On Hiring by Committee
A great basketball team is put together by a great coach. It is not put together by asking each player to vote whether somebody new should join their team or not. It may seem intuitive or even fair that players should have a say in who they should be playing with. But that would be naive.
Players are not necessarily good at selecting other players. Players are good at playing basketball. Selection is a different skill. It requires a great deal of awareness about the psychology of individual players and the collective culture of the team. Selection is therefore something coaches should do well. It is their job to know the players better than they know themselves and it is also their job to know who will fit in and who won’t. Not many people, including players themselves, would question this in sports.
So I’ve always wondered why so many hiring managers believe that developers should (or even want to) decide who joins their team next.
As a hiring manager, I always welcome feedback from other team members. But there is a big difference between asking for opinion about an area of their expertise and asking for a thumbs up or thumbs down. In my experience, most developers don’t even enjoy making such calls. If you pressure them to do it, many times their feedback will be negative simply because it’s a safer option.
Collecting feedback about candidates and informing your decision is important. But at the end of the day, that decision should be made by one or two people (e.g., VPE and CTO). When more than two people are involved in making the final call — usually through the power of veto, voting or giving points — what you have is hiring by committee. And as is the case with most committees, what you probably think you’re doing is being fair to other team members by respecting their opinion. But in reality, you are not doing anybody a favour. You are simply distributing your own responsibility.
