Here are some anti-patterns that won’t help if you want to be a tech company…
Hiring for fit, not skills
FAANG companies love to do this, it means everybody gets on well but nobody really knows how to do new stuff. That’s fine if you are a services company that needs to scale, but not if you need to be innovative. If your culture doesn’t support oddball geniuses, you probably won’t have any.
Overuse of contractors
A byproduct of not hiring for skills means you need to use contractors/consultants. People paid on an hourly basis have no interest in finishing tasks sooner, or contributing ideas to your business.
Particularly for FAANG companies that means junior managers are telling experienced contractors what to do, rather than benefiting from the experience.
In a similar vein: if you are paying for software tools on an hourly basis, the suppliers have little incentive to improve them once you appear to be locked in. Bear that in mind when you decide not to send people to standards committees that work to make stuff portable.
You have to come to us
Some skills are very hard to find, there might only be one or two people on the planet that can do it, and they might not be able to relocate. Insisting that future employees have to move to where your headquarters are is not going to help you. In a WFH world under COVID-19 it makes no sense, and it doesn’t fit logically with using contractors from cheaper places.
Copying
Copying the competitions’ strategy and just trying to do it better is a surefire way to not come in first – see ARM processors section of dead parallel processors.