Your first comment re: exclusionary is simply a filter for the flip side of your 2nd point.
The damage of a bad hire is 10x as bad as the positive impact of a good hire.
A network of competent, easy to get along with people allows one to avoid the truly bad hires that we've all experienced.
Sure you may view it as exclusionary, but if you're hiring for seniors, and been in your niche a decade or more.. the likelihood of someone no one in your network has ever heard of being a great hire vs a terrible hire weighs heavily on a managers brain. Many of these niches are small and are the same few dozen people recirculating over and over. If you are going to spend more time with these people than your spouse or kids, you would like it be be minimally painful.
Joel Spolsky has written extensively about avoiding bad hires. Average and above is the ultimate goal. I agree the impact of a bad hire far outweighs good hires because they consumer the time of managers. Good hires only need a quick steer now and again. Bad hires need a manager to spoon feed them until layoff season arrives.
I'm not sure about the 10x part. On my team I have roughly 15 coworkers. Two are pretty useless, or at least perform at a level dramatically lower than the other 13. So how do we deal with it? Like the Internet, we route around them. Sure they're a waste of company resources/money, but big companies often waste so much money in IT that it's not really a significant factor.
Now if your team is very small, one or two bad apples can be quite damaging.
Maybe you've not gotten the truly bad apples, or have enough process in place to mitigate.
I've been in environments with people who are breaking things at a rate that causes a day of their work to cause more than a day of work for others.
Fighting with management for months and then shunting them off to their own 'strategic branch' for 6 months was the only way to protect the team until they were fired.
Most people don’t understand how bad “average” is.
It’s true that a bad hire has a large impact. But people assume this means the folks like you’re describing. When not taking money into account I view those types of people as net neutral.
A good litmus is to answer the question “would the team be any better off if we replaced them with no one”, and usually the answer is “no” or at least close to it.
Factoring money in does change things. Especially for smaller companies. But even then people overestimate what “bad” means when they cite the massive impact of a bad hire
Yup - there are actually net negative contributors that simply removing would cause in an increase in team output.
Whether it be rate of damage to codebase, manual interventions in prod, hurting morale, time suck in meetings/idle chitchat, causing drama with stakeholders that needs to be triaged, etc.
They are rare, but they happen, and the process of onboarding, feedback, giving a chance, documenting, and off boarding can take a year.
The damage of a bad hire is 10x as bad as the positive impact of a good hire. A network of competent, easy to get along with people allows one to avoid the truly bad hires that we've all experienced.
Sure you may view it as exclusionary, but if you're hiring for seniors, and been in your niche a decade or more.. the likelihood of someone no one in your network has ever heard of being a great hire vs a terrible hire weighs heavily on a managers brain. Many of these niches are small and are the same few dozen people recirculating over and over. If you are going to spend more time with these people than your spouse or kids, you would like it be be minimally painful.