

Paul Buchheit: Building a great team - paul
http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2008/01/building-great-team.html

======
ivankirigin
Hiring is key. I liked the note about the Lake Wobegon hiring strategy here:
[http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/hiring-lake-
wobeg...](http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/03/hiring-lake-wobegon-
strategy.html)

Hiring below the mean of the people at your company will cause tolerance for
less talented hires to increase. Worse people hire worse people.

Smart people should be instructed to only hire really smart people. This way,
you'll never get the feedback loop of degrading quality.

So the theory goes.

------
ntoshev
Summary: the UI designer of Gmail, Google Reader and Google Calendar joined
FriendFeed, and Paul is really excited about it.

------
staunch
I was hoping for some advice for those of us in slightly less ideal
circumstances :-)

I'm charged with assembling a team of people for a new project and I certainly
don't have access to the kinds of people or money PB has. It's tough trying to
find great people when you have a lot of constraints.

~~~
paul
Sorry, I wish I had the answer. Even with our resources, it's still difficult.
The sad thing is that there are a lot of great people out there working away
at bad jobs. One of the things I try to accomplish with my my blog is to
convince them to quit their bad jobs and try something new. I believe that it
will be good for them, and good for the world.

~~~
staunch
That's actually good reminder. I probably should spend more time trying to
convince some of my unhealthily comfortable friends to take a chance. A lot of
them express the desire to, but tend to chicken out. Anyway, it's encouraging
to know even you have difficulty with this :-) Thanks.

~~~
ntoshev
I suppose being well-known for what you do helps more than having resources.
If you have cool stuff to show, perhaps it would work better for expanding
your circle of potential employees (who you still have to convince to work
with you).

