13 ms·

Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses

280 points by benjiweber 6y ago

wccrawford 6y ago
>Instead of “how can we find the smartest people?” think about “how can we find people who will make our team stronger?” I would have thought that was obvious? Why would you hire someone unless you had a need for their talents? I guess I'm probably thinking small-business. At the biggest companies, they probably just hire and hope to fit them in because hiring for exact needs doesn't really scale.
- musingsole 6y ago
  My experience is this obvious perspective vacates with any level of moral maze. The hiring processes kind of require it --> getting headcount approval requires defining a role and arguing how it will lead to better outcomes and then finding/interviewing candidates takes months of time. If your priorities shift in that time...well now you have to shoehorn whatever candidates you get into the role definition you gave before even though you know at that moment they'll be working on something different. And then priorities shift again before they start. Leaving you not knowing what they'll be working on, but also certain you'll need extra hands on something sooner rather than later... AND SO: "give me a smart generalist that specialized in these 8 technologies that make up the entirety of our product" becomes the only viable hire.
  - jldugger 6y ago
    > And then priorities shift again before they start. Leaving you not knowing what they'll be working on, but also certain you'll need extra hands on something sooner rather than later... > AND SO: "give me a smart generalist that specialized in these 8 technologies that make up the entirety of our product" becomes the only viable hire. I mean, unless you were going to fire this person when the project you got head count for is finished, that's pretty much what you should have hired for anyways?
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- kevin_nisbet 6y ago
  I suspect it's a surprisingly easy trap many of us fall into. It's not about hiring someone without a need for their talents, it's that interview processes can amplify team weaknesses if the signal chosen closely aligns with the current team strengths, and as a result is less likely to fill skills and knowledge gaps. And this is a sort of natural trap, since the skills we're best at judging are things we're already good at. I suspect these biases can happen at large and small companies. It's constantly on my mind that the signal we use for my interviews are too closely aligned with my own preconceptions, especially when it's a problem space I've spent alot of time in, and may be foreign to the candidate.
- villasv 6y ago
  Your mindset is modeled after a simple selection process. Big companies often have pipelines for selection processes. HR does screening, leader does interview, manager approves. Each step of the pipeline, the responsible has to optimize for what the team needs. In practice, each one is evaluated by what the layer above thinks. HR optimizes for CVs the leader likes, leader optimizes for profiles the manager likes. Specially at large corporations, managers are removed from the daily needs and don’t have the context to evaluate if the person is the optimal fit for their future tasks, so they concern themselves with evaluating “raw talent” (obviously in a very subjective and biased way). Same thing happens with HR doing the screening. So “talent” is defining both at the beginning and the end of the pipeline, it’s no surprise the end result is an inconsistent hiring pipeline.
  - jimmont 6y ago
    This is brilliant. Tech hiring and work dynamics seem more life a feudal religious experience than anything remotely intelligent or even intuitive.
    - SyzygistSix 6y ago
      Along those lines I'm getting shades/hints that people hire to fit a workforce that resembles something like how they think their software stack works? Sounds good in theory but in practice people aren't actually programs/cogs and stacks are messy?
- astrange 6y ago
  If you’re hiring junior engineers, you can’t pick them for talents because they don’t have any. You hire them expecting to be negative for a little bit and learn on the job. If you don’t do this you’ll run out of senior engineers. On the other hand, if you can work with them it’s good to get people who will contribute things outside the job description.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  > Why would you hire someone unless you had a need for their talents? If you have an opportunity to hire someone with stellar talents, even if it isn't directly aligned with your business, hire them anyway. Modify your business plan to capitalize (!) on those special talents. Even if you don't, there is the opportunity for unexpected synergy. After all, I've applied many things I learned designing gearboxes to the D programming language.
  - KajMagnus 6y ago
    > many things I learned designing gearboxes to the D programming language I'm curious about what are some of those things :- ) (embedded software for gearboxes? Or physical design things that were translatable to software?)
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      I wrote a couple articles about one aspect: https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/b39.html https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/b39.html https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/b40.html https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/b40.html which I learned from mechanical design at Boeing. Another aspect is making it impossible to assemble parts any way but the correct way. For example, you can write C code like this: for (i = 0; i < 10; ++i); do_something(); A colleague of mine, a very good programmer, was stymied by this for a full day. The next day I added a warning to my C compiler for it. As time went on, this warning became commonplace in other compilers. But in D, I didn't make it a warning. I made in an error. A ; cannot be used to create an empty statement, that can only be done with { }. I still can't believe C/C++ have never made that an error. Another one is: if (a < b < c) ... That doesn't do what one thinks it does. So in D it's an error. D is better because so many unnecessary things in C and C++ are minefields, and instead of warning the user, they're just illegal. (All have ways of doing the equivalent if one really needs to.)
      - KajMagnus 6y ago
        > was stymied by this for a full day Oh it took a while until I noticed the extra ';' :- ) It'd likely have slipped past code review o.O > impossible to assemble parts any way but the correct way Hmm make me think about database constraints & foreign keys :- ) > As time went on, this warning became commonplace in other compilers Nice that different languages can help each other become better :- ) > D is better because so many unnecessary things in C and C++ are minefields I remember long ago when coding C++, we had to add a bunch of macros in each C++ class, to remove dangerous-by-default C++ auto generated things (like the copy constructor that copied pointers). I guess you know a lot about such things. D and Rust seems nice :- )
- onion2k 6y ago
  You only need to read a few dozen job adverts to see that tech companies are focused entirely on technical ability and don't hire for other skills. How often do you see "must know Typescript, expert in Docker, passionate about algorithms" compared to "must understand writing documentation, expert in sprint planning, passionate about user value"? Skills that aren't tech are rarely valued by tech companies despite the fact companies need developers with those skills in order to deliver the best tech. Sometimes the best hire for the team is the second best developer but the best person-who-can-explain-things or person-who-can-run-meetings if explaining things or running meetings is holding the team back.
  - bananaface 6y ago
    Is this really true? In my (limited) experience, the best coders are the ones who understand the technology, understand the hardware, and understand good program structure. "Communication" and "teamwork" are totally unimportant and they're usually organic side effects of understanding the domain. I've done open-source stuff with a total asshole and it wasn't pleasant but the end product was good because he was good, and I learned way faster than with most people. But I've not been exposed to that kind of corporate environment. Is it really that important? It reeks of corporate buzzwords to me.
  - EvilEy3 6y ago
    > expert in sprint planning Because they need tech expert and not PO? > passionate about user value Lmao, this is such a vague and useless statement that it is barely worth commenting. What the hell is "passion", how do quantify it and how do you use it? What happens when person you hired for "passion" loses it? > Sometimes the best hire for the team is the second best developer but the best person-who-can-explain-things or person-who-can-run-meetings if explaining things or running meetings is holding the team back. You test for that during interview. Do you think algo challenge, system design are just writing some stuff on the whiteboard and you're done? You need to explain stuff in such a way that interview wants to hire you.
    - meandmycode 6y ago
      > What the hell is "passion", how do quantify it and how do you use it? What happens when person you hired for "passion" loses it? It's harder to quantify than 'expert in typescript' and maybe ill described and abused, but there are a diverse set of needs when it comes to engineering, it's not just deeply technical, it's also broadly technical with strong planning, entrepreneurial thought process etc.. my, perhaps naive view is the world definitely needs both of these so keep and open mind and stay respectful.. 'lmao' I'm certain you wouldn't do in person, debate is good but cmon, always put the extra effort in to understand and communicate your own gut reactions
