A super-productive employee is a curse, not a blessing.
Right now startups and companies are at the peak of wanting to hire A-players, and preferably people who are also FDE Fullstack+DevOps, empowered by AGI. But I think this becomes a dead end when the whole system starts depending on that one person.
Let’s imagine that we have a $500k budget. We can hire, for example, 1 person who will be that exact FDE Fullstack+DevOps empowered by AGI, including token costs in this budget. Or we can hire 5 people who are good at one specific thing, basically a good old agile team: 1 BE, 1 FE, 1 FullStack, 1 QA, 1 Team Lead.
And here is the question, which system seems more resilient to you? To me, the second one. Steve Jobs famously believed that a small team of A-players could run circles around a giant team of B and C players. I think there is a problem with that idea. Your job as a company manager is to use the budget as efficiently as possible. And if you bet on one rockstar, then in the best case you end up in something close to quasi-slavery to that rockstar, and in the worst case you create a single point of failure for the business. While in the second system you will have to put effort into management, but at the same time the system will be harder to break.
You may object, “Hey, but I’m not going to hire just anyone! I’ll find a person I can trust!” And I would answer, “Yes, you can, but even then you will spend resources trying to find that exact rockstar, and I’ll remind you that by nature they are a very rare animal, and right now an even scarcer resource on the job market. And even if you find them, they can get sick, they can burn out, or they can simply get hit by a bus. What are you going to do then?”
That’s why I think it’s possible to find a solution that is good enough. Because not everyone needs a rockstar, everyone needs to multiply their investment, and that is hard to do if the foundation of your system is fragile.
Welcome to the comments to discuss 🧐