Myths Of Building A Great Mobile Team

<i>Avoid a “specialist” culture at your company</i><p>While I agree with the fact that an organization should be generalist heavy. There are some areas that I think there is no substitute for specialist, security and HCI are two areas that we rely on specialist to helm the direction, there is so much domain knowledge in both that it is money well spent to carry specialist in these areas. It looks like the author implied this by using the word culture, but I felt that it is probably worth expanding on so that the avoidance would not be taken to the extreem by a reader.

&#62; Don't hire "mobile engineers"<p>A large media company rejected a friend of mine who only had less than one year iOS experience (but had already collaborated on a couple successful apps). Their rejection reason was they were looking for engineers with 2+ yrs of iOS experience. Some of my friends meet their baseline requirements and they are not hirable (busy with client projects). What this company's HR department fails to understand is it easier to hire someone who has a solid non-mobile background and has been doing it for fun, on-the-side than to hire a mythical 2-yr iOS experience developer. I've gotten all of my contracts because of two big things: my personal connections and my portfolio of iOS apps. What pointy-haired bosses seem to fail to understand is the portfolio is the benchmark for performance and experience. Btw - I have exactly one year of iOS experience and have worked on four apps.

I think it is ok advice:<p>What he means, is don't hire mobile engineers that have worked at big telco provider (samsung,motorola, or carriers). It is well known that these companies just don't have good talent. I'd rather work with a good generalist, than a crappy mobile developer. But, a good mobile developer will run circles around a generalist.<p>"b. Don’t hire “mobile” Product Managers (PMs)" Again, same thing. He equals 'mobile pm' to somebody that has worked in crappy telco related companies.<p>That's not true. There have been plenty of mobile companies that are not telco related. Even before iPhone came to change the landscape, there were plenty of companies that were both mobile and consumer focused.<p>..<p>"For example, on the early Google mobile team we had a PhD student from Yale with no industry experience, an expert on enterprise Java from BEA, and a research scientist at Google. These people helped form a formidable core for mobile engineering at Google."<p>Ah, this explains why the Android api seems like something that came from the desktop. It has everything thrown into it, even the kitchen sink. Comparing to the iPhone sdk, it is clumsy. Also, this probably explains a lot of the usability problems Android has in general.<p>The sad fact is that developing for the android is twice as expensive, and produces less good looking application than the iPhone.<p>Perhaps this guy should have hired mobile engineers?

These don't seem too dissimilar to the myths of hiring for small teams in general, actually.

This first comment about hiring great generalists rather than people who know mobile development has been echoed countless times and it's amazing how often people make that mistake. The most recent example I can think of is from Kevin Rose who said the same thing about how they needed PHP people at Digg until PHP wasn't good enough or they switched languages. Lesson learned: just hire great engineers, even if they code in ColdFusion or something terrible.