Who to Hire? Proactive or Skillful?

In my experience the proactive developer who is still learning rapidly learns and becomes experienced.

The experienced developer on the other hand has little motivation to become interested…

Didn't skilled workers become that way by being proactive about their knowledge? Managers need to manage and lead, period. In the startup world I see time and time again management defering their job to the engineers. These managers only serve as a distraction since the team can do just fine without them.

The ideal answer is you hire the skilled worker and you manage and lead them to success. You dont micro-manage. You dont delegate responsibility. You are there to remove any blockers and any unnecessary cognitive load. You are there to help them, help you, reach the business goals. You work for them. So hire the best most skilled people, and if you manage and lead properly, you challenge them and utilize them, you wont have a bunch of skilled workers uninterested in doing your job for you.

Mix and match them. If problems arise, ask them to work together on the same task. Don't micromanage when they might very well support each other.

Maybe they became uninterested after you started micromanaging them.

Two comments:

First, I take your claim seriously that it’s an either-or decision. Then, clearly I'd hire the "proactive" one. As a manager you simply don’t have time for micromanaging or you should be doing something else.

Second, I question your either-or. Why not try to find interested and experienced candidates? Sure, I don’t know anything about your business. It may be extraordinarily hard to make it happen. But that’s the job of the manager: develop to workplace in a way so that it becomes attractive instead of micromanaging.

In this hypothetical, it sounds like you're having to do extra work that they should be doing themselves in either scenario.

However, the proactive developer will eventually become skilled enough to not need constant cross-checks, whereas the uninterested developer will continue to coast without further intervention.

(Although, I would ask - why are they uninterested?)

Cross checking work doesn't scale. That'll only become more of a problem as your business grows and you have more important concerns that pull you farther and farther away from the actual hands-on work being done.

Attitude matters more if we are talking about the longer term. 6 months to a year in the less credential-ed devs will probably be independent. The experienced but uninterested devs are unlikely to have become more interested.

I need to micromanage

Are you sure?

Good luck.

Smart and gets things done always wins.

Good credentials doesn’t mean much.

yes, both...cross-check the unskilled and micromanage the uninterested...youll be fine

Motivated ppl are better unless hard or requiring exp or skills job is to be done