These articles always skip over the all important context: What is the engineering team supposed to accomplish?<p>> After a baseline level of competency is satisfied, who you hire does not matter.<p>For your average CRUD web app this is obviously true. For the Manhattan Project it’s obviously false. Most engineering work falls somewhere in-between.
More true in SW engineering than other fields. If you have lots of legacy infrastructure and you have a few engineers that really understand that technology then those nodes in the network can overrule almost anything. Hiring is made difficult because there may not that many people with the necessary background so now your hands are tied.
This article inadvertently touches on complexity theory, which is something I've recently become interested in from a management perspective. In complexity theory, organizations are viewed as complex adaptive systems <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system</a> which are dynamic networks of interactions, much like this article is describing.<p>It's been an interesting thought exercise to ignore typical management styles focusing on command and control structures, and shifting to holistic view of the organization and the networks that support its function. i.e. if you want to understand success of your top performers, you have to consider the system they operate within and how it enables their success. I think that relates to the point of this article, and I really enjoyed connecting the dots.
Pretty much every team is a network... which is to say, I think this advice applies to hiring, generally. Not just engineers.<p>Some people have made the solid point that a corollary to:<p>> After a baseline level of competency is satisfied, who you hire does not matter.<p>Is that the hiring team has a solid understanding of what that baseline level of competency is, in the first place. In my previous job, this was the limiting factor: the head of our hiring had absolutely no idea where that bar was.
We did a project in college as part of a Management class. We interviewed employees in a local enterprise and built a Graph describing the relationships between Employees(Nodes). We asked questions like Who do you like the most/the least, etc. It was very interesting and insightful, but I can't remember what the methodology was called and I haven't seen in it again in many years.
And those networks imprint their structure in what they build[1].<p>[1] <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law</a>
I always wondered if a pagerankend management structure would fare better for performance and leadership recognition against the classical hierarchic one.<p>Anyone here has data on this?
In an "X is just Y" comparison, a good heuristic to determine whether someone is being a human being is to ask whether the comparison reduces the humanity out of the concept. This kind of thing is sociopathic.