- nednar 6y ago
  > that was obvious? Why would you hire someone unless you had a need for their talents? To me, that sounds like you think of weakness in terms of "Oh, our UI sucks, let's hire a javascript developer." But is that really what the article means? Could weaknesses be more abstract things like "low trust", "failure to speak up", "inability to change according to market needs"? Do you know many teams that really know their core problems and actually try to solve them?
SMAAART 6y ago
Did you see the movie MoneyBall? That's the point.
- bpcpdx 6y ago
  Ha I was just about to say that. This sounds similar to what they did.
- ThrustVectoring 6y ago
  Moneyball's point was subtly different than this, and I was hoping the article would actually touch on it. The article suggests hiring the best candidates that have skills that mesh well on the team; Moneyball explicitly searches for people whose flaws can be overlooked. This way, you get a team member whose performance outpaces the open-market salary. In other words, you don't hire candidates whose strengths match your weaknesses, you hire candidates whose weaknesses you care about less than the competition does. Like, the best example from the movie was the pitcher with an effective but highly unconventional delivery mechanism.
motohagiography 6y ago
Too complicated. Tell weaker performers they're top talent and let their impostor syndrome do the rest.
- Waterluvian 6y ago
  ^ how I went from non-programmer to completely indispensable in just a few years.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- pottertheotter 6y ago
  I don't think that's how impostor syndrome works? By definition, someone with impostor syndrome is a high performer but they attribute their success to luck, thus they think they are a fraud.
  - pseudalopex 6y ago
    High performance isn't part of the definition. Average performers can feel like frauds too.
- draw_down 6y ago
  You know the scene in the dark knight where joker kills Gambol, then tells his men they work for the joker now? Oh and by the way there’s only one position open. Snaps a pool cue in half, throws it on the ground and tells them to make it quick. Same thing pretty much.
- nednar 6y ago
  Sounds very reasonable. I should really do this more often!
AdrianB1 6y ago
If you want a competitive advantage and having a better team than the competition helps with that, then you are looking for a team that is better than the competition's. This is what you hire for. If the competition is very good, you need to perform better - that does not mean every member of your team needs to be better than every member of the competition's team, except when it has to. For example, take professional tennis players: they need top trainers, top physicians and top managers to be #1. Hiring someone that is not experienced just because they can ask the right questions... will not work. Even asking the right questions require very good knowledge, otherwise they will ask random questions. You don't want to fly in a plane built by someone without experience, but asking smart questions.
- slyall 6y ago
  Except that business is not like sports. There is no "level playing field" that matches teams 1 for 1 against their counterparts. In many cases most parts of the company just have to be "good enough". If you have a great marketing team and 90% of the market already then you don't need a world beating tech team. Even when you are competing against equal and similar companies there are areas there are points of differentiation. One Company's product might be cheaper a easy to setup, Another is good at Enterprise Sales, a third has great tech and features.
  - erosenbe0 6y ago
    There can be luck, too. Billy Joe BigAccount decides to give your company a massive contract because his daughter's diaper wasn't too dirty that morning.
andrew_v4 6y ago
Two personal counterexamples, whether right or wrong: Management consulting - you want to be perceived as hiring the best - project work that is not known in advance, you need very versatile people - looking for demonstrated desire to jump through the hoops and do the marginal work that makes you the "top" Software Engineering - some overlap with the reasons above - adds to the moat: if they're happy working for FAANG et al, competitors are priced out of getting the best - the economics of many technologies are now defined by whether they can return enough to pay people competitively vs big tech. E.g. there are lots of cool deep learning applications that are tougher to try when you need to pay 300k / year for someone really good to run with them - I'm interested in the sibling post referencing moneyball, this would be very cool to see applied to software engineers
- zabzonk 6y ago
  > you want to be perceived as hiring the best Only idiots perceive that consultancies hire "the best" - the best are off doing other things. > project work that is not known in advance, you need very versatile people No, you need a load of dimwits you can throw at a project and make some apparent effect.
  - briefcomment 6y ago
    They literally hire the people with the best grades and test scores from the top universities. Idk how much better you can get than that.
    - mpoteat 6y ago
      It's well considered by a lot of people in the industry that a prospective's grades and even which school they went to aren't a good predictor of skill.
      - briefcomment 6y ago
        Unless you have them actually work with you for a month, they're certainly the best predicators available for new grads with no portfolios right? FWIW, the most effective colleagues I've worked with all scored really high on standardized tests. They're a great predictor imo
void_mint 6y ago
Knowing to hire for weakness instead of "top talent" implies a level of reflection almost no medium+ sized company actually has. Most companies don't need top talent, and the talent they have isn't anywhere close to the top.
- BikiniPrince 6y ago
  Nor can they afford top talent. I was going to chime in on all the terrible thoughts here, but that is rather pointless. High grade performers can earn quite a bit.
xyzelement 6y ago
Exactly. Some traits are always good, some always bad and yet others depend on context. For example I currently work with a team with a lot of very hard working technical people but not enough concern for questions like "what's valuable for us to work on?". So I need to hire people who will ask those questions. On the other hand, if my team was full of big picture pontificators, I'd be looking for someone who's shut up and code for a change.
- josephg 6y ago
  This is also great personal advice. Every month or two look around and see what is missing on your team. Do you need more shared vision? More code? Does your team lack expertise in some area? Do you need more support and acknowledgement from upper management? Are bug reports piling up? Whatever you need, work on that.
acjohnson55 6y ago
Brilliantly put. And I think the same goes for talent development, too. Career ladders, carelessly applied, incentivize everyone to do all the same things to check the boxes for the next level. This can lead to a lot of mediocre impact. I would suggest that we really want is well rounded teams, where individuals are playing to their strengths. It takes a more nuanced approach to evaluation, because not everyone is doing the same things in the same way.
antaviana 6y ago
The catch is that it is quite dificult to hire decently for weaknesses because they can easily sell you a lemon.
vjeux 6y ago
For what it’s worth, at Facebook the general hiring process is in two steps. There’s a centralized hire/no hire that most people are aware of and then a second phase where team selection happens. This is where all the “hire for weakness” steps that the author mention happen. Teams are looking at this pool of people for speciality, levels... that they need and where the matchmaking happens. There are also a lot of smaller but specialized longstanding loops like front-end, AI... and one off “reqs” for special roles that teams need. The world of hiring is very fascinating :)
- wikibob 6y ago
  Is the 6 week onboarding bootcamp followed by team selection deprecated? When did that happen?
  - Impossible 6y ago
    It sounds like OP was talking about the same process, although they skipped mentioning bootcamp and only mentioned team selection. They also accounted for specialist pre-allocated roles. My FB experience was different than many because I was hired to a specific team. I was also the first member of that team to go through bootcamp. It was a weird exception because many of the team members came from the Oculus acquisition, and at the time Oculus had somewhat separate culture. Afaik AR/VR still hires for specific teams and roles externally, although roles in that org are also regularly filled by bootcamp grads with the right experience and/or interests
- jghn 6y ago
  This is one of those areas where more companies need to realize they're not a FAANG. As Joel has pointed out in the past, you're not getting the cream of the crop as a normal company. Likewise you probably neither need nor even want the top. However what you do need is to plug a few holes here and there. As a hiring manager I find it much better to think in terms of a skill mesh. I'm always looking to bring the collective whole forward. A candidate can do that by bringing new skills to the table, by being awesome at existing skills, or some mix of all of the above.
johnsmith4739 6y ago
Amazes me how little data-driven recruiting is. Just as the author puts it, a good hire is for culture ad, and that means being explicitly aware of what's missing. Tough stuff to really look inside and see what's missing. Most hires I see are either out of desperation or because the recruiter had a good chemistry with the candidate. A 1h interview means 0,3% of the time I will work with that person in one year. Talk about a small sample size. (shameless plug): I built this for figuring out the candidate personality: https://freyasense.com/recruiting/ https://freyasense.com/recruiting/
