Pavel Durov

And you fire this person.

And a few weeks you realize you actually don't need and you never needed the third engineer.

The problem was this guy who created more issues and more problems than he solved.

That is so counterintuitive because in developing tech projects we tend to think that you just throw more people into something and then

things get solved miraculously by themselves, just because more people means more attention from them now.

Oh yes, because the other thing that people don't realize is how demotivating working with the B player is.

Everybody can tell if the other person, the other engineer they're working with is really competent.

And it's very visible if the person is not competent, they're asking the wrong questions, they keep lagging behind.

you get this dissatisfaction, this feeling that you are not able to realize your full potential, accomplish what you're really meant to accomplish because of this person working next to you or pretending to work next to you.

And by the way, in some cases, it's not because the person is lazy.

In some cases, it's just their mental, their intellectual ability is not there.

It's not about experience.

Most often it's about natural ability and persistence.

In 90% of cases it's just the inability to focus on one task for an extended period of time.

Not everybody has this ability.

So for people who do have this ability, it's an insult to work alongside someone

who is distracted and cannot go deep in the projects that they're responsible for.

Well, it's in line with my overall philosophy.

I think competition leads to progress.

If you want to create an ideal process for selecting the most qualified people for certain specific tasks you have in mind, what can be better than a competition?