Early in my career, I hired the resume.
Found the smartest person I could, made the offer, and assumed the rest would work itself out. It didn’t. Not because they weren’t talented. They absolutely were. But I didn’t enjoy working with them. And when you don’t enjoy working with someone, you start avoiding them. You skip the pairing session. You keep the code review to two sentences. You stop pulling them into the design conversations where the real learning happens. You don’t announce any of this. You just keep finding reasons to be somewhere else.
Within six months, my “best hire” was my most isolated engineer. All the talent in the world, and none of it was compounding because I wasn’t investing in them. That wasn’t their failure. It was mine.
The part you quietly skip#
Hiring someone is not just the offer letter. It’s every small choice after that: the architecture discussion you pull them into, the customer call you let them sit on, the hard feedback you give instead of saving it for the performance review. That’s where the investment actually happens.
Those moments only happen if you genuinely want to see the person grow. If you’re indifferent to them, you’ll do the minimum. You’ll manage them instead of mentoring them. And they’ll stall.
I’ve seen this enough times to recognize the smell. The engineer is doing solid work, but they’re not in the messy conversations. They get tickets, not context. Six months later everyone acts surprised that they stalled.
Homebot was different#
At Homebot, I was brought in to establish a long-term engineering team. Every person I brought on was someone I was going to spend all day, every day with. There was no hiding in a different Slack channel or deferring to another manager. It was me and them, building from nothing.
That can go wrong fast if you confuse signal with similarity. I wasn’t looking for people who looked like me or laughed at the same jokes. I hired six engineers I had real signal on. People I’d worked with, watched learn, or seen handle hard situations. People I wanted in the room when things got messy.
We retained all six. One hundred percent.
I won’t pretend that was a formula. Small teams are messy, and six hires is still six hires. But it came from hiring people I was excited to invest in. When you actually want to see someone succeed, you make the time. You have the hard conversations. You pull them into the meetings that would be easier to attend alone. You teach them the things that aren’t in any onboarding doc because you want them to get it, not because it’s your job to explain it.
A lot of technical gaps close fast when the person is hungry and someone is actually helping them close the gap. But you can’t manufacture the desire to mentor someone. Either you look at a person and think “I want to see where they go” or you don’t.
Where this can go wrong#
I know how this sounds. “Hire people you like” is one sentence away from “hire people who look like you and laugh at your jokes.” That’s not what I’m saying.
The worst version of culture fit is hiring for similarity. Same background, same schools, same sense of humor. That leads to homogeneous teams that have blind spots the size of continents.
What I’m talking about is different. Do you want to understand how they think? When they see the problem differently, do you get curious or annoyed? That’s the line I’m talking about.
Some of the best people I’ve hired were nothing like me. Different backgrounds, different approaches, different communication styles. But I was genuinely curious about them. I wanted to learn from them as much as I wanted to teach them. That mutual investment is what makes mentorship work. It’s not a one-way street where the senior person dispenses wisdom. It’s two people who are interested in each other’s growth.
The long game#
Two years later, that engineer is the one pulling the new hire into design review. They’re the one explaining why the customer call matters. They’re the one giving the feedback you used to have to give yourself.
But it only starts if the original investment is real. And real investment starts with wanting to make it.
When I look back at the teams I’ve built, the ones that worked weren’t the ones with the highest average IQ on paper. They were the ones where I was personally invested in every single person’s trajectory. Where I could look at each engineer and honestly say “I want to see what this person becomes.” That energy is contagious. People can tell when their manager is going through the motions versus when their manager actually gives a damn.
Hire people you want to mentor. Not people who are easy to manage. Not people who look perfect on paper. Hire the people you’re willing to bet on, because the bet only pays off if you’re actually in it with them.