- marcinzm 6y ago
  I've both taken and been at a company that administered personality tests as part of the interview process. I found the results fairly useless to be honest. Although I did manage to score so low on one part of the assessment that an interviewer seemed to question my basic ability to function in society.
  - johnsmith4739 6y ago
    Personality tests are broken - there is no way a functioning human being will answer them truthfully. Not for the lack of trying... our subconscious will try to protect us and we'll answer in a way we imagine it is socially acceptable.
    - devoutsalsa 6y ago
      @johnsmith4739 You've arrived at home after a long day at the office. As you take your wallet & keys, you realize that you've accidentally taken home a granola bar that you obtained from the snack room at work. You had intended to eat it at your desk, but for some reason you forgot. On a scale of 1 to 10, how guilty do you feel for having unlawfully stolen property from your employer?
      - johnsmith4739 6y ago
        I love it! What if I am the owner? Is then "guilty capitalism?"
Uptrenda 6y ago
First we must ask the question: how can we demoralize people the most effectively? An obvious place to start is to just ignore all their prior work. Since we're starting from scratch we need a baseline to gather where their technical skills are at. So you should ask them to do some kind of coding assessment task. Tell them not to spend more than an hour on it. Chances are good the most desperate will spend way more on it because they need the job. If you're lucky they'll even do it without asking for payment. Spice it up a little! Why not throw in some real work that no one in your company wants to do? You can even ask the applicant to read your organizations repo code and write technical reports on it. That way, later if you do decide to hire them (unlikely) it will reduce your on-boarding costs... and if not... then fuck it, tbh. This isn't about making people feel good. It's about making sure you do what everyone else does. 'We've found that the assessment task is a good signal.' Speaking of signals, how about you ignore the whole resume and focus on what matters. We both know resumes are largely a waste of time and people only get moved up in interviews for making plenty of eye contact. So make sure to fail everyone who doesn't stare at you the whole time. This is how to assess technical skills the most accurate way possible and its known the vast majority of managers fail people in interviews for not staring at them enough (staring increases productivity.) Finally, you don't want to forget the computer science tests. At least four years in school and tons of debt is a lot to stomach compared to people who learned practical skills in their own time at a cost of almost nothing. Though chances are almost zero you use computer science knowledge in your job it's best to make sure you fail every self-taught developer who can't immediately balance a binary dick tree. It shouldn't concern you how many developers are self-taught and won't fit in your talent pipe line after doing this. Your hour long algorithm interviews are sure to make sure that only people who want to feel smart get hired. If you put these measures into place you're sure to build the most mediocre organization possible. But there are other ways to improve the process. Experiment with calling your company 'remote' but only hire from certain timezones; Make sure the interviews happen in person. Hold as many meetings as possible. If there's one thing engineers love it's meetings that break up focused concentration time in their day. Even better if the meetings are only done at certain times in the day as that will be as hostile as possible to a remote working environment. I want to make sure you don't have any funny ideas in your head about remote working. It might seem to offer flexible time management but people are ultimately children and its up to you to put in place measures to prevent this. If you do this right you can even manage to exclude people with chronic illnesses that would have otherwise been able to fit in your talent pipeline through remote work which I think is really something. I hope this post has been helpful to other recruiters and hiring managers out there. Peace
wizardofmysore 6y ago
That is what most companies do. When you have an over supply of backend engineers but need frontend engineers no one looks for more backend engineers. Their stack has a weakness of frontend engineers and they find the one that strengthens it the most.
mlcrypto 6y ago
Thanks to the rate of bitcoin appreciation it doesn't matter where I work. I can make the same or more than the top companies. I can opt out of the crazy hiring process
dukeofdoom 6y ago
Talent is everything. Without Elon Musk, or Von Braun there are no key rocket program break throughs. Not that I know much about rockets, just that there are key talented people that push the world forward. You need the worker bees. But someone at the top has to be the visionary genius. If was the manager of a soccer team that came in last in the League. One way of improving would be to replace my weakest players. And the team would probably marginally improve. But it doesn't usually happen that way. Chances are your best players are not talented enough either, and you should replace those too. Or Perhaps, trading two of your good players for one more talented. Which is typically what happens. So not sure if I would agree with the premise of the article. Also, If I was building a stock portfolio, one not terrible way of doing it would probably be around how many PhDs the companies have on the payroll.
- nednar 6y ago
  This is a valid argument for the discussion. I don't agree with it, but thanks for sharing. What do you think are Elon Musks talents that push his SpaceX program forward? In which area do you think that you could make a valuable contribution to the world?
  - dukeofdoom 6y ago
    If he succeeds reusable rockets, privatizing the space program, commercial flights into space, starlink, and the tech he develops around his quest to going to Mars. Elon has a unique combination of business skills and technical skills. My contribution is in technology development. But even the dumbest ones of us can make a valuable contribution to the world by properly raising the next generation of human beings.
jes5199 6y ago
I recently discovered that, in a topgrading-style interview, it’s possible to filibuster! They expect to be able to ask 4+ questions about every job from the past ten years. But I will happily ramble for 20 minutes about minutia for each of them. It was wonderful
- jmtulloss 6y ago
  From a single interviewers perspective: this does not work. At the company I work at, and in my own interviews, being succinct and articulate in the points you’re making goes a long way. Ending early is not a bad sign.
  - jes5199 6y ago
    oh you assume I still wanted the job
w0mbat 6y ago
I think this guy might be on to something. Every time you add a person to the team who is more stupid than you, it pushes you further up the stack rank. Why hire people with loyalty when you can hire people who can't quit because they can't find their way out of the building? Don't waste money on high salaries, just find people too dumb to realize you are paying them in Monopoly money. Soon you will be the top performer by a huge margin, and it's bonus city, baby!
- EvilEy3 6y ago
  You're probably bring downvoted for the attitude, but you're right. I've worked for a couple of low-mid tier companies and their core was always mediocre talent who is there because it's the top of the world for them. Top talent will always gravitate towards money, prestige. Sure there are some outliers that will work for food and change world, but if you can earn more why wouldn't you?
  - w0mbat 6y ago
    I was just riffing on a joke, but much as I love Hacker News, it's a bad place for that. Too many people who take everything too seriously. But yeah, there was a pinch of truth in what I said too.
nsonha 6y ago
this whole thing reads: don't hire top talent, hire special talent, to us, whatever. The latter sounds even harder than the former. It's hard to see your own weakness, it's rarer to have people to fill an exact particular gap at that particular point in time. Maybe do away with the mindset of people as off-the-shelf products and think about them more as raw resources and focus more on upskilling. Universities are hopeless on this so the responsibility must fall on to someone.
- waihtis 6y ago
  Good mindset for big corp, not so for small biz. Waiting for someone to upskill and gain momentum for 6-12 months means a lost lump sum of money that can kill your business.
  - nsonha 6y ago
    I guess it's something to balance. There is no reason to believe that the special talent will show up in 6-12 months nor that they will find your small biz a good place for them. I have a hunch that many of the people who can fix the weaknesses for your org are gonna be top talent as well with lots of choices
  - onion2k 6y ago
    Hiring a candidate who already knows what you need often takes a lot longer than hiring someone who can learn what you need even if you account for the on-boarding time, especially if it's a slightly esoteric thing. Difficulty in hiring people who know your stack is also a good reason to choose the simplest and most common tech to run on rather than something niche you feel is technically better.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
