8 ms·

How to hire the best people you've ever worked with (2007)

137 points by wyclif 11y ago

geofft 11y ago
> Now, you might say, Marc, that's great for a young kid who has a lot of spare time to stay current, but what about the guy who has a family and only has time for a day job and can't spend nights and weekends reading blogs and staying that current? > Well, when you run into a person like that who isn't current in their field, the other implication is that their day job isn't keeping them current. > If they've been in that job for a while, then ask yourself, is the kind of person you're looking for really going to have tolerated staying in a day job where their skills and knowledge get stale, for very long? If they've got a family to feed, the answer is "yes," right? Or "That's why they're looking for a job with your company." Alternatively, if they've got an H-1B...
rumcajz 11y ago
> REST vs SOAP, the new Facebook API, whether Ruby on Rails is scalable, what do you think of Sun's new Java-based scripting language, Google's widgets API, Amazon S3, etc. Really? Why would anyone learn any of that unless they actually need it to make their work done?
- overgard 11y ago
  Because learning that kind of thing increases the possibility space of what you can do. Insights usually come from a diversity of knowledge, if you only learn what you need to know you'll be exceptionally average.
  - DavidWoof 11y ago
    I agree in theory, but the problem is that everybody has their own personal "10 most interesting things right this moment" list, and they often don't match up even (or especially) among excellent programmers. So the fact that somebody isn't spending time with your favorite new toy doesn't mean they're not constantly learning, especially when the top 10 list is as ridiculously subjective as the one in the article.
    - KaneMorgan 11y ago
      I read it as they should be interested in something, not they should be interested in what you're interested in.
    - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
      That's not his point. He doesn't care that your list is different than his; he cares that you have one.
- autotune 11y ago
  Messing around with an API in your off time is important because it means you can change contexts and get up to speed more quickly without having to learn everything from scratch on the job, and of course context is everything. I'm probably not going to be super into a social network's API but for things that are server-related? Damn right I want to know how build 30 servers with just a POST request, a for loop, and some json data. You can then apply that knowledge to something a bit more boring you might get hired for if needed, like a startup that needs someone who can answer questions about how to properly use their API to make a number of POST requests to send hundreds of orders of glitter to various companies who have not sent a response to said persons job application... in theory of course.
  - ohyes 11y ago
    No it doesn't. It means you have a lot of free time and can be used as cannon fodder for the startup. You will work 80-100 hour weeks producing exceptional work for compensation that is below the area average. Let's get real, employers /want/ young naive fresh out of college kids who've never been burned and don't know any better than to give their early to mid twenties to a VC/startup for peanuts. Messing around with a rest API is just a sign that you are potential prey, a fresh kill for the hamburger machine.
    - tamana 11y ago
      You said it yourself, these candidates produce exceptional work. The fact that they may be underpaid is a problem with their (group) ability to negotiate pay, not a failure in hiring manager's talent recognition.
    - autotune 11y ago
      > You will work 80-100 hour weeks producing exceptional work for compensation that is below the area average. This is what glassdoor reviews are for, and is entirely dependent on the company. Besides that it's a two way street, you bolster up the resume and if it turns out it's not what you expected than you now have the skills to find an environment that is what you're looking for. Alternatively you could of course spend your early-mid 20s being homeless and join the gutter punks in trying to sell weed to those VCs around The Haight instead, but that's not as fulfilling or lucrative IMHO.
- mattmanser 11y ago
  To be fair this was 2007, they were interesting things at the time that you might plausibly muck around with for a side project.
- AYBABTME 11y ago
  Because they're curious about it? The same as they might be curious about the geology of Mars and the history of the world since the Renaissance. Maybe just for the kick of it, or because they have a side project in mind.
- wyclif 11y ago
  Keep in mind this was written in 2007. I don't think all of that stuff is irrelevant by any means, though. Nine years later, the list might look somewhat different, but his point is that it's an indicator of intellectual curiosity, not things that are directly practical for the job the employer is offering.
jph 11y ago
My top hiring metric is grit. Wikipedia says it's an individual's passion for a particular long-term goal or end state, coupled with a powerful motivation to achieve their objective. This perseverance of effort promotes the overcoming of obstacles and challenges... and serves as a driving force in achievement realization.
- CryoLogic 11y ago
