Fantastic Point About the Consequences of Who You Hire
I was reading this article by Paul Graham about why Yahoo didn't last, and came across this point: (which, by the way, wasn't John Gruber's highlighted section)
In technology, once you have bad programmers, you're doomed. I can't think of an instance where a company has sunk into technical mediocrity and recovered. Good programmers want to work with other good programmers. So once the quality of programmers at your company starts to drop, you enter a death spiral from which there is no recovery.
Paul goes on to talk about the difference in the culture of Google at 500 people and Yahoo at the same point. It's interesting, but not necessarily surprising for someone that's been in this business as long as Paul, and I, have. It's classic: There's no Free Lunch.
There's no way around hiring the best talent you can get. No one thinks getting the cheapest artist is a good idea. Nor the cheapest surgeon. Everyone seems to understand that when you're dealing with an artistic, or especially challenging area of study, and there's one and only one person at the task, that it's a good idea - no, the right idea, to get the best you can. What they think is that coding, like building automobiles, or making frozen pizzas, is something that you can get better at by throwing more people at it.
There are tons of books on this. Even more Harvard Business Studies. It's a deceptively simple lie - programmers are like ants - you just need more. Yup... you keep thinking that. It's a lie, plain and simple.
Everything we humans do has some sense of skill and quality. If you want to be good at something, you have to practice. And not a little. You have to want it. These are the qualities of a good worker - not just that he knows a language, and takes orders. That's a given. You need more.
Sadly, I have a feeling this is never going to be really understood by most people.