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First tea to use flying wedge9/1/2023 This playbook stands at stark odds with the typical scaled company’s approach. If you wanted a less abstract description, you might just call it “hiring friends” although I’ve seen folks hire friends without committing to the full wedge. While the flying wedge isn’t relevant in modern warfare, it is a surprisingly common phenomenon in the modern workforce, and I’ve seen folks run this playbook at pretty much every company I’ve worked at. In all cases, it describes a small entry point that expands the deeper it gets. “Flying wedge” has been used to describe an American football play and an early fighter jet formation, but its first usage came from a Greek and Roman military formation where soliders formed in a triangular wedge to penetrate an opposing formation. One of my teammates–one who had joined the team through the more traditional route of interviewing–described this pattern as the flying wedge. (In his defense, that’s because the product was canceled shortly after he joined, although to his discredit he did continue to publicly refer to himself as the product’s Chief Architect.) A third previous colleague reached out to our Director, and without a single interview we’d soon hired a new Chief Architect who would ultimately never write or read a technical specification about our product, nor contribute a single line of code. Instead, our new manager brought over one of his previous colleagues. We didn’t run a hiring process, do interviews, or consider candidates on the existing team. That new manager soon decided he needed a tech lead on his team. Instead, our Director brought on a colleague he’d worked with before. We didn’t run a hiring process, or even do interviews. When I worked at Yahoo!, our team needed another engineering manager.
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