  I'm no expert in this area, but when I look for potential co-founders I always think the best metric is how self driven they are. It's so easy to find people who went to school, got the grades and graduated. Its harder to find people who go and do things outside of the standard.
  - WWLink 11y ago
    I take it you don't care much for employees that do things besides programming? Like I dunno.. hobbies, and family, and stuff? Call me lazy if you wish but I almost never want to program during the weekend. That time is better spent with family, or playing games, or washing the car. Or something. Anything really. If I come into work having burned my brain out over the weekend programming something, then I don't produce results that satisfy me. Hehe.
    - yareally 11y ago
      I do some hobby programming for fun, but I don't expect everyone I work with to do that. I do it for fun and wouldn't otherwise. When I interview developers, I ask them about their hobbies in general. Sure, I throw in some technical questions depending on the position (usually language/platform agnostic), but those aren't the focus or the best way to hire to me. I want to know if they have an interest/curiosity into how things work (problem solving/debugging skills), can communicate effectively (can work as a team) and are passionate about something in their life (tells me they can focus on something when needed). I follow up with questions about how they solved some difficult problem in their life (could be programming or could be just learning how to change their oil). I ask them how they came up with a solution and what they learned about it. I want to see if they learned enough from it to be able to explain it to me or anyone else in the interview. Doing that gives me an idea of how their communication skills are. I want to gauge their problem solving and debugging skills during the interview, because I think almost anyone can be taught to be a better programmer, but it's much harder to learn to be an exceptional troubleshooter/problem solver and that tends to be a majority of what software developers do.
overgard 11y ago
His thing about reading too much into references is pretty bad. Like "moody" = "clinically depressed." Pretty big jump there! Could you really say that about a stranger based on a tepid reference? Maybe their project was stupid, or they had a bad seating arrangement where they were stuck next to an annoyingly chatty person, or they just weren't naturally bubbly, or ... whatever, there's like a thousand possible reasons to consider before you jump to "clinically depressed" with regard to a stranger. I also think the thing about drive is a bit naive. If you're dealing with a young unknown quantity than sure, drive can be a useful metric, but on the other hand if you're dealing with a proven reliable professional with domain expertise, who cares if they have drive? I've worked with plenty of really good people that don't want to touch a computer after they go home, and yet are incredibly capable at their jobs, and that's totally fine.
- wpietri 11y ago
  Yeah, I share your concern on drive. People who are incredibly driven are surely going in some direction, but it's not clear to me that it's always the right one, and I've often seen them drive in a direction that is different than where the team is going or what the company needs.
- hobs 11y ago
  Yeah, I prefer vision and ability to deliver over some person's belief in your perceived drive. Its a very simple con to make someone think you are determined, its much harder to con results.
- geofft 11y ago
  I interpreted that passage as that he had once gotten a review of someone as "moody" and it turned out they were actually clinically depressed, and similarly with the other reviews. Not much better to extrapolate from one data point than from zero, though!
- ntumlin 11y ago
  Similar to that, when he mentioned constantly interrupting = egomaniac. I've noticed that I'm fairly bad about interrupting people, but I don't think it's because I feel I'm way better than everyone else and my opinion is so important, but that's what my parents and some of my close friends do as well. When I do it with people besides them, I usually stop myself and maybe apologize, but by then it's too late. I know I must be annoying, but surely that doesn't mean I'm a bad developer.
JamesBarney 11y ago
Specifically, I am unaware of any actual data that shows a correlation between raw intelligence, as measured by any of the standard metrics (educational achievement, intelligence tests, or skill at solving logic puzzles) and company success. I don't mean to be nit-picky but I enjoy an internally consistent burden of proof in a blog post. In this post he seemed to move the goal posts. He dismisses intelligence as valuable because it doesn't meet an impossibly high burden of evidence. But then argues you should instead should use drive, curiosity, and ethics without substantiating his claims. For example, test programmers on basic algorithms -- linked lists, binary searches. Just in pseudocode -- it doesn't matter if they know the relevant Java library calls. Programming and algorithms are two different sets of skills. Writing a stable, easy to use, useful java/ruby/python/javascript library is a very different skill set from solving algorithmic puzzles, which are both unrelated to recreating a linked list from scratch in 10 minutes on a whiteboard.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  Yes arguing from your own ignorance is not the most reliable way to convince someone of something. In regards intelligence it is the only thing other than work tests that has been shown to have any major correlation with job performance. Edit. This paper make for a great read on this topic. 1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227600464_Stubborn_Reliance_on_Intuition_and_Subjectivity_in_Employee_Selection https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227600464_Stubborn_...