More of a perception change rather than an actual change I think. FWIW, I've always hired to "fill gaps" and not to "add stars". Now, do I want a great person who can fill that gap? Sure. But the priority is the gap, not the person. There are those mythical people for whom "if you interview they will 'make' a position so they can hire you" is said to be true. In my experience, people who are hired because they seem like super stars rather than for a particular role, do not do as well. Why? Because it usually automatically puts them in conflict with the person who is already doing that role, and second, what they should be doing isn't immediately apparent leading to some meandering around which is perceived by upper management as being 'non-productive.'
vladmk 6y ago
This seems like an oversimplification of what it takes to make a company grow and succeed. Is it either a) hire top talent or b) hire for weakness. The question this article is posing is the wrong one, it’s neither a nor b. Companies need to hire based on what they need most, sometimes it’s profit, sometimes value, sometimes all of the above. This article feels like it’s based on a strawman.
- onion2k 6y ago
  The last section of the article covers your exact point, and suggests that some large companies might need a hybrid approach. In smaller companies (or teams within big companies) the points in the article are absolutely correct though.
EvilEy3 6y ago
Sorry, we don't buy snake oil here. Try this bs on LinkedIn they absolutely love a lot of words justifying hiring inferior talent.
- kowlo 6y ago
  You speak on behalf of HN, however, this submission appears to be on the front-page. It seems that the majority of voting users browsing HN throughout the duration of this posts existence do indeed love this bs.
  - EvilEy3 6y ago
    What makes you think that upvote equals agree or love? I also upvoted post because I wanted to see more people discuss the matter at hand.
nxpnsv 6y ago
One clearly doesn’t exclude the other. And really, that’s all you need from this article. (And that’s not even in the article)
johbjo 6y ago
> “We hire top talent” These phrases are mainly intended to flatter the employees, to make them grateful for being "chosen", and maybe to increase trust and confidence among them. Choosing who to hire (once basic requirements are met), is much less important than the morale and attitudes among employees. Much better to say "top talent" than "randomly picked". But, the hiring process is a huge factor in the perception of the identity of the employees.
- fit2rule 6y ago
  HR people should be required to demonstrate the basics of the technology they are hiring for .. if they can't do that, they're not qualified to gatekeep the technology teams. Too often, HR is used to repress technological advances, out of fear of loss of control. That is a good thing: HR should lose control over technology groups.
- comboy 6y ago
  To me, much more important in that phrase is expectation who will you be working with. It's fantastic to be surrounded by smarter* people and keep learning, but at some level it's hard and if you like what you do, then this seems to be the most important thing about the job. You have your basic financial needs covered when you're a decent coder, even boring projects can have great and interesting implementations, it all drops down to people who you are working with. Also, not just in IT, true masters tend to be interesting people in my experience. More often than not, they have humility and curiosity that allowed them to get that far. But of course it often tends to be an empty phrase. If they do hire top talent you are more likely to hear specific names rather than this phrase. 1. smarter / more experienced / more knowledgeable / sometimes even having your level of expertise but coming from a different background
fit2rule 6y ago
How about just fire your whole HR department, and let team leads do the work of finding qualified engineers for their needs? HR is the bane of the technology world. As a cultural phenomenon, the class of "HR" specialists are massive drag on the progress of the species. We would be better off without this role in our technological cultures. So much technical debt accrues because the HR person doesn't have a single, frickin', clue what they are doing. If you don't know what "firmware" means, don't try to hire firmware developers, yo.
nednar 6y ago
The article assumes that most teams know and openly talk about what their weaknesses are. But is that actually a common thing? Don't we have a natural drive to ignore our weaknesses and blame them on others? It's a little funny, because the alternative phrasing also includes that already. One hires the best of the best without specifying the best of <what>. "The best people will solve all the problems!" without any inclination about what the problems are. Doesn't that imply that one doesn't actually know one's own problems and hopes that if one can just hire a people smarter than oneself, they will figure it out for you?
mleonhard 6y ago
The article spends most of its words trying to convince the reader to do it, and only a few paragraphs on how to do it. I was convinced in the first paragraph. My own experience shows that hiring for your team's weaknesses can make it more effective. In 2013, I went from an operations-heavy role to a new team with little operations experience. Our TL designed and coded a new service. He was not happy with the feedback I gave through the design & code review process. Before deploying the new service to production, we met with one of the company's top engineers (Sanjay Ghemawat) for a "production readiness review". The reviewer was impressed and found only a couple of minor issues. He said that it was rare for him to review a service and find no major issues. Many of the questions he asked during the review were things that I had brought up earlier and convinced our TL to fix. Although I had not written any code on the service, I contributed operational knowledge and filled a weakness of the team. Our TL did not acknowledge my contribution and even gave me a bad review, costing me about $80k in compensation. Now, years later, I believe that he did that to get me to leave the team. I had often pushed to fix the major problems in our project. I think he wanted to keep control and continue working on fun things and ignore the problems. Our manager went along with him, building his own empire. I left and the person who took my place had the same problem and left as soon as they could. Honesty and respectfulness are important qualities of teams and team members because they develop trust. Trust makes teams more productive. An internal study at Google concluded that teams with members who trust each other are much more productive than teams with high technical ability and low trust [0]. Lack of trust is a team weakness that we can hire to improve. We can also intentionally train and practice skills that improve team trust. I want a systematic way to identify the strengths and weaknesses of myself, my teammates, and potential teammates. I want a questionnaire like the one in Essential Enneagram which was tested in a study with 1,000 participants [1]. I wish the large tech companies would invest in this kind of work and publish it. [0] https://rework.withgoogle.com/print/guides/5721312655835136/ https://rework.withgoogle.com/print/guides/5721312655835136/ [1] https://drdaviddaniels.com/enneagram-test/ https://drdaviddaniels.com/enneagram-test/
Gustomaximus 6y ago
I had an interesting call once asking me to interview for marketing job at a women's online fashion business. I said to the person "not sure IM the right person, I'm male and have zero interest in fashion". To which she replied "That's great because I've got plenty of that fit, I want someone that looks at this more as a business than personal interest" I never interviewed as they salary was low, but I really liked that approach. I find that 'must love and be passionate about our company products' a little overdone, especially in the US. Its healthy to have people with different points of view, and staff that use alternatives and can discuss why.
- jacques_chester 6y ago
  Some (not all) recruiters are salespeople. They'll say any old thing, just so long as you hop on the conveyor belt.
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  Being "passionate about the business" is overmuch, but for the employer, it's important that candidate respects the business, in the sense that the candidate believes that what the business is doing matters (quality product that will make the world better, boss recognizes good work and rewards it, customers deserve to be fleeced, or what ever gets you out of bed), so that you want to accomplish progress at work and not just do the minimum for the paycheck.
- proc0 6y ago
  That's rare in my experience. It seems every startup wants you to think their area is the most exciting in the world and you are full of ideas of how to move the product forward. It's like wanting detailed specs means you are unmotivated, just because you're not interested in making decisions in that space, whether to use one color over another or think ahead about the behavior of the feature, for development it is technically irrelevant, as it's all just translating to code, but business people will have none of that attitude lol.
12xdev 6y ago
Is this you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tizjq_Ux_zQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tizjq_Ux_zQ
say_it_as_it_is 6y ago
I think that managers should have to take the GMAT as part of the hiring process, even if they got their MBA 20 years ago. They need to know number properties and have basic critical reasoning skills for the roles that they are interviewing for. Why give them a free pass while requiring principal engineers with 20 years experience to answer leetcode problems? The low quality management at large organizations is an obvious sign that they're not screening for the best talent, who clearly scores at least 700 on the GMAT.

