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I think one thing that stood out to me when interviewing people was whether they were interested in what they were applying for. People who seemed interested al
by lordnacho 6y ago
I think one thing that stood out to me when interviewing people was whether they were interested in what they were applying for. People who seemed interested also seemed to actually know how to do things, what was going on in the field, and they'd know other similar people.
I don't know if there's a connection or it was just the people I came across, but another thing that bothered me was that people who subscribed to an innate talent model tended to be useless at evaluating skills. They'd have no idea what to ask, what to expect as an answer, and they'd have no BS detector.
I think a more healthy approach to talent is comparative advantage. You already have a team, and you want to improve it. Even a person who is not better than anyone at any of the relevant skills can improve a team, because it's opportunity cost that matters. The canonical example of this is the CEO who is better at strategy and grammar than his secretary, it still makes sense to have a secretary write the letters.
The reason sports talent is different from most other talent is that you have a limited number of players on the field. It's then a straight up production-over-replacement calculation, whereas most teams in business don't have that constraint.
It also gives you a floor. If I'm writing a c++ system and the junior on the team eats up time being hand-held, that eats into that opportunity cost savings. I suspect this is actually what people mean with "talent" when hiring, they want someone who doesn't necessarily have all the answers, but will behave in a way that doesn't impede the existing producers.
- slumdev 6y ago> Even a person who is not better than anyone at any of the relevant skills can improve a team, because it's opportunity cost that matters. Fun fact: Amazon won't hire you unless your interview panel believes that you're a better fit than 50% of the people already in that role at Amazon.
- lostcolony 6y agoAnd Amazon should be thankful that they're terrible at interviewing. Else given just the normal churn of employees they'd have very quickly been unable to keep growing.
- agf 6y agoExcept the better-than-average people move on, and the worse-than-average people stick around. So you have to hire above 50% just to keep quality static, and you don't every raise your bar to the point where it's hard to meet it just by hiring this way.
- jgwil2 6y ago> the better-than-average people move on, and the worse-than-average people stick around. Is there any evidence for that? The "better-than-average" have to work somewhere, so why should we assume that they change jobs more often? If you are an above-average workplace why should you not be able to retain above-average people?
- Google234 6y agoAmazon will let go of the bad people pretty quickly in my experience
- toast0 6y ago> The reason sports talent is different from most other talent is that you have a limited number of players on the field. It's then a straight up production-over-replacement calculation, whereas most teams in business don't have that constraint. Growing your team tends to reduce productivity of each person, since each person now needs to spend more time on communication and coordination, and less time on being productive. Depending on the team and the new member, you can end up adding a person and getting a lot more team productivity (great!) or adding a person and losing team productivity. It's not as simple as a sports team, where if you put an extra person on the field, you get a penalty, usually quickly, so the limit is clear; but there's still a limit.