  - dlss 11y ago
    Conscientiousness is also correlated with job performance, and is about on par with IQ for predicting lifetime earnings. Agreeableness (also a Big-Five trait) is also quite important in cooperative settings (though both have small effects relative to IQ for single shot task performance). http://www.gwern.net/Conscientiousness%20and%20online%20education#conscientiousness http://www.gwern.net/Conscientiousness%20and%20online%20educ... has a nice overview of the literature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientiousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientiousness does a reasonable job describing the trait. Edit: while we're listing large causal factors for work performance, I feel appalled I forgot to mention genetics... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9739126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9739126
d23 11y ago
I know it's Marc Andreessen and I know it's a nit-pick, but did he never learn how to use a paragraph? Short, standalone sentences can be powerful to make a point, but they can be tiring when used every single paragraph.
ishener 11y ago
just in case people miss that: this was written by Marc Andreessen
untilHellbanned 11y ago
> Most people softball deficiencies in people they've worked with when they do reference calls. Everything these days is so PC that I wish people would even softball the deficiencies. We are in the age of recommendation inflation. Everybody is "great". There is no "but...".
mabbo 11y ago
> Google, on the other hand, uses the metric of educational achievement. > Have a PhD? Front of the line. Masters? Next. Bachelor's? Go to the end. That's... That's not really true at all. While I interned there (during my bachelors) I met a lot of people without their masters. One guy had only his high school diploma.
- s3nnyy 11y ago
  Although a degree seems to be a poor predictor of performance in a software engineering role (http://blog.alinelerner.com/how-different-is-a-b-s-in-computer-science-from-a-m-s-in-computer-science-when-it-comes-to-recruiting/ http://blog.alinelerner.com/how-different-is-a-b-s-in-comput...), I am sure the percentage of people with degrees at Google is higher compared to "normal" companies. I have some insights in Google-Zürich and the percentage of Masters and PhDs is above average compared to other companies. (Disclaimer: I live in Zurich and I used to code for a living. Now, I hire engineers for different companies in Switzerland. If you look for a tech-job in Zurich, check out my story "8 reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT" on https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-to-switzerland-to-work-in-it-c7ac18af4f90 https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-t... or ping me at the mail-address in my HN-profile.)
tokenadult 11y ago
The blog post says, "Specifically, I am unaware of any actual data that shows a correlation between raw intelligence, as measured by any of the standard metrics (educational achievement, intelligence tests, or skill at solving logic puzzles) and company success." That's just an argument from ignorance. According to Hacker News comment karma scores, one of my most popular comments ever was a comment that included a FAQ about what the research shows about company hiring procedures.[1] What the research says is that for hiring workers for any kind of job, a work-sample test and a test of general intelligence are about tied for effectiveness in identifying good job candidates. ALL hiring procedures sometimes miss good workers, and all hiring procedures sometimes result in hiring lousy workers, but if you want to optimize, the way to optimize is to hire workers who are good at doing the specific tasks you are hiring for (that's what a work-sample test shows you) and how have good general cognitive ability, which shows as well as any indicator that they can learn to do new tasks in the future. References to the research literature are available in my previous comment, linked in the footnote. Anything else you do in hiring, for whatever reason, has less benefit to your company than checking whether job candidates can do the job tasks and checking whether the job candidates are smart or dull. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543
- stanleydrew 11y ago
  It seems most people have missed what he actually said, which was that he's not aware of research linking employee intelligence to "company success". Employee intelligence may well be linked in research to employee success, but he didn't suggest otherwise. Employee success and company success are two different outcomes of interest.
ccvannorman 11y ago
TLDR: There are thresholds for intelligence and pre-existing ability, but focus on three things: Drive, Curiosity, and Ethics. I have also heard "Hire for intelligence and attitude", which I also agree with. A good attitude will take you far.

