Would you want 10 Lionel Messis on your football team?
Would you want 10 Lionel Messis on your football team?
It’s that time of the year again! Peak football season is upon us. No, I am not talking about the Super Bowl. I am talking about the game played with the foot and with a round ball. Anyways, with that out of my system we can move on to the teaser/click-bait question I posed as the subject of today’s article.
Caveat Emptor: There will be many football references in this post.
Last week I attended a panel on the topic of scaling and hiring for software engineering teams. BTW does that mean that the good times are back - hmm? One of the panel members proudly stated that this company only hires 10x engineers. I do understand the merit and value of hiring prodigious engineers, but is hiring those alone a good strategy?
Now back to the teaser question. No, I would never build a football team comprised of 10 Lionel Messis. That team, whilst admittedly being incredibly entertaining, won’t be able to win much. The team is imbalanced. You can’t win with just Messi, in spite of him being the GOAT. You need the Busquets’ and Toures of the world, amongst many other players who each play a role to collectively deliver a championship winning team. Not only do you need other players with different skills to complement Messi, but you would not be able to afford 10 of him. Lionel commands about $100M/yr.
Even if you were able to afford 10 Messis, they wouldn’t perform at the level you expect of them. Messi plays high up the pitch, he doesn’t track back, tackle or defend much. Putting him as a central defender is both wasteful of his talents and frustrating to him. You’re playing him outside of his position.
We can learn a lot from observing many of the best football teams, especially on their approach to building a well balanced team. You need a very talented group of players, it absolutely helps if Mr. Messi is one of them, a system that works for that group and the true sense of collectivism: Team » Player. The Barcelona team of 2010-2011 is a very good example of that.
Is Mascherano a 10x player? No he isn’t, nor were Abidal, Pedro and several other members of that team, but collectively they were one of the finest football teams ever assembled.
"Nobody's given us a hiding like that but they deserve it" - Sir Alex Ferguson
What then, does it mean to build a well balanced software engineering team?
First, you should assess candidates against a common foundation, technical and otherwise. Every member of your team must exhibit the same set of core capabilities. Their strengths in these capabilities might vary, perhaps due to experience, but they must exhibit those. You won’t get into a Barcelona team if you cannot pass or control the ball. You don’t necessarily have to pass it like Xavi to get in, but you must show excellent ball control.
Second, you need to align talent and skills with challenges and problems. There’s no point in hiring a team of very seasoned engineers if you cannot offer them challenges that stimulate them and are ones that actually matter. Ones that have a big impact on your business. Many a times, I have seen pet-projects start because talented engineers are bored or unsatisfied with the work they are doing. That’s a waste of talent and previous resources akin to asking Messi to play at right-back.
Third, as you develop and build your teams you need to be mindful of fostering a sense of camaraderie, mentoring and growth. The junior engineers that you hire today should grow to becomes the stars of the future, with the right mentorship, guidance and challenges offered to them. I can attest to that. Some of the best engineers I know today were ones I hired from college ~10 years ago. They thrived because they were competent - they had a solid foundation - and were able to learn from more seasoned engineers who worked with them on hard problems. While you cannot turn a Mascherano into a Messi, no matter how hard you try, you should be able to develop a junior engineer into a fantastic 10x with the right people and culture.
A team that is able to grow and develop engineers regardless of experience is one of the telling signs of a high performance engineering team.
It’s worth noting that I am not advocating for having two set of hiring standards, one for prodigious and another for “the rest of us”. Absolutely not. You want to hire the very best you can at all times. But the very best need not be just the most prodigious. You’re trying to optimize for the whole, with the intent of building a world class team. The “best” is therefore situation and dependent on what you need to complement your team.
Again, we can learn from that exceptional 2010-2011 Barcelone team. Several of the players on that team were very good, but they weren’t prodigious or exceptional like Messi, Iniesta or Xavi. However, the team as a whole was exceptional. One of the very best 11 to ever grace a football pitch.
We can also learn from teams opting to collect the most glamorous players and to deliver nothing. None other than Messi himself played alongside Neymar and Mbappe at PSG, arguably three of top 20 footballers to ever play the game. That team failed to deliver and is deemed a failure. Before that, Madrid built the Galacticos v1.0 who are also another example of galactic stars failing to live up to their expectations. You need balance, cohesion, a sense of unity, purpose and much more than just a collection of stars to win.
Anyways, enough of sports-balls. Next week we resume business as usual. Thanks for reading!
If you are like me and are watch a lot of football, I’d encourage you to watch this video of Rio Ferdinand talking how this Barcelona team absolutely destroyed Manchester United in the 2010-2011 CL final.