IME when I've seen a "1/10th engineer" it's almost always been a total management failure.
Turns out reading HN comments is not a good way to run a company. Who would have thought?
Literally everyone thought this, and probably even the talentless hacks that you hired. Strange that you had to create a throwaway account to figure this one out.
Remind me, whose job is it to convince other execs and the board of the most appropriate talent strategy? Maybe lesson 1 here is "if you're running a company and don't trust your CTO, look for a new one"?
There's probably nothing wrong with your existing team except it being too large and democratic. One guy can bounce ideas around in his head faster than a dozen negotiating them with each other. I've seen teams like yours, and IME the issue isn't always incompetence, sometimes each of them thinks they're the rockstar. Anytime one of them doesn't get their way, they jam everything up for everyone else.
We've become too democratic as a whole. Nobody follows orders from above; everybody expects to have a say in things they don't even have a stake in. Whenever you get to hiring again, try stacking your team with 2-4 ex-military types and see how it works out for you (it works well for UPS well beyond that scale). You don't get bleeding-edge experience (and never a 10x-er), but you get tax breaks, competence, obedience, people trained to work as a cohesive unit, and you can wave the flag and call yourself a patriot (which helps with government contracts if that's your business).
> We need to keep track of the time your spending on your opex KIPs. We can't pay your expected bonus if you don't.