# How to Hire a Team

A low-effort guide I dashed off in less than an hour, because I got riled up.

1.  Try not to hire a team. Try pretty hard at this.
    1.  Try to find a more efficient way to solve your problem that requires less labor – a smaller-footprint solution.
    2.  Try to hire contractors to do specific parts that they’re really good at, and who have a well-defined interface. Your relationship to these contractors will mostly be transactional and temporary.
    3.  If you must, try hiring just one person, a very smart, capable, and trustworthy generalist, who finds and supports the contractors, so all you have to do is manage the problem-and-solution part of the interface with the contractors. You will need to spend quite a bit of time making sure this lieutenant understands what you’re doing and why, so be very choosy not just about their capabilities but about how well you work together, how easily you can make yourself understood, etc.
2.  If that fails, hire the smallest team that you can. Small is good because:
    1.  Managing more people is more work.
        1.  The relationship between number of people and management overhead is roughly O(n) but unevenly distributed; some people are a lot more work to manage than others.
        2.  You should just go ahead and make “low management overhead” one of your desiderata, which is further pressure in the direction of “hire fewer people.”
    2.  Coordinating the efforts of more people scales superlinearly.
    3.  It is very hard to maintain a super-high quality bar while also hiring a lot of people; in any given pool of candidates these two ideas trade off directly against each other.
    4.  The larger a team you hire, the more you will be tempted to hire narrow specialists, who are by definition less capable of coordinating with the other parts of the team (because they don’t understand the other domains and tradeoffs, or how to integrate the pieces of work).
3.  Be relentlessly picky
    1.  For each person you interview, assume you are not going to hire them. Actively look for why they are not a fit.
    2.  Also assume they will hate working with you. Be sure to showcase what’s weird and unfortunate about you, so they can make an informed decision and not be unpleasantly surprised after they start.
    3.  During the interview process, give them a series of tasks to do that are as much like their eventual potential job as possible.
        1.  Ask yourself, if this person actually worked here, would I be happy with this work output?
        2.  Do not think of it as a throwaway interview task, think of it as the real thing. Suddenly the work will look a lot worse.
        3.  Could you do better than this? You could? Try not to settle for less. No, really, try not to.
    4.  Make the tasks, especially the early ones, as easy for you to evaluate as possible. You don’t want to give up and make a suboptimal hire just because you are tired of evaluating candidates. Make it cheap and efficient to go through a lot of applications.
4.  The cost of a person is not dominated by their salary
    1.  Never hire a person just because they are cheap (in salary)
    2.  The actual costs of a person are almost entirely in management overhead
    3.  Assume that every employee will be net negative to your team, especially at first, and potentially forever
5.  Compose your team like a Magic deck
    1.  You are not collecting Magic cards, you are building a Magic deck. All of your employees/cards have to complement each other to help you execute a particular strategy.
    2.  Do not hire all land cards; do not hire all 8/8 beasts with no support.
        1.  To put this another way: carefully compose your team to have the right mix of independent, senior people who really get it and more green, junior people who will need mentorship and support but can do the shovel-work well.
        2.  If you are expecting the senior people to mentor the junior people, make sure that they have leadership skills as well as domain-specific skills.
        3.  If you are not expecting the senior people to mentor the junior people, then be ready to mentor the junior people yourself, or don’t hire any junior people. (But then the senior people might not have enough lackeys.) 
    3.  Do not hire a random assortment of colors and capabilities just because the art on the cards is pretty.
        1.  To put this another way: for each person you hire, if they can execute end-to-end independently on something useful, great.
        2.  If they can’t, actually play the movie in your mind of them doing their job. Who else do you need to hire to provide inputs or followups for their work? Build the team holistically.
    4.  Do not hire 60 people. Definitely do not hire a commander deck of 100 people.
6.  Know your vision and hire to it
    1.  Know, for yourself, what you are trying to do, what success looks like, and have some idea of the steps between here and there.
    2.  Get clear on which aspects of your vision are fixed and not up for discussion, and which you are open to influence about.
    3.  Do all of this BEFORE you hire, so that you can begin transmitting the vision and the fixed parts starting from the very first interview. This is a mutual filter.
    4.  Do not hire people who want to argue with you about the fixed parts of the vision. This kind of argument is a tax you will pay for as long as that person is around, which will suck the lifeblood from your team faster than anything else.
    5.  Hire people whose skills are directly pertinent to your plan. Do not hire people whose skills are not directly pertinent to your plan. (People fuck this one up constantly.)
7.  Keep the Tuckman model in mind
    1.  The Tuckman model says that when you change the composition of a team you will go through some phases of adjustment, handily named: forming, norming, storming, and performing. I’m not going to explain them, you can just look it up.
    2.  Explicitly allocate time for these phases. You’re going to spend time on them whether you want to or not, but it’ll go faster and cleaner if you do them on purpose than if you let the phases wash over you by surprise.
    3.  The norming and storming will be faster and easier if you did the vision step correctly
    4.  If you grow the team by a lot, the norming and storming will take a lot longer, and it might not converge to the place you expected.
        1.  If you start with six and add one or two, you’ll probably absorb them okay, with mild perturbations.
        2.  If you start with three and add seven, heaven help you, who knows where you’ll end up. Somewhere else, that’s for sure.
        3.  Corollary: grow thoughtfully and at a sustainable pace.
    5.  While you’re forming, norming, and storming, you’re not performing. Are you *sure* you want to hire more people?
8.  Learn from every hiring round
    1.  You will probably not be perfect at hiring on the first try. To put it another way, you will regret some of the hires you make.
    2.  As in all things, try to learn from this. How early could you have detected the problems that you only noticed later? Surprisingly often, the warning signs were there in the very first interview, but you didn’t know how to notice them at the time.
    3.  You will get better at hiring with practice (unless you suck, in which case, sorry about that). Consider hiring *just one person* the first few times you do it, rather than trying to hire an entire team, 
9.  Everyone who joins will probably eventually leave
    1.  … unless they stay forever, which might be worse
    2.  Ask yourself from the very start: how will we know if this is working? And what’s the exit strategy if it’s not?
    3.  Don’t keep those questions a secret; share them clearly and openly with the person you are hiring.
    4.  Every employment relationship should converge to a win/win after an adjustment period. Don’t allow too long an adjustment period, and don’t chicken out of letting people go.
    5.  The win/win deal will need to be continuously renegotiated. (This is part of management overhead, and cannot be skipped.) But now we’re getting into team management, which is whole different list.