the people who make things happen

I’ve spent the last ten months basically obsessed with hiring. A lot of hiring, and hiring fast. Fast enough that you don’t really have the luxury of figuring out what you’re looking for one candidate at a time. You have to figure it out upfront.

That’s actually a pretty interesting exercise. When you’re hiring this quickly, you start asking yourself what really separates the people you want from everyone else. The usual answers come pretty quickly: intelligence, technical depth, experience, communication, domain knowledge. All useful. You can build a perfectly reasonable interview process around them.

I’ve just never been particularly convinced that they tell you the thing I care about most.

agency

This isn’t exactly a new idea. Paul Graham has been writing about hiring great people for years. Steve Jobs talked about hiring people who could tell you what should be done, rather than people who simply wait to be told what to do. Amazon has built parts of its culture around Ownership, Bias for Action, and Hire and Develop the Best.

Everyone talks about this stuff. I did too. I just don’t think I really understood it until recently.

Hiring at this pace gave me a chance to actually feel the difference. You stop thinking so much about the credentials on the resume and start thinking about what happens when you put someone in a messy situation where the answer isn’t obvious and nobody is handing them the playbook.

Do they figure out what matters? Do they find the people they need? Can they make a decision with incomplete information? When the obvious path doesn’t work, do they keep going? That’s what I mean by agency. The ability to create momentum without needing the world to be perfectly organized around you.

I’ve become pretty convinced that this is one of the highest-leverage things you can hire for, particularly in a startup. Intelligence and technical depth still matter enormously, but they’re only useful if they turn into something. A brilliant person who waits for the roadmap is still waiting for the roadmap.

where it compounds

This also explains a lot of what I’ve seen in engineering careers. Early on, progression is often about raw technical strength. Can you solve hard problems? Can you build things? Can you understand complicated systems?

Then, somewhere around Staff and beyond, the game changes. You aren’t just being rewarded for what you can do yourself. You’re rewarded for what you can make happen. That’s force multiplication.

You identify the important problem before someone assigns it to you. You get five people moving in the same direction. You create clarity. You unblock other teams. You make the organization faster.

I’ve seen very few truly great Staff-plus engineers who didn’t have a ridiculous amount of agency. There are exceptions. Someone might be such a technical monster that they take latency down by 90% or make something 100x faster and the impact speaks for itself. That’s real impact. But even in those cases, there’s often agency underneath it. They found the problem. They tried something nobody asked them to try. They went outside the obvious path.

Eventually, raw capability isn’t enough. You need to be able to point that capability at something important and make other people better along the way.

startups don’t have passengers

This matters even more in a startup because the margin for error is tiny. You’re competing with companies that have more money, more people, more customers, more infrastructure, more brand, and usually more time. You don’t get to make mediocre hires and hope the rest of the organization compensates for them.

So I treat every hire as critical, whether it’s an intern, a junior engineer, or a Staff engineer. The bar changes with the level, but the underlying expectation doesn’t. I want people who raise the bar for their role, operate with a high degree of autonomy, and see something that needs doing without waiting for permission.

The best version of this is almost the reverse of traditional management. I don’t want to hire people and then spend my time telling them what to do. I want to hire people who eventually tell me what we should be doing.

That only works if the organization is built to support it. Give people enough context to make decisions. Reward ownership. Don’t turn every problem into a roadmap item handed down from above.

When you get that right, you start solving problems before they become problems.

the caveat

There is a catch. Agency without judgment is dangerous. Someone who moves ten times faster in the wrong direction isn’t particularly useful. And if you reward motion without caring about the outcome, people will optimize for motion.

There’s an old story about a city paying a bounty for dead rats. The incentive sounded great until people figured out they could breed rats, kill them, and collect the rewards. The system was working exactly as designed. It was just producing the wrong thing.

That’s how I think about incentives inside companies. Reward activity and you’ll get activity. Reward speed without direction and you’ll get motion. Reward heroic firefighting and eventually people start creating fires.

So agency needs to come with judgment and self-awareness. You want people who can figure out what matters, move quickly, recognize when they’re wrong, and bring other people with them.

and that’s the game

I’ve spent the last ten months trying to figure out how to identify these people quickly and reliably, and I still don’t have a perfect formula. I’m not sure there is one.

But I have a much stronger opinion than I did ten months ago. I knew all of this before. I just didn’t really know it. Now I do. Intelligence gives you the ability to solve the problem. Agency makes you go solve it. And if I have to bet on one trait in a startup, I’m betting on the person who gets out of bed every day and makes the needle move.

That’s probably the whole game.

If that’s not you, ngmi.