Steve Jobs supposedly said, “A players hire A players; B players hire C players.”
Silicon Valley takes this to heart, a guiding light for tight hiring process and keeping a high bar when building out teams. Better to keep everything at the “A” level, lest the insidious “B”s bring on even worse “C”s and drag performance down. That way lies mediocrity and bloat and bureaucracy.
A decade ago—before I had any management experience—I concluded that while it’s an evocative soundbite, it doesn’t work in practice. In the intervening time, I’ve had to build and disband teams, hire and fire hundreds of engineers, for companies large and small across geographies and functions. Yet my conclusion, now weathered and tested, remains:
You don’t want to build teams of exclusively “A” players.
Let’s start with the fundamental issues. “A” players aren’t well-defined; the aura that gives someone their “A”-ness is impossible to predetermine, and the label applies after an accomplishment. Then, whether the work was “A” level—or merely a “B”- or “C”-grade delivery—is largely dependent on who’s doing the evaluation. Of course, if it requires an “A” player to identify, hire, evaluate and recognize other “A” players, then qualifications necessarily overlap; they score well if they do the task in the same way as the OG.
The criteria for “A”-ness therefore self-reinforcing. It speaks more to the hiring manager than to the hired, that the qualifications are more about compatible personalities and similar backgrounds and passing the beer test. Sure, this playbook initially scaled PayPal, but that example is used not because the company built great lasting teams, but rather attracted a disproportionate number of employees who went on to create other valuable companies. Perhaps the narrow slice of “A”-level excellence PayPal selected for was entrepreneurship.
Alternatively, I like hiring for complementary skillsets. I learned this from a former manager, also the company’s CTO1, in the context of a performance review. We noted that managing managers, in contrast to IC engineers, required recognition of the increased intersection in our Venn diagrams of expertise. Our natural instincts are to hire and promote those who think and act alike to ourselves, so the challenge becomes finding and elevating those with a completely different approach2. Harmonizing skillsets strengthens the team; the sum, greater than its parts.
The “exclusively A players” approach also underlines an unfounded fear: letting in the riff-raff only corrodes the organization. I’ve debated prior bosses who believed that “B” players—for whatever definition they were using in their head—overwhelm the truly excellent people. Worse, tolerance signaled to the “A”s that it’s okay to execute to the lower standard, so they lose motivation for high-level execution. We’re thus stuck in the world of “B”s and “C”s, in perpetuity.
The mistake is ignoring context. Even if we can agree on what “A”-level work looks like, whether someone can perform to that bar highly depends on situation and expectation. I’ve worked with early-stage startup folks who built both the software and hardware components of Square’s first-gen card reader, but struggled to adopt the heavier processes of a more mature company. I’ve managed engineers who excelled responding to production incidents, but couldn’t wrangle a production system from inception to production with the same focus.
Yet situations come and go. Environments shift, and what was best practice is now labeled a fad. Senior roles don’t necessarily scale across the same dimensions and attributes—what you do as a principal engineer isn’t just mid-level engineering with more breadth, but a whole new set of responsibilities. An amazing marketer cannot move the needle for a broken product.
The situation matters. Archetypes exist to help define excellence within circumstance. “A” players, performing at their best, are still prisoners of the moment: the convergence of right skills, right timing, and right conditions sets them up to produce excellent work. Veer off the ideal state, and they look like a “B” or “C” player.
Ironically, my experience has been that those who look to apply a letter-grading system to candidates and colleagues are, at times, tough to manage and not easy to work with either. To be fair, they are oftentimes legitimately great at their jobs. But for a significant number of these folks, mentorship is a foreign concept, as they have already defined a mental caste to bucket their peers. Moreover, their status commands reinforcement and support, becoming a form of leadership tax. This type of “A” player is a burden unto themselves; I shudder in thinking about assembling a team of the same personalities.
Instead, to paraphrase some advice from another engineering leader: build great teams by creating productive environments so it’s easy for “normal” folks to do great work. “A players only” is definitionally exclusive, situationally inflexible, and practically underwhelming. Great teams eschew the letters completely.
