Last year, startup-investor Shekhar Kirani made a controversial series of tweets . In them was a list of characteristics he thinks are found in the best software developer s — so-called “10x engineers”. Some of the qualities he mentioned were things like hating meetings, not mentoring other team members, and always using dark color schemes (as someone who sets a white background in my editors, that last one affected me personally).

Putting aside its bizarre shallowness, the tweet encourages tolerance of anti-social behavior in these hypothetical candidates because of their technical output. He suggests that it’s a sacrifice worth making because they are great at writing code .

But is this the real image of a valuable developer? Is trading general warmness for raw technical talent worth it? Or is Kirani’s depiction of the ideal coder just, as one reply to the tweet stated, a list of “the worst tendencies of inexperienced engineer s.”

The term ‘10x Engineer’ just refers to an engineer that can add 10 times more value to the company than the worst engineer. But beyond this, there’s a certain broader stereotype that many people think describes an amazing engineer that will get things done. The abrasive, brilliant, lone-wolf type. It’s the Insufferable Genius trope that’s assigned to software developers throughout pop culture (think Gilfoyle from HBO’s Silicon Valley or Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg). But like many stereotypes, studies show that it does not reflect real life.

A Mckinsey study investigated which of the 5-factor personality traits benefit teams the most when working in an agile environment, as many developers are. To the report’s surprise, agreeableness was revealed to be the most valuable trait, which is manifested in ways such as kindness and cooperation.

These traits obviously can make life easier for team members in general, but this isn’t the whole story. The study explained that, when combined with straightforwardness, agreeableness leads to a better flow of ideas. Agreeable people can challenge an idea in a way that’s empathetic and supportive. Without this ability, feedback can come across hostile, leading team members to refrain from making valuable suggestions in the future. Such a team will be much more effective at reconciling differences and solving problems.

Cooperation in a team benefits its productivity. Individuals that produce code in isolation cause huge knowledge gaps for the rest of the team. And when these lone rangers resign, it takes time for others to understand what they left behind – not to mention the skill gap left to fill in the team. It’s much more sustainable to hire someone who actively explains their code and mentors other team members.

Of course, having programming knowledge and experience in a team is still critical. But having good technical ability in the absence of softer skills that build good teams is not going to achieve results companies are looking for. More than anything else, a real 10x Engineer is not merely a highly effective individual, but one who can work with others to create a highly effective team — a 10x Team.

This article was originally published on ult by Doug Neale . . cult is a Berlin-based community platform for developers. We write about all things career-related, make original documentaries and share heaps of other untold developer stories from around the world.

The process of building great tech teams is broken — here’s how we fix it

Today’s world of software development is different from the proprietary software of years past. Open source enables speed, agility, and flexibility. APIs connect disparate processes into ecosystems of solutions that easily plug into each other and speak a shared language.

While software development itself is now extremely collaborative, I’d say the process of hiring and upskilling talent in this world is just the opposite.

It’s fragmented with siloed teams and technologies that don’t work together. Individual recruiters, hiring managers, HR teams, and strategic leaders work independently like the legacy software that the developers they’re hiring, in many cases, are replacing.

Misaligned expectations between recruiters and hiring managers is a common pain point, but the problems with building great tech teams go much further up the organizational pyramid than you might expect.

For example, Chief Learning Officers rarely consult with hiring managers when they develop L&D initiatives. At first glance, that might make sense… but not when you really think about it.

If you want to start prioritizing certain skills at your organization and develop entire courses to promote those skills, wouldn’t you want to understand the skills that are being prioritized when hiring prospective employees from day one?

This is why I believe we need strategic communication between teams so that everyone is aligned on who to hire, why, and how to upskill them into the most complete talent that fits the technology trends and business needs of the present, AND the future.

Here are some ways we can get there:

1. Build a skill-based organizational culture

Some cultures are fun. Some are rigid. The joke in the VC world here in Silicon Valley is that the culture of Venture Capital firms can be summed up in one item of clothing: Patagonia vests.

But culture of course far exceeds clothing — and it starts in the hiring process.