137 points by wyclif 11y ago

> Now, you might say, Marc, that's great for a young kid who has a lot of spare time to stay current, but what about the guy who has a family and only has time for a day job and can't spend nights and weekends reading blogs and staying that current? > Well, when you run into a person like that who isn't current in their field, the other implication is that their day job isn't keeping them current. > If they've been in that job for a while, then ask yourself, is the kind of person you're looking for really going to have tolerated staying in a day job where their skills and knowledge get stale, for very long? If they've got a family to feed, the answer is "yes," right? Or "That's why they're looking for a job with your company." Alternatively, if they've got an H-1B...

rumcajz 11y ago

> REST vs SOAP, the new Facebook API, whether Ruby on Rails is scalable, what do you think of Sun's new Java-based scripting language, Google's widgets API, Amazon S3, etc. Really? Why would anyone learn any of that unless they actually need it to make their work done?

overgard 11y ago
Because learning that kind of thing increases the possibility space of what you can do. Insights usually come from a diversity of knowledge, if you only learn what you need to know you'll be exceptionally average.
- DavidWoof 11y ago
  I agree in theory, but the problem is that everybody has their own personal "10 most interesting things right this moment" list, and they often don't match up even (or especially) among excellent programmers. So the fact that somebody isn't spending time with your favorite new toy doesn't mean they're not constantly learning, especially when the top 10 list is as ridiculously subjective as the one in the article.
  - KaneMorgan 11y ago
    I read it as they should be interested in something, not they should be interested in what you're interested in.
  - AnimalMuppet 11y ago
    That's not his point. He doesn't care that your list is different than his; he cares that you have one.
autotune 11y ago
Messing around with an API in your off time is important because it means you can change contexts and get up to speed more quickly without having to learn everything from scratch on the job, and of course context is everything. I'm probably not going to be super into a social network's API but for things that are server-related? Damn right I want to know how build 30 servers with just a POST request, a for loop, and some json data. You can then apply that knowledge to something a bit more boring you might get hired for if needed, like a startup that needs someone who can answer questions about how to properly use their API to make a number of POST requests to send hundreds of orders of glitter to various companies who have not sent a response to said persons job application... in theory of course.
- ohyes 11y ago
  No it doesn't. It means you have a lot of free time and can be used as cannon fodder for the startup. You will work 80-100 hour weeks producing exceptional work for compensation that is below the area average. Let's get real, employers /want/ young naive fresh out of college kids who've never been burned and don't know any better than to give their early to mid twenties to a VC/startup for peanuts. Messing around with a rest API is just a sign that you are potential prey, a fresh kill for the hamburger machine.
  - tamana 11y ago
    You said it yourself, these candidates produce exceptional work. The fact that they may be underpaid is a problem with their (group) ability to negotiate pay, not a failure in hiring manager's talent recognition.
  - autotune 11y ago
    > You will work 80-100 hour weeks producing exceptional work for compensation that is below the area average. This is what glassdoor reviews are for, and is entirely dependent on the company. Besides that it's a two way street, you bolster up the resume and if it turns out it's not what you expected than you now have the skills to find an environment that is what you're looking for. Alternatively you could of course spend your early-mid 20s being homeless and join the gutter punks in trying to sell weed to those VCs around The Haight instead, but that's not as fulfilling or lucrative IMHO.
mattmanser 11y ago
To be fair this was 2007, they were interesting things at the time that you might plausibly muck around with for a side project.
AYBABTME 11y ago
Because they're curious about it? The same as they might be curious about the geology of Mars and the history of the world since the Renaissance. Maybe just for the kick of it, or because they have a side project in mind.
wyclif 11y ago
Keep in mind this was written in 2007. I don't think all of that stuff is irrelevant by any means, though. Nine years later, the list might look somewhat different, but his point is that it's an indicator of intellectual curiosity, not things that are directly practical for the job the employer is offering.

jph 11y ago

My top hiring metric is grit. Wikipedia says it's an individual's passion for a particular long-term goal or end state, coupled with a powerful motivation to achieve their objective. This perseverance of effort promotes the overcoming of obstacles and challenges... and serves as a driving force in achievement realization.