280 points by benjiweber 6y ago

>Instead of “how can we find the smartest people?” think about “how can we find people who will make our team stronger?” I would have thought that was obvious? Why would you hire someone unless you had a need for their talents? I guess I'm probably thinking small-business. At the biggest companies, they probably just hire and hope to fit them in because hiring for exact needs doesn't really scale.

musingsole 6y ago
My experience is this obvious perspective vacates with any level of moral maze. The hiring processes kind of require it --> getting headcount approval requires defining a role and arguing how it will lead to better outcomes and then finding/interviewing candidates takes months of time. If your priorities shift in that time...well now you have to shoehorn whatever candidates you get into the role definition you gave before even though you know at that moment they'll be working on something different. And then priorities shift again before they start. Leaving you not knowing what they'll be working on, but also certain you'll need extra hands on something sooner rather than later... AND SO: "give me a smart generalist that specialized in these 8 technologies that make up the entirety of our product" becomes the only viable hire.
- jldugger 6y ago
  > And then priorities shift again before they start. Leaving you not knowing what they'll be working on, but also certain you'll need extra hands on something sooner rather than later... > AND SO: "give me a smart generalist that specialized in these 8 technologies that make up the entirety of our product" becomes the only viable hire. I mean, unless you were going to fire this person when the project you got head count for is finished, that's pretty much what you should have hired for anyways?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
kevin_nisbet 6y ago
I suspect it's a surprisingly easy trap many of us fall into. It's not about hiring someone without a need for their talents, it's that interview processes can amplify team weaknesses if the signal chosen closely aligns with the current team strengths, and as a result is less likely to fill skills and knowledge gaps. And this is a sort of natural trap, since the skills we're best at judging are things we're already good at. I suspect these biases can happen at large and small companies. It's constantly on my mind that the signal we use for my interviews are too closely aligned with my own preconceptions, especially when it's a problem space I've spent alot of time in, and may be foreign to the candidate.
villasv 6y ago
Your mindset is modeled after a simple selection process. Big companies often have pipelines for selection processes. HR does screening, leader does interview, manager approves. Each step of the pipeline, the responsible has to optimize for what the team needs. In practice, each one is evaluated by what the layer above thinks. HR optimizes for CVs the leader likes, leader optimizes for profiles the manager likes. Specially at large corporations, managers are removed from the daily needs and don’t have the context to evaluate if the person is the optimal fit for their future tasks, so they concern themselves with evaluating “raw talent” (obviously in a very subjective and biased way). Same thing happens with HR doing the screening. So “talent” is defining both at the beginning and the end of the pipeline, it’s no surprise the end result is an inconsistent hiring pipeline.
- jimmont 6y ago
  This is brilliant. Tech hiring and work dynamics seem more life a feudal religious experience than anything remotely intelligent or even intuitive.
  - SyzygistSix 6y ago
    Along those lines I'm getting shades/hints that people hire to fit a workforce that resembles something like how they think their software stack works? Sounds good in theory but in practice people aren't actually programs/cogs and stacks are messy?
astrange 6y ago
If you’re hiring junior engineers, you can’t pick them for talents because they don’t have any. You hire them expecting to be negative for a little bit and learn on the job. If you don’t do this you’ll run out of senior engineers. On the other hand, if you can work with them it’s good to get people who will contribute things outside the job description.
WalterBright 6y ago
> Why would you hire someone unless you had a need for their talents? If you have an opportunity to hire someone with stellar talents, even if it isn't directly aligned with your business, hire them anyway. Modify your business plan to capitalize (!) on those special talents. Even if you don't, there is the opportunity for unexpected synergy. After all, I've applied many things I learned designing gearboxes to the D programming language.
- KajMagnus 6y ago
  > many things I learned designing gearboxes to the D programming language I'm curious about what are some of those things :- ) (embedded software for gearboxes? Or physical design things that were translatable to software?)
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    I wrote a couple articles about one aspect: https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/b39.html https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/b39.html https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/b40.html https://www.digitalmars.com/articles/b40.html which I learned from mechanical design at Boeing. Another aspect is making it impossible to assemble parts any way but the correct way. For example, you can write C code like this: for (i = 0; i < 10; ++i); do_something(); A colleague of mine, a very good programmer, was stymied by this for a full day. The next day I added a warning to my C compiler for it. As time went on, this warning became commonplace in other compilers. But in D, I didn't make it a warning. I made in an error. A ; cannot be used to create an empty statement, that can only be done with { }. I still can't believe C/C++ have never made that an error. Another one is: if (a < b < c) ... That doesn't do what one thinks it does. So in D it's an error. D is better because so many unnecessary things in C and C++ are minefields, and instead of warning the user, they're just illegal. (All have ways of doing the equivalent if one really needs to.)
    - KajMagnus 6y ago
      > was stymied by this for a full day Oh it took a while until I noticed the extra ';' :- ) It'd likely have slipped past code review o.O > impossible to assemble parts any way but the correct way Hmm make me think about database constraints & foreign keys :- ) > As time went on, this warning became commonplace in other compilers Nice that different languages can help each other become better :- ) > D is better because so many unnecessary things in C and C++ are minefields I remember long ago when coding C++, we had to add a bunch of macros in each C++ class, to remove dangerous-by-default C++ auto generated things (like the copy constructor that copied pointers). I guess you know a lot about such things. D and Rust seems nice :- )
onion2k 6y ago
You only need to read a few dozen job adverts to see that tech companies are focused entirely on technical ability and don't hire for other skills. How often do you see "must know Typescript, expert in Docker, passionate about algorithms" compared to "must understand writing documentation, expert in sprint planning, passionate about user value"? Skills that aren't tech are rarely valued by tech companies despite the fact companies need developers with those skills in order to deliver the best tech. Sometimes the best hire for the team is the second best developer but the best person-who-can-explain-things or person-who-can-run-meetings if explaining things or running meetings is holding the team back.
- bananaface 6y ago
  Is this really true? In my (limited) experience, the best coders are the ones who understand the technology, understand the hardware, and understand good program structure. "Communication" and "teamwork" are totally unimportant and they're usually organic side effects of understanding the domain. I've done open-source stuff with a total asshole and it wasn't pleasant but the end product was good because he was good, and I learned way faster than with most people. But I've not been exposed to that kind of corporate environment. Is it really that important? It reeks of corporate buzzwords to me.
- EvilEy3 6y ago
  > expert in sprint planning Because they need tech expert and not PO? > passionate about user value Lmao, this is such a vague and useless statement that it is barely worth commenting. What the hell is "passion", how do quantify it and how do you use it? What happens when person you hired for "passion" loses it? > Sometimes the best hire for the team is the second best developer but the best person-who-can-explain-things or person-who-can-run-meetings if explaining things or running meetings is holding the team back. You test for that during interview. Do you think algo challenge, system design are just writing some stuff on the whiteboard and you're done? You need to explain stuff in such a way that interview wants to hire you.
  - meandmycode 6y ago
    > What the hell is "passion", how do quantify it and how do you use it? What happens when person you hired for "passion" loses it? It's harder to quantify than 'expert in typescript' and maybe ill described and abused, but there are a diverse set of needs when it comes to engineering, it's not just deeply technical, it's also broadly technical with strong planning, entrepreneurial thought process etc.. my, perhaps naive view is the world definitely needs both of these so keep and open mind and stay respectful.. 'lmao' I'm certain you wouldn't do in person, debate is good but cmon, always put the extra effort in to understand and communicate your own gut reactions
nednar 6y ago
> that was obvious? Why would you hire someone unless you had a need for their talents? To me, that sounds like you think of weakness in terms of "Oh, our UI sucks, let's hire a javascript developer." But is that really what the article means? Could weaknesses be more abstract things like "low trust", "failure to speak up", "inability to change according to market needs"? Do you know many teams that really know their core problems and actually try to solve them?

