Hiring was always a challenge. One of my best employees was a physics undergraduate that I met because he is the little brother of my wife’s best friend from high school. (It’s always who you know…) In general, nobody you hire will have the same passion that you have. If they did, they would be competing against you rather than working for you. You need your employees to be motivated and interested in their work, but in the end you are offering them a job much like other jobs they could take. Hiring is a mutually beneficial financial relationship. Don’t take things personally and don’t expect your employees to show any more dedication or loyalty than you showed to your last employer.

My company provided generous benefits including tuition reimbursement, insurance, and a retirement plan. I provided at least one free lunch per week at local restaurants and kept the refrigerator and snack room well stocked with free munchies at all times. We had a pleasant work environment, but that didn’t stop all problems. I fired one employee for not working the hours he said he worked, but only after other employees were constantly complaining that the guy wasn’t contributing his fair share. I later fired one of the complaining employees for the same offence. Firing is harder than hiring, and then you have to hire a replacement for the person you fired. For that reason, avoid firing anyone as long as you can.

In the end, a combination of Apple and of 9/11/2001 killed my business. Our customers made money by selling avionics, the electronics in aircraft cockpits. We made money by selling the software used to design and build avionics. The first major hit came when one of our customers committed to deliver a lab full of avionics development systems based on our software to one of the big two commercial aircraft manufactures. When Apple refused to sell more Openstep licenses at any price, my customer couldn’t meet their commitment, and I couldn’t sell any more software. Our software needed to run in embedded systems on single board computers, so Mac OS X, when it finally arrived, was not suitable. The second hit came with the attack on 9/11. After 9/11, our customers temporarily stopped designing new avionics in anticipation of a commercial avionics slump. In fact, on 9/11, I was on-route to San Diego for final acceptance test of another of our software products by the USMC. I was stranded in Minneapolis, and the colonel in charge of the project was transferred to South Korea to replace someone who went to Afganistan.

I don’t write software, but the Peter Principle arises in anything, in that you rise to your level of incompetence. If you are a god programmer, then stay programming, but hire people to do your website, to handle your mail and ordering and cleaning your offfice and such stuff and stick to the stuff that makes you money, namely programming.

Ensure the person you hire for specific tasks can do them with minimal supervision and if it involves money, ensure that there are checks and balances to keep sticky fingers out of the till.

Until you need someone who can do the exact thing that you are doing, get rid of those things that you don’t like doing, that prevent you from making money and that drag you down physically, emotionally and/or financially. When you have all those things out of your way and you are still needing more of what you do best, then look to hire someone who can assist you on those things that make you money.

Just my thoughts. Merry Christmas.

My advice: if you have more on your plate than you can handle and you can afford to hire help, that’s all you need to know about whether you should. Put any doubts or what-ifs you might have out of your mind and just go for it. Fantastic if you can find and afford to hire the best, even better if you can surround yourself with people faster and smarter than you, but don’t put so much weight on doing so that you won’t hire anyone until you can.

Getting those stuck projects you need to do but don’t have time to do moving is far more important than perfection, and if you never get to them because you never take the risk of hiring help then you’ll be severely limiting your potential. I’ll bet that once you’ve got your first employee you’ll be thinking two things: “how/why did I ever go so long without hiring help?” and “ooh, what else isn’t getting done that I can offload to yet another person?”

http://thefakerixstep.blogspot.com/2007/12/why-i-can-work-for-you.html

http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/how_to_hire_the.html

He links to Joel Spolsky and Rands in Repose — I’d review their writings on the subject too.

Joel’s general guide to what to look for is easy to remember: (1) smart; (2) gets things done. I think he may have added “(3) plays well with others” at some point.