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The Case for Spiky People: Why Greatness Never Fits in Every Box
a John Candeto idea from his return to JUST PRESS RECORD
Matt Zeigler
May 14, 2025
All your life they tell you to be well-rounded.
Play the sport, but do the play, go out for student government and - you know what? Yes, but also, no.
Because when you want to get a job done, sometimes, average just ain’t gonna cut it.
John Candeto introduced me to his framing of less-than-well-rounded people in his prior company’s hiring decision process. He said,
"I thought about spiky people. And, and let me explain that... I spent about a decade building a software business. And one of the things we learned was, when we hired people who sort of, they kind of ticked every box on everything, they ended up to not be very good performers. They'd be okay. But, imagine a software engineer that, just everybody loves and gets along well with and is capable enough at coding and can also help out with the business stuff. And what we learned is if you could find an engineer that just you would marvel at their code, they may or may not be a lot of fun at the bar, and sometimes they were, but what we found is we learned that when we hired spiky people, meaning people that were just phenomenal at a thing, that worked a lot better than hiring people who could sort of cover everything."
But what happens if you put together a whole group of misfits like this? Besides potentially awful holiday parties. Certainly, nothing could get done except the occasional tightly focused project John…
"No great symphony was ever written by committee, you know?"
That’s when he got me. All the way.
Certain projects have to be solved at the micro level. They have to be done with a spike. With aplomb.
And you just can’t get that with average, well-rounded, overall “fine” people.
You will still need those rounded-rollers too! It’s just, the spiky people do special work. Spiky people make symphonies.