Hire the “frustrateable”

Look ma, I made up a word!

Software engineering is an exercise in trade-offs. Improvements in technology are a constant tide beneath the day-to-day of being an engineer. Most of the tools I use were born out of annoyance; “this process is repetitive” or “this system isn't efficient” or “seriously, how the does this work - it’s so complicated”. The beauty of software is that drastic improvement is often just a weekend of hacking away from becoming reality.

Even so, I've never heard any hiring manager or CTO set out to hire people specifically because of the fact that they get frustrated. And not frustrated like banging their head on their desk, but rather like setting out to make a process an order of magnitude more efficient or to turn a complex system into one that anybody can grasp.

In a special type of person, frustration renders innovation. You want those people on your team.