"How to Hire a Team" by Gretta Duleba

"How to Hire a Team" by Gretta Duleba

Author: LessWrong February 2, 2026 Duration: 8:40
LessWrong (Curated & Popular)
TechnologyCulturePhilosophySocietySociety & Culture
A low-effort guide I dashed off in less than an hour, because I got riled up.

  1. Try not to hire a team. Try pretty hard at this.
    1. Try to find a more efficient way to solve your problem that requires less labor – a smaller-footprint solution.
    2. Try to hire contractors to do specific parts that they’re really good at, and who have a well-defined interface. Your relationship to these contractors will mostly be transactional and temporary.
    3. If you must, try hiring just one person, a very smart, capable, and trustworthy generalist, who finds and supports the contractors, so all you have to do is manage the problem-and-solution part of the interface with the contractors. You will need to spend quite a bit of time making sure this lieutenant understands what you’re doing and why, so be very choosy not just about their capabilities but about how well you work together, how easily you can make yourself understood, etc.
  2. If that fails, hire the smallest team that you can. Small is good because:
    1. Managing more people is more work.
      1. The relationship between number of people and management overhead is roughly O(n) but unevenly distributed; some people [...]
---

First published:
January 29th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cojSyfxfqfm4kpCbk/how-to-hire-a-team

---



Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.


Dive into a stream of ideas where technology, culture, philosophy, and society intersect, all through the lens of the LessWrong (Curated & Popular) podcast. This isn't a traditional talk show with hosts, but rather a curated audio library of the most impactful writing from the LessWrong community. Each episode is a narration of a full post, selected for its high value and interesting arguments, focusing on pieces that have been formally curated or have garnered significant community approval. You'll hear clear, thoughtful readings of essays that tackle complex topics like artificial intelligence, rational thinking, moral philosophy, and the forces shaping our future. The audio format lets you absorb these dense, often paradigm-shifting concepts during a commute or a walk, turning written analysis into an immersive listening experience. This particular feed is deliberately selective, offering a manageable stream of the community's standout work. For those who want an even deeper dive into the discussion, there are broader feeds available. The LessWrong (Curated & Popular) podcast serves as an intellectual filter, delivering the signal through the noise and inviting you to engage with some of the most rigorously examined ideas on the internet.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Official website RSS
apple_music
LessWrong (Curated & Popular)
Podcast Episodes
“Claude 4.5 Opus’ Soul Document” by null [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:19:57
Summary As far as I understand and uncovered, a document for the character training for Claude is compressed in Claude's weights. The full document can be found at the "Anthropic Guidelines" heading at the end. The Gist…
“Alignment remains a hard, unsolved problem” by null [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 23:23
Thanks to (in alphabetical order) Joshua Batson, Roger Grosse, Jeremy Hadfield, Jared Kaplan, Jan Leike, Jack Lindsey, Monte MacDiarmid, Francesco Mosconi, Chris Olah, Ethan Perez, Sara Price, Ansh Radhakrishnan, Fabien…
“Video games are philosophy’s playground” by Rachel Shu [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 31:50
Crypto people have this saying: "cryptocurrencies are macroeconomics' playground." The idea is that blockchains let you cheaply spin up toy economies to test mechanisms that would be impossibly expensive or unethical to…
“Stop Applying And Get To Work” by plex [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 2:52
TL;DR: Figure out what needs doing and do it, don't wait on approval from fellowships or jobs. If you... Have short timelines Have been struggling to get into a position in AI safety Are able to self-motivate your effort…
“Gemini 3 is Evaluation-Paranoid and Contaminated” by null [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 14:59
TL;DR: Gemini 3 frequently thinks it is in an evaluation when it is not, assuming that all of its reality is fabricated. It can also reliably output the BIG-bench canary string, indicating that Google likely trained on a…

«1...678910