> No one ever left your team? That’s not a badge of honor—it’s a red flag. No one’s being challenged enough to outgrow their role<p>I don't follow this, seems like you could conclude the exact opposite. I.e. If no one is leaving they must be sufficiently challenged to grow & stay engaged.<p>That aside, if someone is outgrowing their role due to them being challenged, why can't they move into a new role rather than quit? A bigger red flag to me is turnover due to lack of opportunity for advancement.
Not convinced by the turnover thing.<p>Engineers are human beings, and work should be optimized to make human happy rather than human happiness optimized for work. IMO saying "hire less cautiously because not firing people is a bad sign" is not very respectful of people's life, as being fired can have very bad consequences on the impacted folks.
> Hackathons are adrenaline-fueled chaos, great for pizza and team bonding but rarely for long-term innovation. You end up with half-baked projects that die the moment the event ends. If you’re serious about innovation, ditch hackathons and embrace intermissions instead.<p>They don't have to be like this. I do much of my best work over 3-day HackDays that the company holds multiple times per year. Often I'll make a Proof-of-Concept during HackDays and incrementally improve it for production readiness to serve a specific overdue or upcoming need.
I never really understood company hackathons. Usually they involve people submitting their own ideas and trying to implement them in a crunch mode for some meager reward. This just comes off as the company trying to exploit people for new ideas rather than have a proper R&D department work on coming up with innovations.
The only thing I would disagree with is that these believes are unpopular.<p>For the rest, it's a reasonable perspective. Even the "red flag" one about people not leaving is sensible. It's a flag and not a verdict. It's also possible that you hired well, set expectations correctly, and people are performing and growing.