The article misses something super critical: why?. More specifically why a key few hires can change the trajectory of a company. The answer almost always comes down to one word and applies companies of any size: leadership.
Leadership is a concept largely foreign to the software industry for two reasons.
* Most software developers are never exposed to strong personalities and have no idea what strong leadership looks like. An excellent software developer tends to score high in agreeability, but a strong leader knows how to turn that down to 0 for maximum confrontation and/or defiance.
* Strong leaders know when to not follow trends with extreme criticality. This is highly paradoxical since so many software companies are funded by advertising which is a business of growing trends. Real leaders set new trends and take share from existing players setting their brand reputation in the process. Most people in software are deathly afraid to abandon conventions of comfort whether in business or in product/process innovation.
Leadership is a concept largely foreign to the software industry for two reasons.
* Most software developers are never exposed to strong personalities and have no idea what strong leadership looks like. An excellent software developer tends to score high in agreeability, but a strong leader knows how to turn that down to 0 for maximum confrontation and/or defiance.
* Strong leaders know when to not follow trends with extreme criticality. This is highly paradoxical since so many software companies are funded by advertising which is a business of growing trends. Real leaders set new trends and take share from existing players setting their brand reputation in the process. Most people in software are deathly afraid to abandon conventions of comfort whether in business or in product/process innovation.