Hidden Value - Book Review

Stephen: Honestly? No, I wouldn't hire you as a sustainer.
Jen: Are you kidding? I sustained RTD and MID for years!
Stephen: [hmm...the truth might not have been a good idea]

Hidden Value is a book by Charles O'Reilly about people, companies, culture -- and how the right mix can accomplish great things. I'd go so far as to call it a great, even inspiring, book. I took notes.

The central idea of the book is that by fostering an environment of:

• teamwork
• accountability
• collaboration
• autonomy
• trust

companies can yield the benefits of employees who take ownership of their work environment and do the right thing to improve it.

Manage less, trust and verify more.

Nice.

Hidden Value also emphasizes the importance of hiring people that fit will fit into the company's culture. Cultural fit is considered more important than an aptitude for specific skills. Herb Kellher, longtime CEO of Southwest Airlines is quoted as saying:

"We draft great attitudes. If you don't have a good attitude, we don't want you, no matter how skilled you are. We can change skill levels through training. We can't change attitude."

This is a fabulous approach for a large company, especially one such as Southwest Airlines where a star pilot is probably not more than 10% better than the median pilot. This probably still applies to a good extent in a small software company. The difference between a star and the median developer in the software industry is probably 100-1000% when measuring both quantity and quality. However, I don't think it's possible to hide a bad attitude from a customer in a small company. The attitude of developers is bound to bleed into a small software company's products and services.

If a company treats its people like people, and not assets, then it is in a great position to ask its people to treat its customers like people too. Customers like being treated like people because they are people. Having happy customers makes it a lot easier to get and maintain a positive income statement.

QED or something like that.

So, would I still tell Jen I wouldn't hire her as a sustainer? I don't know. I do know I would have broadened my "interview" question from:

"Have you used Perl or another scripting language to automate system maintenance?"

to:

"Have you ever written a program to automate something you found repetitive or error-prone?"

I think this is a much better question because it focuses more on the desired behavior than a particular skillset. I certainly agree with Herb that a scripting language skill can be taught, whereas the desire to automate work that can be automated is not likely to be taught. It's probably best not to pay someone while you wait for a behavior "light" to come on.