Hi, guys! Continuing the topic of recruiting employees, we would like to talk about the professional skills of candidates and the requirements put forward to new specialists. How technically savvy should a newcomer be? Should you hire an experienced developer who will be head and shoulders above the rest of the team participants? Or is it enough for an employee to correspond to some average bar? What choice do you make in your company? In order to better understand the essence of the problem, it may be useful to move away from it for a moment to another area, where similar solutions have long been found.

It's obviously, that an arbalest as a device appeared much later than a bow. The problem solved by its creator is fairly simple and clear: it was desirable to save the kinetic energy of a stretched bowstring without the participation of an archer's musculature. As a result, a crossbow turned out to be more cumbersome, less long-range, more expensive in production, less rapid, less killing at medium distances. A bow (especially a long one) was beating an arbalest on all indicators, nevertheless, after the popularization of a crossbow, almost all the armies in one or another way started using primarily an arbalest, not a bow. And the reason for this is quite ordinary.

To become Robin Hood and make an arrow fly, at least, in the right direction, let alone any accuracy, you need to spend more than one month, and maybe even more than one year on study and training. And getting a whole team of good archers working together is even less likely and more difficult. But with crossbows and crossbowmen everything is much easier, because a couple of hours briefing is enough to organize a protective wall of arrows in the closest skirmish with an enemy. It is economically and strategically simpler to find and hire ten crossbowmen and give them ten crossbows than to raise one archer.

Of course, a senior-archer will be five times more efficient than any junior-crossbowman, and bureaucracy for one archer is not required at all. And it is not necessary to organize a teamwork for the only archer. At the same time, for those ten crossbowmen you need to hire a separate team leader, a couple of office managers, an HR agent to replace the dead and dismissed crossbowmen and a court holidays organizer to entertain a crowd of crossbowmen until they shoot. As a result, bow skills became a pleasant bonus when hiring crossbowmen, and later it turned into a hobby rather than a main profession. Although, of course, at conferences of crossbowmen they all are talking solely about proper bow mastery and how much technique of bow proficiency helps to shoot with a crossbow. And notice that for every ten crossbowmen in a team it would be nice to have at least a couple of archers. And that if all ten thousand crossbowmen in the regular army could use a bow, then it would be possible to seize Byzantium. But we all know that, as a result, standardization always wins professionalism.

Riter development team