The guru and the maven can help raise the bar for an entire engineering team faster than hiring experts or learning from the best.
The most effective software development teams need to be made up of a variety of different and complementary archetypes. You need deep technical experts, glue engineers, and those who are excellent communicators, mentors, and teachers.
With that being said:
- Hiring an expert developer is not the best way to improve the output of your team.
- And learning from the best is not the best learning.
If either of those statements feel controversial to you, I’m here to try to change your mind.