CryoLogic 11y ago
I'm no expert in this area, but when I look for potential co-founders I always think the best metric is how self driven they are. It's so easy to find people who went to school, got the grades and graduated. Its harder to find people who go and do things outside of the standard.
- WWLink 11y ago
  I take it you don't care much for employees that do things besides programming? Like I dunno.. hobbies, and family, and stuff? Call me lazy if you wish but I almost never want to program during the weekend. That time is better spent with family, or playing games, or washing the car. Or something. Anything really. If I come into work having burned my brain out over the weekend programming something, then I don't produce results that satisfy me. Hehe.
  - yareally 11y ago
    I do some hobby programming for fun, but I don't expect everyone I work with to do that. I do it for fun and wouldn't otherwise. When I interview developers, I ask them about their hobbies in general. Sure, I throw in some technical questions depending on the position (usually language/platform agnostic), but those aren't the focus or the best way to hire to me. I want to know if they have an interest/curiosity into how things work (problem solving/debugging skills), can communicate effectively (can work as a team) and are passionate about something in their life (tells me they can focus on something when needed). I follow up with questions about how they solved some difficult problem in their life (could be programming or could be just learning how to change their oil). I ask them how they came up with a solution and what they learned about it. I want to see if they learned enough from it to be able to explain it to me or anyone else in the interview. Doing that gives me an idea of how their communication skills are. I want to gauge their problem solving and debugging skills during the interview, because I think almost anyone can be taught to be a better programmer, but it's much harder to learn to be an exceptional troubleshooter/problem solver and that tends to be a majority of what software developers do.

overgard 11y ago

His thing about reading too much into references is pretty bad. Like "moody" = "clinically depressed." Pretty big jump there! Could you really say that about a stranger based on a tepid reference? Maybe their project was stupid, or they had a bad seating arrangement where they were stuck next to an annoyingly chatty person, or they just weren't naturally bubbly, or ... whatever, there's like a thousand possible reasons to consider before you jump to "clinically depressed" with regard to a stranger. I also think the thing about drive is a bit naive. If you're dealing with a young unknown quantity than sure, drive can be a useful metric, but on the other hand if you're dealing with a proven reliable professional with domain expertise, who cares if they have drive? I've worked with plenty of really good people that don't want to touch a computer after they go home, and yet are incredibly capable at their jobs, and that's totally fine.

wpietri 11y ago
Yeah, I share your concern on drive. People who are incredibly driven are surely going in some direction, but it's not clear to me that it's always the right one, and I've often seen them drive in a direction that is different than where the team is going or what the company needs.
hobs 11y ago
Yeah, I prefer vision and ability to deliver over some person's belief in your perceived drive. Its a very simple con to make someone think you are determined, its much harder to con results.
geofft 11y ago
I interpreted that passage as that he had once gotten a review of someone as "moody" and it turned out they were actually clinically depressed, and similarly with the other reviews. Not much better to extrapolate from one data point than from zero, though!
ntumlin 11y ago
Similar to that, when he mentioned constantly interrupting = egomaniac. I've noticed that I'm fairly bad about interrupting people, but I don't think it's because I feel I'm way better than everyone else and my opinion is so important, but that's what my parents and some of my close friends do as well. When I do it with people besides them, I usually stop myself and maybe apologize, but by then it's too late. I know I must be annoying, but surely that doesn't mean I'm a bad developer.

JamesBarney 11y ago

Specifically, I am unaware of any actual data that shows a correlation between raw intelligence, as measured by any of the standard metrics (educational achievement, intelligence tests, or skill at solving logic puzzles) and company success. I don't mean to be nit-picky but I enjoy an internally consistent burden of proof in a blog post. In this post he seemed to move the goal posts. He dismisses intelligence as valuable because it doesn't meet an impossibly high burden of evidence. But then argues you should instead should use drive, curiosity, and ethics without substantiating his claims. For example, test programmers on basic algorithms -- linked lists, binary searches. Just in pseudocode -- it doesn't matter if they know the relevant Java library calls. Programming and algorithms are two different sets of skills. Writing a stable, easy to use, useful java/ruby/python/javascript library is a very different skill set from solving algorithmic puzzles, which are both unrelated to recreating a linked list from scratch in 10 minutes on a whiteboard.

