> We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do

Or from Bell Labs: "How do you manage a bunch of geniuses? You don't"

  > Companies who generically look for "the best engineers"

If you need "the best" then your system is (most likely) too complicated and you're going to have a hard time keeping "the best" as their work becomes frustrating.

  > The best engineers will tell you why your architecture is wrong, why your code sucks, why your timeline is unrealistic, and why your product decisions make no technical sense. If you're not ready for that level of pushback, you don't actually want the best engineers.

I want to stress how important this is. An engineer should be grumpy. The job is to find problems AND fix them. They don't just complain but argue why it should be done another way. They complain about what seems like petty things because they understand that if a big problem can be broken down into small problems than the accumulation of small problems creates big problems.

People often conflate phrases like "but what about", "how do we handle", "okay, but" or so on as "no". But these are not "no" phrases by engineers. These are "I'm thinking out loud" phrases.

If you surround yourself with yesmen you've surrounded yourself with people who don't care about the company, they just care about their own survival within it. Unless you're perfect, you need people that are unafraid to challenge management when they think management is wrong. You need people to be able to make mistakes because hindsight is a million times clearer than foresight.