Pro-agile hiring

[Pho Tek]

I'm concerned that excessively pro-agile hiring criteria may push us into a tar pit in which innovation skills�traditionally our strength�will be sacrificed for collaboration skills.

I've worked in a team whereby one of the developers is causing much grief among the team because of his interpersonal problems. The powers that be demands that the developer be retained because of his "genius".

The quote above is taken from an sdmagazine article by Warren Keuffel. I tend to agree with the author - from the experience described above - and would prefer someone who can "get along" to a dysfunctional loner. What are your opinions on this ?

Regards,

Pho

[Lasse Koskela]

"It depends..."

[Scott Ambler]

I've seen enough organizations get burned by their "dysfunctional geniuses" that my advice is to find good people who can work together effectively.

At How Can Enterprise-Level Professionals Be Agile? I list some strategies which you can follow to help build a good agile team (it's from the point of view of building an enterprise architecture team instead of a project team, but the ideas are there). It doesn't indicate that you should include a dysfunctional genius.

- Scott

[Rick O'Shay]

Independent innovation and collaboration are not mutually exclusive concepts. The prima donna can disturb team dynamics but good management can solve most if not all of those issues. On the other spectrum you have the tyranny of the dispassionate and the weak and that can be a worse problem.

Regardless, you cannot manage around a person; you need to manage around the group and assume that the group resources will not be static and that skills will fluctuate. It's a well known fact that programmer skill and productivity often vary by an order of magnitude.