SMAAART 6y ago

Did you see the movie MoneyBall? That's the point.

bpcpdx 6y ago
Ha I was just about to say that. This sounds similar to what they did.
ThrustVectoring 6y ago
Moneyball's point was subtly different than this, and I was hoping the article would actually touch on it. The article suggests hiring the best candidates that have skills that mesh well on the team; Moneyball explicitly searches for people whose flaws can be overlooked. This way, you get a team member whose performance outpaces the open-market salary. In other words, you don't hire candidates whose strengths match your weaknesses, you hire candidates whose weaknesses you care about less than the competition does. Like, the best example from the movie was the pitcher with an effective but highly unconventional delivery mechanism.

motohagiography 6y ago

Too complicated. Tell weaker performers they're top talent and let their impostor syndrome do the rest.

Waterluvian 6y ago
^ how I went from non-programmer to completely indispensable in just a few years.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
pottertheotter 6y ago
I don't think that's how impostor syndrome works? By definition, someone with impostor syndrome is a high performer but they attribute their success to luck, thus they think they are a fraud.
- pseudalopex 6y ago
  High performance isn't part of the definition. Average performers can feel like frauds too.
draw_down 6y ago
You know the scene in the dark knight where joker kills Gambol, then tells his men they work for the joker now? Oh and by the way there’s only one position open. Snaps a pool cue in half, throws it on the ground and tells them to make it quick. Same thing pretty much.
nednar 6y ago
Sounds very reasonable. I should really do this more often!

AdrianB1 6y ago

If you want a competitive advantage and having a better team than the competition helps with that, then you are looking for a team that is better than the competition's. This is what you hire for. If the competition is very good, you need to perform better - that does not mean every member of your team needs to be better than every member of the competition's team, except when it has to. For example, take professional tennis players: they need top trainers, top physicians and top managers to be #1. Hiring someone that is not experienced just because they can ask the right questions... will not work. Even asking the right questions require very good knowledge, otherwise they will ask random questions. You don't want to fly in a plane built by someone without experience, but asking smart questions.

slyall 6y ago
Except that business is not like sports. There is no "level playing field" that matches teams 1 for 1 against their counterparts. In many cases most parts of the company just have to be "good enough". If you have a great marketing team and 90% of the market already then you don't need a world beating tech team. Even when you are competing against equal and similar companies there are areas there are points of differentiation. One Company's product might be cheaper a easy to setup, Another is good at Enterprise Sales, a third has great tech and features.
- erosenbe0 6y ago
  There can be luck, too. Billy Joe BigAccount decides to give your company a massive contract because his daughter's diaper wasn't too dirty that morning.

andrew_v4 6y ago

Two personal counterexamples, whether right or wrong: Management consulting - you want to be perceived as hiring the best - project work that is not known in advance, you need very versatile people - looking for demonstrated desire to jump through the hoops and do the marginal work that makes you the "top" Software Engineering - some overlap with the reasons above - adds to the moat: if they're happy working for FAANG et al, competitors are priced out of getting the best - the economics of many technologies are now defined by whether they can return enough to pay people competitively vs big tech. E.g. there are lots of cool deep learning applications that are tougher to try when you need to pay 300k / year for someone really good to run with them - I'm interested in the sibling post referencing moneyball, this would be very cool to see applied to software engineers

zabzonk 6y ago
> you want to be perceived as hiring the best Only idiots perceive that consultancies hire "the best" - the best are off doing other things. > project work that is not known in advance, you need very versatile people No, you need a load of dimwits you can throw at a project and make some apparent effect.
- briefcomment 6y ago
  They literally hire the people with the best grades and test scores from the top universities. Idk how much better you can get than that.
  - mpoteat 6y ago
    It's well considered by a lot of people in the industry that a prospective's grades and even which school they went to aren't a good predictor of skill.
    - briefcomment 6y ago
      Unless you have them actually work with you for a month, they're certainly the best predicators available for new grads with no portfolios right? FWIW, the most effective colleagues I've worked with all scored really high on standardized tests. They're a great predictor imo

void_mint 6y ago

Knowing to hire for weakness instead of "top talent" implies a level of reflection almost no medium+ sized company actually has. Most companies don't need top talent, and the talent they have isn't anywhere close to the top.

BikiniPrince 6y ago
Nor can they afford top talent. I was going to chime in on all the terrible thoughts here, but that is rather pointless. High grade performers can earn quite a bit.

xyzelement 6y ago

Exactly. Some traits are always good, some always bad and yet others depend on context. For example I currently work with a team with a lot of very hard working technical people but not enough concern for questions like "what's valuable for us to work on?". So I need to hire people who will ask those questions. On the other hand, if my team was full of big picture pontificators, I'd be looking for someone who's shut up and code for a change.

josephg 6y ago
This is also great personal advice. Every month or two look around and see what is missing on your team. Do you need more shared vision? More code? Does your team lack expertise in some area? Do you need more support and acknowledgement from upper management? Are bug reports piling up? Whatever you need, work on that.

acjohnson55 6y ago

Brilliantly put. And I think the same goes for talent development, too. Career ladders, carelessly applied, incentivize everyone to do all the same things to check the boxes for the next level. This can lead to a lot of mediocre impact. I would suggest that we really want is well rounded teams, where individuals are playing to their strengths. It takes a more nuanced approach to evaluation, because not everyone is doing the same things in the same way.

antaviana 6y ago

The catch is that it is quite dificult to hire decently for weaknesses because they can easily sell you a lemon.

vjeux 6y ago

For what it’s worth, at Facebook the general hiring process is in two steps. There’s a centralized hire/no hire that most people are aware of and then a second phase where team selection happens. This is where all the “hire for weakness” steps that the author mention happen. Teams are looking at this pool of people for speciality, levels... that they need and where the matchmaking happens. There are also a lot of smaller but specialized longstanding loops like front-end, AI... and one off “reqs” for special roles that teams need. The world of hiring is very fascinating :)

wikibob 6y ago
Is the 6 week onboarding bootcamp followed by team selection deprecated? When did that happen?
- Impossible 6y ago
  It sounds like OP was talking about the same process, although they skipped mentioning bootcamp and only mentioned team selection. They also accounted for specialist pre-allocated roles. My FB experience was different than many because I was hired to a specific team. I was also the first member of that team to go through bootcamp. It was a weird exception because many of the team members came from the Oculus acquisition, and at the time Oculus had somewhat separate culture. Afaik AR/VR still hires for specific teams and roles externally, although roles in that org are also regularly filled by bootcamp grads with the right experience and/or interests
jghn 6y ago
This is one of those areas where more companies need to realize they're not a FAANG. As Joel has pointed out in the past, you're not getting the cream of the crop as a normal company. Likewise you probably neither need nor even want the top. However what you do need is to plug a few holes here and there. As a hiring manager I find it much better to think in terms of a skill mesh. I'm always looking to bring the collective whole forward. A candidate can do that by bringing new skills to the table, by being awesome at existing skills, or some mix of all of the above.

johnsmith4739 6y ago

Amazes me how little data-driven recruiting is. Just as the author puts it, a good hire is for culture ad, and that means being explicitly aware of what's missing. Tough stuff to really look inside and see what's missing. Most hires I see are either out of desperation or because the recruiter had a good chemistry with the candidate. A 1h interview means 0,3% of the time I will work with that person in one year. Talk about a small sample size. (shameless plug): I built this for figuring out the candidate personality: https://freyasense.com/recruiting/ https://freyasense.com/recruiting/

marcinzm 6y ago
I've both taken and been at a company that administered personality tests as part of the interview process. I found the results fairly useless to be honest. Although I did manage to score so low on one part of the assessment that an interviewer seemed to question my basic ability to function in society.
- johnsmith4739 6y ago
  Personality tests are broken - there is no way a functioning human being will answer them truthfully. Not for the lack of trying... our subconscious will try to protect us and we'll answer in a way we imagine it is socially acceptable.
  - devoutsalsa 6y ago
    @johnsmith4739 You've arrived at home after a long day at the office. As you take your wallet & keys, you realize that you've accidentally taken home a granola bar that you obtained from the snack room at work. You had intended to eat it at your desk, but for some reason you forgot. On a scale of 1 to 10, how guilty do you feel for having unlawfully stolen property from your employer?
    - johnsmith4739 6y ago
      I love it! What if I am the owner? Is then "guilty capitalism?"