danieltillett 11y ago
Yes arguing from your own ignorance is not the most reliable way to convince someone of something. In regards intelligence it is the only thing other than work tests that has been shown to have any major correlation with job performance. Edit. This paper make for a great read on this topic. 1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227600464_Stubborn_Reliance_on_Intuition_and_Subjectivity_in_Employee_Selection https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227600464_Stubborn_...
- dlss 11y ago
  Conscientiousness is also correlated with job performance, and is about on par with IQ for predicting lifetime earnings. Agreeableness (also a Big-Five trait) is also quite important in cooperative settings (though both have small effects relative to IQ for single shot task performance). http://www.gwern.net/Conscientiousness%20and%20online%20education#conscientiousness http://www.gwern.net/Conscientiousness%20and%20online%20educ... has a nice overview of the literature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientiousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientiousness does a reasonable job describing the trait. Edit: while we're listing large causal factors for work performance, I feel appalled I forgot to mention genetics... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9739126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9739126

d23 11y ago

I know it's Marc Andreessen and I know it's a nit-pick, but did he never learn how to use a paragraph? Short, standalone sentences can be powerful to make a point, but they can be tiring when used every single paragraph.

ishener 11y ago

just in case people miss that: this was written by Marc Andreessen

untilHellbanned 11y ago

> Most people softball deficiencies in people they've worked with when they do reference calls. Everything these days is so PC that I wish people would even softball the deficiencies. We are in the age of recommendation inflation. Everybody is "great". There is no "but...".

mabbo 11y ago

> Google, on the other hand, uses the metric of educational achievement. > Have a PhD? Front of the line. Masters? Next. Bachelor's? Go to the end. That's... That's not really true at all. While I interned there (during my bachelors) I met a lot of people without their masters. One guy had only his high school diploma.

s3nnyy 11y ago
Although a degree seems to be a poor predictor of performance in a software engineering role (http://blog.alinelerner.com/how-different-is-a-b-s-in-computer-science-from-a-m-s-in-computer-science-when-it-comes-to-recruiting/ http://blog.alinelerner.com/how-different-is-a-b-s-in-comput...), I am sure the percentage of people with degrees at Google is higher compared to "normal" companies. I have some insights in Google-Zürich and the percentage of Masters and PhDs is above average compared to other companies. (Disclaimer: I live in Zurich and I used to code for a living. Now, I hire engineers for different companies in Switzerland. If you look for a tech-job in Zurich, check out my story "8 reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT" on https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-to-switzerland-to-work-in-it-c7ac18af4f90 https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-t... or ping me at the mail-address in my HN-profile.)

tokenadult 11y ago

The blog post says, "Specifically, I am unaware of any actual data that shows a correlation between raw intelligence, as measured by any of the standard metrics (educational achievement, intelligence tests, or skill at solving logic puzzles) and company success." That's just an argument from ignorance. According to Hacker News comment karma scores, one of my most popular comments ever was a comment that included a FAQ about what the research shows about company hiring procedures.[1] What the research says is that for hiring workers for any kind of job, a work-sample test and a test of general intelligence are about tied for effectiveness in identifying good job candidates. ALL hiring procedures sometimes miss good workers, and all hiring procedures sometimes result in hiring lousy workers, but if you want to optimize, the way to optimize is to hire workers who are good at doing the specific tasks you are hiring for (that's what a work-sample test shows you) and how have good general cognitive ability, which shows as well as any indicator that they can learn to do new tasks in the future. References to the research literature are available in my previous comment, linked in the footnote. Anything else you do in hiring, for whatever reason, has less benefit to your company than checking whether job candidates can do the job tasks and checking whether the job candidates are smart or dull. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543

stanleydrew 11y ago
It seems most people have missed what he actually said, which was that he's not aware of research linking employee intelligence to "company success". Employee intelligence may well be linked in research to employee success, but he didn't suggest otherwise. Employee success and company success are two different outcomes of interest.

ccvannorman 11y ago

TLDR: There are thresholds for intelligence and pre-existing ability, but focus on three things: Drive, Curiosity, and Ethics. I have also heard "Hire for intelligence and attitude", which I also agree with. A good attitude will take you far.