As I’ve argued in the past , the idea of hiring for culture fit is changing. Organizations used to hire archetypes that looked and felt the same, risking inclusivity in the process. Today, culture fit is more about aligning values at every stage of the interview process.

These values must be inclusive at their heart, but once you know that a candidate has a similar world view, a hunger for excellence, and customer-centricity, for example, then you simply must prioritize skills.

What my team and I do is put skills at the heart of our organizational culture. We hire for skills, agnostic of gender or racial background. In fact, we mask personally identifiable information like name and gender during screening and even, sometimes, during interviews so that unconscious bias won’t impact a hiring decision.

I think everyone can recognize that interviews are often a source of subjectivity where it’s easy for someone’s decision to be based on personal preferences over actual skill.

We ensure that objectivity is at the heart of coding interviews by designing a way to accurately measure skills, even during a face-to-face interview so that there is absolutely no room for subjectivity or bias in the process.

But we go further than just hiring. We design our learning and development programs around strategically prioritized skills. That way, we know we have a pipeline of developer talent that will meet our needs, but we can also tailor L&D programs to further strengthen their skills and make them future-ready.

With our skill-based organizational culture in place, it was easy to get stakeholders to collaborate to define skill-based objectives and work towards helping new and old developers alike grow in a strategic manner.

This is also something that we’ve put into our solutions for companies worldwide. We not only help you hire based solely on skill, and nothing else, we also enable you to identify skill gaps within your current organization so that hiring and even L&D programs can be aligned seamlessly.

2. Continuous assessment to ensure continuous learning

People who develop products often follow this procedure: design, test, iterate.

I’ve found that many learning and development programs don’t emphasize the last two steps. Companies design these great programs, but it’s hard for them to understand and quantify success.

In fact, Deloitte’s 2021 Human Capital Trends Report highlights that reskilling and upskilling programs must “gather and act on workforce data that provides a real-time view of workers’ skills across the entire talent ecosystem.”

Part of this will, of course, be gathering employee feedback on individual programs, but you also have to test their skills in quantifiable ways. Can you build an assessment that gauges their ability to code in Go, a highly sought-after programming language , for instance?

Their assessment data then needs to be tracked against performance data. Are they succeeding in their role in the way their assessments might predict? Why or why not? How can the L&D program be tweaked to impact real-world applications of skills?

If you aren’t assessing the skills that you’re prioritizing, you’re building skill infrastructure blind.

3. Apply D&I insights to your upskilling programs

Though the corporate world doesn’t necessarily have a strong track record of supporting diversity and inclusion, something did seem to change in the aftermath of last year’s BLM protests. Many organizations have prioritized D&I hiring initiatives, but where their efforts fall short is in upskilling and promoting diverse talent from within.

For instance, women are more likely to take a career break than their male peers, and D&I upskilling programs can be effective ways to help them quickly reacclimate to a different work environment that places emphasis on different skills.

With the skill gap very much heightening competition for tech talent, your HR department can add a lot of value by simply working with your hiring managers to highlight these upskilling programs as an attractive draw to your organization.

On the flip side, the hiring managers themselves can really help inform elements of these programs by communicating areas of growth needed from their candidates.

This collaboration allows you to not only hire diverse talent, but also tailor programs to their needs to put diverse talent in positions of leadership.

The connective tissue to build great tech teams

It’s funny how sometimes we fail to learn lessons from the things we study day after day. We focus on the minutiae of execution rather than seeing strategic changes as they happen.

When it comes to tech, we’ve embraced the collaboration of APIs, but we haven’t sourced, screened, interviewed, and upskilled our tech talent nearly as comprehensively.

It’s time to build connective tissue between the structures of tech employee lifecycle management so that organizations can act and move as a single unit when building great tech teams.

You need to stop hiring ‘cultural fits’

Two of the most famous characters from Lewis Carol’s Through the Looking Glass are the twins, Tweedledum and Tweedledee. When Alice encounters them, they ridiculously mirror each other’s actions and words.

