Today I learned about a new hiring concept called "player-coach," and I realized I've always used player-coach criteria for my hiring. Similar to a role on the court where players both participate in the game and provide guidance: a player coach might also attend meetings, write code, and provide advice to the team. They possess both the leadership capability to mentor while growing, and the technical capability to make important decisions. In the past, large companies preferred managers to focus solely on people and ICs to focus solely on tasks. However, a "player-coach" role means leaders must be constantly involved in delivering results—writing code, fixing bugs, personally launching new features, conducting user interviews, and so on. The hiring process is the same as mine: first, do it yourself to understand the standards and intricacies, then hire people who can both lead and deliver. So how do you find these people? The founder of Gamma explained that they have a three-month trail (so long it surprised the host) where they treat candidates like members of their own team and have them do things from scratch to see how they demonstrate leadership and hands-on skills. Looking back, many of the candidates I hired for important positions failed within a month due to this issue. This is why I later stopped hiring small-time leaders who managed people at large companies or C-level employees who didn't produce results at small companies. People who only knew how to manage but not how to play a player, or who only knew how to play a player but had no mentoring skills, quickly stopped working with me. I worried that the repeated hiring and firing process would be too much of a hassle for HR, but actually, if I had adopted a three-month trail system earlier, I could have solved it (assuming you were always the one cleaning up the mess, of course). If I hadn't learned the concept of player-coach today, I think I'd still be torn between guilt and whether I was too demanding or whether I was being unkind by not protecting a veteran player.