I've been fascinated by Moneyball and the efforts made in sports to assemble good teams using data more than opinions. I used to think about baseball more, but lately I've been intrigued by American football. There are challenges in assembling a team, with the constraints of a limited budget, existing contracts that cannot be changed, and the fact that one player isn't a replacement for another, even when they have similar skill sets.

That got me thinking that we could do this with our development teams. Certainly the skills that each of posses might be closer to one another than athletes, but that doesn't change the need to have a variety of skills on a project. We need someone that writes great T-SQL, someone that can manage front end code, someone that can build and provision environments, someone to help test.

I know that many of you can do all these things, but do you want to? Maybe more important, is it a good use of your skills as a developer to manage restores or schedule index maintenance? Those are tasks that might provide a welcome break, but they aren't necessarily the tasks that I want you to be responsible for or even spend time performing.

There is also the very, very high likelihood that the people hired in your environment have different levels of skills. In a group of T-SQL developers, or SSIS package builders, or any other group that each of you can learn from the others. And you should learn from others, since it's entirely likely that some of you will leave, and others will need to handle the load left behind. After all, the next person hired is as likely to be the weakest team member as the strongest.