Uptrenda 6y ago

First we must ask the question: how can we demoralize people the most effectively? An obvious place to start is to just ignore all their prior work. Since we're starting from scratch we need a baseline to gather where their technical skills are at. So you should ask them to do some kind of coding assessment task. Tell them not to spend more than an hour on it. Chances are good the most desperate will spend way more on it because they need the job. If you're lucky they'll even do it without asking for payment. Spice it up a little! Why not throw in some real work that no one in your company wants to do? You can even ask the applicant to read your organizations repo code and write technical reports on it. That way, later if you do decide to hire them (unlikely) it will reduce your on-boarding costs... and if not... then fuck it, tbh. This isn't about making people feel good. It's about making sure you do what everyone else does. 'We've found that the assessment task is a good signal.' Speaking of signals, how about you ignore the whole resume and focus on what matters. We both know resumes are largely a waste of time and people only get moved up in interviews for making plenty of eye contact. So make sure to fail everyone who doesn't stare at you the whole time. This is how to assess technical skills the most accurate way possible and its known the vast majority of managers fail people in interviews for not staring at them enough (staring increases productivity.) Finally, you don't want to forget the computer science tests. At least four years in school and tons of debt is a lot to stomach compared to people who learned practical skills in their own time at a cost of almost nothing. Though chances are almost zero you use computer science knowledge in your job it's best to make sure you fail every self-taught developer who can't immediately balance a binary dick tree. It shouldn't concern you how many developers are self-taught and won't fit in your talent pipe line after doing this. Your hour long algorithm interviews are sure to make sure that only people who want to feel smart get hired. If you put these measures into place you're sure to build the most mediocre organization possible. But there are other ways to improve the process. Experiment with calling your company 'remote' but only hire from certain timezones; Make sure the interviews happen in person. Hold as many meetings as possible. If there's one thing engineers love it's meetings that break up focused concentration time in their day. Even better if the meetings are only done at certain times in the day as that will be as hostile as possible to a remote working environment. I want to make sure you don't have any funny ideas in your head about remote working. It might seem to offer flexible time management but people are ultimately children and its up to you to put in place measures to prevent this. If you do this right you can even manage to exclude people with chronic illnesses that would have otherwise been able to fit in your talent pipeline through remote work which I think is really something. I hope this post has been helpful to other recruiters and hiring managers out there. Peace

wizardofmysore 6y ago

That is what most companies do. When you have an over supply of backend engineers but need frontend engineers no one looks for more backend engineers. Their stack has a weakness of frontend engineers and they find the one that strengthens it the most.

mlcrypto 6y ago

Thanks to the rate of bitcoin appreciation it doesn't matter where I work. I can make the same or more than the top companies. I can opt out of the crazy hiring process

dukeofdoom 6y ago

Talent is everything. Without Elon Musk, or Von Braun there are no key rocket program break throughs. Not that I know much about rockets, just that there are key talented people that push the world forward. You need the worker bees. But someone at the top has to be the visionary genius. If was the manager of a soccer team that came in last in the League. One way of improving would be to replace my weakest players. And the team would probably marginally improve. But it doesn't usually happen that way. Chances are your best players are not talented enough either, and you should replace those too. Or Perhaps, trading two of your good players for one more talented. Which is typically what happens. So not sure if I would agree with the premise of the article. Also, If I was building a stock portfolio, one not terrible way of doing it would probably be around how many PhDs the companies have on the payroll.

nednar 6y ago
This is a valid argument for the discussion. I don't agree with it, but thanks for sharing. What do you think are Elon Musks talents that push his SpaceX program forward? In which area do you think that you could make a valuable contribution to the world?
- dukeofdoom 6y ago
  If he succeeds reusable rockets, privatizing the space program, commercial flights into space, starlink, and the tech he develops around his quest to going to Mars. Elon has a unique combination of business skills and technical skills. My contribution is in technology development. But even the dumbest ones of us can make a valuable contribution to the world by properly raising the next generation of human beings.

jes5199 6y ago

I recently discovered that, in a topgrading-style interview, it’s possible to filibuster! They expect to be able to ask 4+ questions about every job from the past ten years. But I will happily ramble for 20 minutes about minutia for each of them. It was wonderful

jmtulloss 6y ago
From a single interviewers perspective: this does not work. At the company I work at, and in my own interviews, being succinct and articulate in the points you’re making goes a long way. Ending early is not a bad sign.
- jes5199 6y ago
  oh you assume I still wanted the job

w0mbat 6y ago

I think this guy might be on to something. Every time you add a person to the team who is more stupid than you, it pushes you further up the stack rank. Why hire people with loyalty when you can hire people who can't quit because they can't find their way out of the building? Don't waste money on high salaries, just find people too dumb to realize you are paying them in Monopoly money. Soon you will be the top performer by a huge margin, and it's bonus city, baby!

EvilEy3 6y ago
You're probably bring downvoted for the attitude, but you're right. I've worked for a couple of low-mid tier companies and their core was always mediocre talent who is there because it's the top of the world for them. Top talent will always gravitate towards money, prestige. Sure there are some outliers that will work for food and change world, but if you can earn more why wouldn't you?
- w0mbat 6y ago
  I was just riffing on a joke, but much as I love Hacker News, it's a bad place for that. Too many people who take everything too seriously. But yeah, there was a pinch of truth in what I said too.

nsonha 6y ago

this whole thing reads: don't hire top talent, hire special talent, to us, whatever. The latter sounds even harder than the former. It's hard to see your own weakness, it's rarer to have people to fill an exact particular gap at that particular point in time. Maybe do away with the mindset of people as off-the-shelf products and think about them more as raw resources and focus more on upskilling. Universities are hopeless on this so the responsibility must fall on to someone.

waihtis 6y ago
Good mindset for big corp, not so for small biz. Waiting for someone to upskill and gain momentum for 6-12 months means a lost lump sum of money that can kill your business.
- nsonha 6y ago
  I guess it's something to balance. There is no reason to believe that the special talent will show up in 6-12 months nor that they will find your small biz a good place for them. I have a hunch that many of the people who can fix the weaknesses for your org are gonna be top talent as well with lots of choices
- onion2k 6y ago
  Hiring a candidate who already knows what you need often takes a lot longer than hiring someone who can learn what you need even if you account for the on-boarding time, especially if it's a slightly esoteric thing. Difficulty in hiring people who know your stack is also a good reason to choose the simplest and most common tech to run on rather than something niche you feel is technically better.

