Comment by hinkley

I've noticed that some people hold a grudge against mediocrity that I don't entertain, and yet they don't know what to do with belligerent incompetence and so they try not to think about it, whereas I can't stop thinking about it.

Overqualified people working on a project can produce some heinous code. What I want as a team lead is to know how far I can trust people with different tasks, figure out who can be stretched in what directions, make a stab at scheduling the work out to try to minmax that equation, course correct a few times, observe outcomes and root causes and try to put safety equipment or process in the places where things start to go wrong the most.

You can get a lot of important if boring work done by 'average' or 'below average' developers - as long as they don't suffer from Dunning-Kruger.

Performance is on a bell curve (and not static). If you're trying to run your project like you only have to deal with the top 20%, well guess what, you're still going to have a bell curve. If you're in charge of any strategy and you won't acknowledge this, then you are the biggest idiot in the room, and I don't want to hear your opinions on who the second biggest idiot is.