Extremely true, and very important from my experience too. Hiring other people to work with you isn't just about having more bags of meat to write more code, but about having other people with different perspectives. This can be about ideas in business, design decisions, and even just looking at your code and spotting problems you missed.
"Diversity in thought" is incredibly important to success in a project of non-trivial size, and if everyone thinks exactly the same way, it's all too easy to make bad decisions as a result of the echo chamber.
I imagine this is a major contributor to the failure of many startups -- we often laugh at the startups that come up with absurd business models that could obviously never work, or develop apps that clearly nobody would want to use, but simply pointing and laughing belies the truth: what happened was that they didn't have anyone who disagreed, who thought differently.
Sometimes you just need someone to point out that what you're doing is dumb, and that there's better options.
"what happened was that they didn't have anyone [internally] who disagreed, who thought differently."
I suppose that someone on the team could have "known" that the product wouldn't succeed with customers before it shipped, but the strategy of knowing what will work with customers in advance is considered a bit outdated, especially in software which is now relatively cheap to prototype and get out in front of customers.
"Diversity in thought" is incredibly important to success in a project of non-trivial size, and if everyone thinks exactly the same way, it's all too easy to make bad decisions as a result of the echo chamber.
I imagine this is a major contributor to the failure of many startups -- we often laugh at the startups that come up with absurd business models that could obviously never work, or develop apps that clearly nobody would want to use, but simply pointing and laughing belies the truth: what happened was that they didn't have anyone who disagreed, who thought differently.
Sometimes you just need someone to point out that what you're doing is dumb, and that there's better options.