ChuckMcM 6y ago

More of a perception change rather than an actual change I think. FWIW, I've always hired to "fill gaps" and not to "add stars". Now, do I want a great person who can fill that gap? Sure. But the priority is the gap, not the person. There are those mythical people for whom "if you interview they will 'make' a position so they can hire you" is said to be true. In my experience, people who are hired because they seem like super stars rather than for a particular role, do not do as well. Why? Because it usually automatically puts them in conflict with the person who is already doing that role, and second, what they should be doing isn't immediately apparent leading to some meandering around which is perceived by upper management as being 'non-productive.'

vladmk 6y ago

This seems like an oversimplification of what it takes to make a company grow and succeed. Is it either a) hire top talent or b) hire for weakness. The question this article is posing is the wrong one, it’s neither a nor b. Companies need to hire based on what they need most, sometimes it’s profit, sometimes value, sometimes all of the above. This article feels like it’s based on a strawman.

onion2k 6y ago
The last section of the article covers your exact point, and suggests that some large companies might need a hybrid approach. In smaller companies (or teams within big companies) the points in the article are absolutely correct though.

EvilEy3 6y ago

Sorry, we don't buy snake oil here. Try this bs on LinkedIn they absolutely love a lot of words justifying hiring inferior talent.

kowlo 6y ago
You speak on behalf of HN, however, this submission appears to be on the front-page. It seems that the majority of voting users browsing HN throughout the duration of this posts existence do indeed love this bs.
- EvilEy3 6y ago
  What makes you think that upvote equals agree or love? I also upvoted post because I wanted to see more people discuss the matter at hand.

nxpnsv 6y ago

One clearly doesn’t exclude the other. And really, that’s all you need from this article. (And that’s not even in the article)

johbjo 6y ago

> “We hire top talent” These phrases are mainly intended to flatter the employees, to make them grateful for being "chosen", and maybe to increase trust and confidence among them. Choosing who to hire (once basic requirements are met), is much less important than the morale and attitudes among employees. Much better to say "top talent" than "randomly picked". But, the hiring process is a huge factor in the perception of the identity of the employees.

fit2rule 6y ago
HR people should be required to demonstrate the basics of the technology they are hiring for .. if they can't do that, they're not qualified to gatekeep the technology teams. Too often, HR is used to repress technological advances, out of fear of loss of control. That is a good thing: HR should lose control over technology groups.
comboy 6y ago
To me, much more important in that phrase is expectation who will you be working with. It's fantastic to be surrounded by smarter* people and keep learning, but at some level it's hard and if you like what you do, then this seems to be the most important thing about the job. You have your basic financial needs covered when you're a decent coder, even boring projects can have great and interesting implementations, it all drops down to people who you are working with. Also, not just in IT, true masters tend to be interesting people in my experience. More often than not, they have humility and curiosity that allowed them to get that far. But of course it often tends to be an empty phrase. If they do hire top talent you are more likely to hear specific names rather than this phrase. 1. smarter / more experienced / more knowledgeable / sometimes even having your level of expertise but coming from a different background

fit2rule 6y ago

How about just fire your whole HR department, and let team leads do the work of finding qualified engineers for their needs? HR is the bane of the technology world. As a cultural phenomenon, the class of "HR" specialists are massive drag on the progress of the species. We would be better off without this role in our technological cultures. So much technical debt accrues because the HR person doesn't have a single, frickin', clue what they are doing. If you don't know what "firmware" means, don't try to hire firmware developers, yo.

nednar 6y ago

The article assumes that most teams know and openly talk about what their weaknesses are. But is that actually a common thing? Don't we have a natural drive to ignore our weaknesses and blame them on others? It's a little funny, because the alternative phrasing also includes that already. One hires the best of the best without specifying the best of <what>. "The best people will solve all the problems!" without any inclination about what the problems are. Doesn't that imply that one doesn't actually know one's own problems and hopes that if one can just hire a people smarter than oneself, they will figure it out for you?

mleonhard 6y ago

The article spends most of its words trying to convince the reader to do it, and only a few paragraphs on how to do it. I was convinced in the first paragraph. My own experience shows that hiring for your team's weaknesses can make it more effective. In 2013, I went from an operations-heavy role to a new team with little operations experience. Our TL designed and coded a new service. He was not happy with the feedback I gave through the design & code review process. Before deploying the new service to production, we met with one of the company's top engineers (Sanjay Ghemawat) for a "production readiness review". The reviewer was impressed and found only a couple of minor issues. He said that it was rare for him to review a service and find no major issues. Many of the questions he asked during the review were things that I had brought up earlier and convinced our TL to fix. Although I had not written any code on the service, I contributed operational knowledge and filled a weakness of the team. Our TL did not acknowledge my contribution and even gave me a bad review, costing me about $80k in compensation. Now, years later, I believe that he did that to get me to leave the team. I had often pushed to fix the major problems in our project. I think he wanted to keep control and continue working on fun things and ignore the problems. Our manager went along with him, building his own empire. I left and the person who took my place had the same problem and left as soon as they could. Honesty and respectfulness are important qualities of teams and team members because they develop trust. Trust makes teams more productive. An internal study at Google concluded that teams with members who trust each other are much more productive than teams with high technical ability and low trust [0]. Lack of trust is a team weakness that we can hire to improve. We can also intentionally train and practice skills that improve team trust. I want a systematic way to identify the strengths and weaknesses of myself, my teammates, and potential teammates. I want a questionnaire like the one in Essential Enneagram which was tested in a study with 1,000 participants [1]. I wish the large tech companies would invest in this kind of work and publish it. [0] https://rework.withgoogle.com/print/guides/5721312655835136/ https://rework.withgoogle.com/print/guides/5721312655835136/ [1] https://drdaviddaniels.com/enneagram-test/ https://drdaviddaniels.com/enneagram-test/

Gustomaximus 6y ago

I had an interesting call once asking me to interview for marketing job at a women's online fashion business. I said to the person "not sure IM the right person, I'm male and have zero interest in fashion". To which she replied "That's great because I've got plenty of that fit, I want someone that looks at this more as a business than personal interest" I never interviewed as they salary was low, but I really liked that approach. I find that 'must love and be passionate about our company products' a little overdone, especially in the US. Its healthy to have people with different points of view, and staff that use alternatives and can discuss why.

jacques_chester 6y ago
Some (not all) recruiters are salespeople. They'll say any old thing, just so long as you hop on the conveyor belt.
alisonkisk 6y ago
Being "passionate about the business" is overmuch, but for the employer, it's important that candidate respects the business, in the sense that the candidate believes that what the business is doing matters (quality product that will make the world better, boss recognizes good work and rewards it, customers deserve to be fleeced, or what ever gets you out of bed), so that you want to accomplish progress at work and not just do the minimum for the paycheck.
proc0 6y ago
That's rare in my experience. It seems every startup wants you to think their area is the most exciting in the world and you are full of ideas of how to move the product forward. It's like wanting detailed specs means you are unmotivated, just because you're not interested in making decisions in that space, whether to use one color over another or think ahead about the behavior of the feature, for development it is technically irrelevant, as it's all just translating to code, but business people will have none of that attitude lol.

12xdev 6y ago

Is this you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tizjq_Ux_zQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tizjq_Ux_zQ

say_it_as_it_is 6y ago

I think that managers should have to take the GMAT as part of the hiring process, even if they got their MBA 20 years ago. They need to know number properties and have basic critical reasoning skills for the roles that they are interviewing for. Why give them a free pass while requiring principal engineers with 20 years experience to answer leetcode problems? The low quality management at large organizations is an obvious sign that they're not screening for the best talent, who clearly scores at least 700 on the GMAT.