"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
“Little Echo” by Zvi [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 4:08
I believe that we will win. An echo of an old ad for the 2014 US men's World Cup team. It did not win. I was in Berkeley for the 2025 Secular Solstice. We gather to sing and to reflect. The night's theme was the opposite…
“A Pragmatic Vision for Interpretability” by Neel Nanda [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:03:58
Executive Summary The Google DeepMind mechanistic interpretability team has made a strategic pivot over the past year, from ambitious reverse-engineering to a focus on pragmatic interpretability: Trying to directly solve…
“AI in 2025: gestalt” by technicalities [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 41:59
This is the editorial for this year's "Shallow Review of AI Safety". (It got long enough to stand alone.) Epistemic status: subjective impressions plus one new graph plus 300 links. Huge thanks to Jaeho Lee, Jaime Sevill…
“Eliezer’s Unteachable Methods of Sanity” by Eliezer Yudkowsky [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 16:13
"How are you coping with the end of the world?" journalists sometimes ask me, and the true answer is something they have no hope of understanding and I have no hope of explaining in 30 seconds, so I usually answer someth…
“An Ambitious Vision for Interpretability” by leogao [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 8:49
The goal of ambitious mechanistic interpretability (AMI) is to fully understand how neural networks work. While some have pivoted towards more pragmatic approaches, I think the reports of AMI's death have been greatly ex…
“MIRI’s 2025 Fundraiser” by alexvermeer [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 15:37
MIRI is running its first fundraiser in six years, targeting $6M. The first $1.6M raised will be matched 1:1 via an SFF grant. Fundraiser ends at midnight on Dec 31, 2025. Support our efforts to improve the conversation…
“The Boring Part of Bell Labs” by Elizabeth [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 25:57
It took me a long time to realize that Bell Labs was cool. You see, my dad worked at Bell Labs, and he has not done a single cool thing in his life except create me and bring a telescope to my third grade class. Nothing…

«1...5678910»