google had developed a number of people who spent much, if not all, of their time &lt;i&gt;preventing change&lt;/i&gt;. It took me a while to figure out what motivated someone to be anti-change.&lt;p&gt;The fear was risk and safety. Folks moved around a lot and so you had people in charge of systems they didn&apos;t build, didn&apos;t understand all the moving parts of, and were apt to get a poor rating if they broke. When dealing with people in that situation one could either educate them and bring them along, or steam roll over them. Education takes time, and during that time the &apos;teacher&apos; doesn&apos;t get anything done. This favors steamrolling evolutionarily :-)&lt;p&gt;So you can hire someone who gets stuff done, but if getting stuff done in your organization requires them to be an asshole, and they aren&apos;t up for that, well they aren&apos;t going to be nearly as successful as you would like them to be.&lt;p&gt;The other risk is of course the people who &apos;get a lot done&apos; but don&apos;t need to. Which is to say they can rewrite your CRM system and push it out to the world in a week but only by writing it from scratch.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rhizome</author><text>Word f&apos;ing up. I was recently fired from a remarkably relatable situation where a &lt;i&gt;hot ninja&lt;/i&gt; startup had no effective intake process, so for orientation I had one pair-programming episode regarding an intensely technical internal aspect of the application before being sent off to fend for myself in their repository. Couple this with an office and project management style predicated on &quot;who can interrupt the loudest?&quot;, having multiples of these conversations occur simultaneously, and an absolutely open office plan.&lt;p&gt;But hey, the CEO had sold a previous company for good money so this means he knows what he&apos;s doing. I&apos;m sure they&apos;ll be a huge success.&lt;p&gt;I&apos;m not saying that I&apos;m God&apos;s gift to college-dropout programmers, but I&apos;d never had a problem succeeding in a job until this one. In reaction to this state of affairs I had considered that maybe I need to be at a huge company that has better processes, but your Google tale says maybe otherwise.&lt;p&gt;&amp;#60;/vent&amp;#62;</text></comment>
<story><title>Hire For The Ability To Get Shit Done</title><url>http://blog.eladgil.com/2011/09/hire-for-ability-to-get-shit-done.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>I can relate to this, but I can also relate to the other side of the question. Sometimes it isn&apos;t me, its you. Take someone who gets things done and suddenly in your organization they aren&apos;t delivering. Could be them, but it could also be you.&lt;p&gt;I had this experience working at Google. I had a horrible time getting anything done there. Now I spent a bit of time evaluating that since it had never been the case in my career, up to that point, where I was unable to move the ball forward and I really wanted to understand that. The short answer was that Google had developed a number of people who spent much, if not all, of their time &lt;i&gt;preventing change&lt;/i&gt;. It took me a while to figure out what motivated someone to be anti-change.&lt;p&gt;The fear was risk and safety. Folks moved around a lot and so you had people in charge of systems they didn&apos;t build, didn&apos;t understand all the moving parts of, and were apt to get a poor rating if they broke. When dealing with people in that situation one could either educate them and bring them along, or steam roll over them. Education takes time, and during that time the &apos;teacher&apos; doesn&apos;t get anything done. This favors steamrolling evolutionarily :-)&lt;p&gt;So you can hire someone who gets stuff done, but if getting stuff done in your organization requires them to be an asshole, and they aren&apos;t up for that, well they aren&apos;t going to be nearly as successful as you would like them to be.&lt;p&gt;The other risk is of course the people who &apos;get a lot done&apos; but don&apos;t need to. Which is to say they can rewrite your CRM system and push it out to the world in a week but only by writing it from scratch.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kamaal</author><text>&lt;i&gt;So you can hire someone who gets stuff done, but if getting stuff done in your organization requires them to be an asshole, and they aren&apos;t up for that, well they aren&apos;t going to be nearly as successful as you would like them to be.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;You&apos;ve sort of nailed it. Also what I see is, how much people are addicted to the NIH syndrome. They have a ways of working which they won&apos;t change, adapt or even agree debate for their own good.&lt;p&gt;The way I see, too much or too little process are both equally dangerous. The key is neither to over play nor under play the game. Too little management leads to wandering in the wild with no goals, plans, tracking and destination. Often overly delayed projects.&lt;p&gt;Too much management gets in the way of achieving what would have been even easily possible.&lt;p&gt;After all the analysis I can say, sure you may want to hire every smart guy on the market. But you must also know to manage them. Bunch them together, create a positive environment and enable them to be as much productive as they can be. Good people need to be taken care of, Senior developers/architects even though not managers need to have some people skills. Its simple, if interacting with people is a part of your job.. People skills become part of your job.&lt;p&gt;To be good alone is not sufficient, if you are good alone you can probably get a maximum of 9 hours worth of job done everyday. But if you can manage 10 such brilliant guys you can deliver 90 hours of such work every day. But that requires spotless planning, tracking, course correction and most important creating an environment where such people can be productive.&lt;p&gt;Nothing big in software these days can achieved without team work. If a person is not good with teams, may be its time for him to look somewhere else. Being a jerk, rude and arrogant with junior developers may help you give a false sense of superiority but that won&apos;t bring you success.</text></comment>