A contradiction to Joel's thoughts on micromanagent

Do you read Joel Spolsky, either at joelonsoftware.com or on inc.com? If not and if you happen to be related to a technology company, you must subscribe to his writings now and probably read the archive. He presents well thought out essays on building high quality technology products, high performing technology building teams and so on. I have been reading him for a few years now and have generally liked what I read.

But lately, I have been having a major contradiction with what he says and this post is about that. He talks about why micromanagement is a bad idea and that he would never micromanage since he always hires the best talent available. So far so good. Till the point that he wants to build a team of a few dozen people, you will never end up with talent which is anything less than the best. Even then you need to be in a position where you can control the business requirements such that you are willing to wait for talent before you expand on your product offerings. For Joel, that's always possible, since he owns his company, and hence has a control over who gets hired and hence he has a strong tight fist control over all the positive cycle he wishes to generate.

Once you get out of that comfort circle, that of having control over the timelines as well as the size of the company, you are in hard luck. Once you have time pressures (and some will argue that they can always control it, but I don't agree) you sometimes need to build a team in a short span and hence you are always constrained by the talent pool available at THAT POINT of time. So, you might always end up hiring somebody who is say only 95% of your worst previous talent. So, you see that the lowest talent point of yours is already going down.

Now, similarly, if you wish to expand your product offerings, you need to hire a LOT of people, some of whom will always slip through despite being not the best. They may not be less smart, but may have a lazy attitude, or may have a indisciplined work culture (those people who won't check in code in time, or break the build, or not write documentation, or introduce the first shitty code since nobody was looking around) and thats the beginning of the slide. Now, if you don't have shareholders to respond to, you can stick with only a narrow product offering and get away with it, as Joel has. But no public listed company is in a position to totally neglect their expansion of product offerings only for the express desire of keeping only the 100% best talent.

I am not saying that hiring the best talent is not possible or should not be the endeavor of any manager/owner. All I am saying is that as an engineer or a manager of a few years experience in the industry, you are quite often to find yourself in the company of less than 100% talented people every now and then for reasons you can't always control. You can always chose to start up your own company with these principles as your primary motive, as Joel has done, but not everybody is going to be in a position to do that. If everybody in fact did that, then all companies would be just 2 or 3 or 4 member companies working on fairly trivial products.

My point is that once you talk about building large wealth creating organizations like the Yahoos, Googles, Microsofts, IBMs etc, you will definitely end up in a position where you will end up with less than 100% perfect talent and from there on, you need to bring on the best management, and possibly micromanagement, skills to the table to make it all work.

ps: Feel free to critique what I have written here, since I am still philosophizing on this idea. :-)