Each brother frequently says “contrariwise” as if he’s about to disagree with his counterpart, only to inadvertently say the same thing. Unfortunately, far too many companies end up with teams that look and act in much the same way.

Every organization would say they want to hire according to merit. The problem is that many people unconsciously evaluate merit in a self-validating way.

The most successful candidate will often mirror the traits and experiences of the hiring manager. This is what Kellogg School of Management professor Lauren Rivera calls “ Looking Glass Merit .”

When companies hire for ‘cultural fit,’ and a vast majority do according to Rivera’s latest research , they’re doing the same thing on an organizational level. This doesn’t mean companies should abandon hiring people that embody a set of core values or soft skills. However, in 2020, we shouldn’t be hiring people who look and act identically. Here’s why:

1. Monolithic company culture is less important during WFH

As many organizations grapple with staying remote at least through Q3 2021, the future of building company culture is in flux. This Fast Company article argues that work culture is now driven at an individual level rather than from the top-down.

The new reality for organizations is that remote work culture, like everything online, is moving towards personalization and specialization.

Generally speaking, this means that online communities trend towards fragmentation and align around increasingly specific interests. Think of the hyper-specialized communities on Reddit such as this subreddit where people only post pictures of birds with photoshopped human arms .

In the context of remote work, this means that community building will naturally align around smaller, less generalized interests. As Britany Stewart, COO of BURST Oral Care explained in a webinar with Volition Capital, Slack channels work best if they are focused on highly specific themes. BURST has a channel dedicated to parents working from home that has fostered a small, but highly engaged subcommunity.

As organizations think about hiring for cultural fit in this context, employees no longer need to fit into a monolithic organizational culture. In fact, their diversity rather than their similarities could actually make the organization more culturally dynamic.

2. Diversity of thought reflects success

A full range of diversity and inclusion (D&I) initiatives should be at the heart of any hiring strategy. Cisco Systems has adopted what they call a ‘full spectrum’ diversity approach , where, in addition to racial, ethnic, and gender diversity, they also target diversity of thought and background.

Deloitte explains that “a complex problem typically requires input from six different mental frameworks,” and no one is good at all six. Teams full of different cognitive styles and personalities will not only view problems from every angle, they’ll also solve them faster according to research in HBR . If you have a team of only analytical thinkers, a creative thinker might be the best possible addition.

Sometimes this can cause conflict, but unlike Tweedledum and Tweedledee who could never actually come to blows, you want to build an environment where reasonable conflict is used to pressure test ideas.

The goal shouldn’t be to hire someone who will get along with your team; the goal should be to hire someone who will push your team to look at more problems in more ways.

3. Skills-based hiring is on the rise

If you want a more equitable and productive hiring process, you need to focus on skills — especially in tech roles. This is something that’s even starting to happen at the highest level of government.

A recent executive order from the White House resoundingly endorsed skill-based hiring. It reduced minimum education requirements for federal jobs, stating: “degree-based hiring is especially likely to exclude qualified candidates for jobs related to emerging technologies and those with weak connections between educational attainment and the skills or competencies required to perform them.”

Malcolm Gladwell’s book, David and Goliath, calls overestimating the value of an Ivy League degree “Elite Institutional Cognitive Disorder” (EICD), and Gladwell blames this disorder on many poor hiring decisions. He instead advocates for hiring on the basis of skill, arguing that performance relative to one’s peers is the best predictor of success.

Grades are one method, but, increasingly, there are all sorts of online assessments that can evaluate the most relevant skills for any given position. In fact, our recent Developer Survey found that 70% of student developers make use of online competitive coding platforms to upskill themselves for the job market.

Through the looking glass

Regardless of your company culture before COVID-19, that culture is probably very different today.

This doesn’t mean that organizations shouldn’t continue promoting community-building activities and certain values that are unique to them. It does mean that the value of finding a Tweedledum or Tweedledee employee who simply fits in has never been less important.

Instead of trying to find someone who reflects everything you like about yourself or your company, step back through the looking glass and find someone who pushes your company culture to be different and better.