Be very selective during the hiring process. You may be forced to throw out what could be good apples, but at least it reduces the chances of you hiring a bad apple.
I have to say there is always two sides of the story.
Sometimes these "bad apples" are actually decent or good employees, but the disfunctional dynamics, or even maybe bad managers can turn a potentially good employee into a bad one.
When managers are incompetent technically, some tend to rely on few employees they trust on decission. The problem is that these trusted employees become trusted not necessary of their technical skills, but their affinity, (or ass kissing abilities) to their manager.
A good manager, will be able to take advice from all his employees, and even his most technical ones. A bad manager will rely a lot more on his chronies, which, there is a great chance, they are going to be technicallly incompetent.
So, if you are actually good, but forced to implement things you think are stupid, just because your manager happens to trust other people's opinion's more, then it it is going to be frustrating.
Some people suck it up, some leave, some just moan and complain, and of course are labeled bad apples.
And this happens way to often, especially in larger companies. Small companies, will go with the technical competence, otherwise die.
Technical incompetence and chronyism thrives is large coorporations, with lots of managerial layers.
Sometimes, there are truly people that are bad apples, and shouldn't be there, but often there are people that are great, but slowly become a bad apple b/c of the above circumstances.
I like bad apples, if they are good at what they do. Overworked software development teams where everybody just says "yes" to incompentent management that results in everybody having to work 200% because of poor choice of technology, waterfall development model and hiring people that don't do their job. The key for being a successful bad apple is to not bitch behind peoples back, but be straight with your criticism and improve stuff, or switch jobs.
Point taken. My point was rather implement a strict hiring process to weed out bad apples even if it has the consequences of false positives and potentially good people are thrown out.
Something that your comment reminded me of is that your team is only as strong as the worst employee. If you are hiring bad apples as managers then it has the very likely potential of being bad apples all the way down.
Be too selective and you won't hire anyone good either. Great people are often eccentric, with weird personality kinks that can make them harder to work with. In my experience, smart, creative, brilliant people are pretty much always harder to work with, opinionated, pushy, and demanding. But I'll take that over "average but does what he's told" any day.
