A-players hire A-players

Or what happens when B-players hire C-players...

There is a nice story on Folklore about how Steve was lecturing on how to hire: “A-players hire A-players,” he said, “B-players hire C-players.” Apart from wondering how B-players ever get hired (they don’t: they start off as either A-players and deteriorate, or as C-players and improve), this quote jumped back into my head this week on learning that one of the websites that we had designed and delivered, in conjunction with a marketing company, was now going to be managed by ‘some guy doing a homer’.

Now, this website was for a professional — well, I'm not going to reveal what they did, nor am I going to reveal the web address, because I’m not out to name-and-shame, but they are a professional organization, providing a professional service, aimed at professional clients. So why not use professional marketing agencies, and a professional web designer?

I wouldn’t feel so bad if the site had been improved upon since they went away, but the site that we spent ages designing and developing is quickly falling apart. Margins are all over the place, headers move up and down depending on which page you’re on, the content has spilled out to become at least 1600-pixel wide, pictures are distorted and stretched, colors are chosen almost at random, links are broken, the site map page spews xml, cross-platform support is a joke, and — worst of all from a design perspective — Comic Sans has been given pride of place.

On one hand it was amusing watching the site deteriorate last week in front of our eyes: it was obvious that the new designer was working live on the CSS stylesheets, not quite understanding what the stylesheets were doing, and introducing table tags and other HTML 1.0 throwbacks as they went along. On the other hand, it was depressing to see our hard work being ripped apart, the visual design being broken, and the coding-standards ignored.

I don’t mind as much if clients find someone cheaper to do the job if the quality is as good as, or better, than what we can deliver: that way we know we have to stay competitive on pricing, and constantly work to improve our skills, and work efficiently. But when you pay less and your website breaks completely as a result, who’s actually benefitting?

So, back to the A-players hiring A-players. At least now I know that if anyone asks me to recommend a professional <insert-what-this-company-does> I’ll know what to say, “You don’t need a professional <insert-what-this-company-does>, apparently you just get some guy doing a homer to do it.”