Stop Hiring For Frameworks, Start Hiring for Scars

There’s an easy way to speed up your team’s software development. Start a tad slower and accelerate to lightspeed. This isn’t quite obvious. Intuition would say that if you build your software teams by maxing out the new members’ experience in your specific tech stack, you’ll hit the ground running and get more done. But in reality, you slow yourself down by the fast start, because you won’t necessarily be getting the right people.

Job descriptions often look like a laundry list of specific frameworks and years of history in them: “…must have 5 years of React experience” or such. Focusing myopically on a specific technology might actually be a liability for high-stakes projects.

When the stakes are high and the problems are new, you don’t just need a specialist. You need experience all right, but you need broad experience. You need a strategist.

The Specialist vs. The Strategist

The Specialist is like a chess player who has mastered a couple of specific openings. They win as long as the game follows a predictable path. If the opponent (in this case: the project) moves unexpectedly, they are on thin ice. If all you have is a hammer, all problems look like nails. And, in this metaphor, they are on thin ice with a hammer. Not a winning combination.

The Strategist understands the game of software. Note that this is different from a generalist. This is someone who has in-depth understanding of how software development works. They have seen the same patterns before across different ecosystems, seen same exact problems in different environments. They adapt to the new technologies, frameworks and syntaxes. They solve problems. They know how to avoid those problems in the first place.

A specialist will do better when you have a very definite, static problem. But if the project is complex and evolves, the strategist will always outperform.

Wisdom Over Knowledge

With the rise of Generative AI, the syntax of coding has become less of a hurdle. AI can translate code from one language to another or suggest API calls in seconds. And anyone with a broad skillset and deep experience can switch from one framework to another, initially aided by the guardrails GenAI offers. This has increased the value of seniority and broad experience.

I recently bumped into a case where AI-generated C++ code looked perfect but contained a subtle error regarding parameter passing in a multi-threaded environment. A junior specialist might have missed it, but a seasoned pro with deep understanding of how computers work at a fundamental level, spotted the flaw immediately.

Knowledge is knowing the syntax. Wisdom is knowing that a specific implementation will fail under stress.

Start Slower, You’ll Be Faster

The biggest argument for hiring a specialist with very specific expertise is how quickly they can get to work.

Every company has its own unique code base architecture, tacit knowledge and history and internal work culture. All of this takes time to adapt to, too. As always, the soft stuff is the hard stuff.

Regardless of how well a developer knows a framework like, say, React or Qt, they still need time to learn the context of your business. Someone with a deep understanding of how programming works can often learn a new syntax in a matter of weeks, but the value they bring from having solved hard problems elsewhere pays dividends for years.

Jumping Fences

Diversity in software development isn’t just about demographics (yet, that’s highly important, too!). It’s about the diversity of experience. When you build a team of clones who all know the same framework, you get groupthink.

I have seen this firsthand. I have moved from embedded Linux to cross-platform apps. I’ve seen how problems were solved in different domains and I know how to apply those patterns to whatever you bring my way. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I can do anything. I need a team, too – I don’t have any delusions of infallibility. I sure hope that team is composed of people with different backgrounds so they can see what I’m blind towards.

Conclusion

Technical skills are the baseline, but broad experience, curiosity and openness are the true indicators of success. For your next high-stakes project, look past the X years of experience in Y and look for the person who has weathered the most storms. They are the ones who will keep the ship upright when the going gets tough.