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Daniel Gross: Why Energy Is the Best Predictor of Talent
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- eric4smith 5y agoThis is so very true. Another extremely good signal are people that won’t give up easily. Tenacity, grit, whatever you want to call it. All that trumps degrees and knowledge, because all you have to do is spark the interest of this kind of person and they will find a way because they just won’t stop until they do.
- Trasmatta 5y agoI've helped mentor CS students and bootcamp students before (as well as junior devs and interns), and I agree. Asking for help is good, but certain types of people think that learning to program is just a matter of learning all the steps and then doing it, when in reality it requires a more meta level skill of being able to tenaciously pursue a problem until you solve it. You should be asking for help along the way, but you need to have a drive to figure out the problem yourself, regardless of what help others are or are not able to give. Sometimes students just need a lift up and then they find that ability along the way, but it just doesn't seem to ever surface in others.
- andai 5y agoThere's something that's been bugging me I've been trying to put into words. Lately I've been teaching programming to high schoolers and college students, and I kind of feel like, the sort of people who want to pay someone to teach them rather than figuring it out by themselves are going to have a distinct disadvantage. Maybe it's just a case of "I did things the hard way so everyone else should too" -- my path was certainly not efficient! But I have to wonder if they lack that "grit", and if it can be taught or if is something innate. Here's another example which might illustrate the same mindset: I go to IRC as a last resort, because I don't want to ask anything I could have solved in a few minutes by myself (or worse, that I could have found on Google!) But when I do go to IRC, I formulate my question very precisely, explain the facts, the steps I took, my hypothesis... and 9 times out of 10, just the act of writing the question out causes the solution to become obvious! (Or reveals something I forgot to try, which then solves the problem...)
- Trasmatta 5y agoI definitely see what you're saying. I think many people come to programming with the mindset that it's just like math. Memorize the formulas and the rules, and then get the right answer. So they just want somebody to teach them the formula so they can memorize it. But that's just not how writing software works.
- drewcoo 5y agoActually, when I got my math degree I noticed the same two sets of people. The memorizers and the ones who enjoyed solving problems. Software works just like math (where math is doing proofs, often with new things you're not familiar with).
- itronitron 5y agoI recommend showing them how to solve various types of problems that developers typically encounter, setting up a project in an IDE, cloning a repo and building it, finding API docs for the specific version being used, etc... That way they know how to get past roadblocks when they encounter them. I'm currently taking a class, which is not programming related, and it's maddening because the teacher and course material do a very poor job of covering the basics, so from my perspective as an outsider it is near impossible to figure out how everything relates. It's possible that your current students need a general overview of how all the pieces interrelate before they can internalize and build their own knowledge.
- sergiotapia 5y agoThis is why I don't buy into the "anyone can code" mindset. More than being some kind of super genius, to be a successful engineer you need to have the stones to face your stupidity every single day. Most jobs have clear a to b to c to d steps. You know when you're done. With software dev you faceplant almost every couple of hours until you finally succeed and get that high. Then you start all over again with a new ticket. Most people have no desire to live that every day. They are happier in excel massaging spreadsheets.
- mountainriver 5y agoI really like grit over energy. So much of software is just about grit and I see it as a distinguishing factor among the engineers I mentor. The ability to sit with hard problems and continue to be curious in the face of pain and adversity is a very important skill.
- dgb23 5y agoIMO that's the easy part, the hard part is to do all the boring stuff around that. Both of these things require different types of grit or energy or what ever and some freedom and organizational skills, but the tricky problems are the most exciting and motivating.
- treeman79 5y agoI used to give recruiters opinionated technical questions. Instructions were to forward his resume if he was passionate about it. Didn’t care what side of issue the candidate was on. Just that they had an opinion and showed enthusiasm about why their “side” was best. It worked very well.
- devmunchies 5y agoI think "enthusiasm" is more descriptive than "energy". I typically enjoy interviews since I'm a depth-first learner as opposed to breadth first, and interviews are an opportunity to talk about all kinds of things I've learned. Depth first learning meaning that I go deep a specific topic before learning adjacent topics (e.g. if building a database access layer + cache, I'll go deep on Redis documentation, which cause me to go deep on specific redis commands, etc. then after redis I move on to cache rehydration strategies, etc). This is reflected in my enthusiasm in interviews and ability to "talk their ear off" if they are interested in the topic. Maybe I have it backwards, my enthusiasm for learning technologies is why I go deep in the first place.
- csours 5y agoThe most energetic person I know is also the most infuriating to work with. I like him, but he can only listen to one point at a time. He gets very frustrated when the one thing he wants to fix doesn't make the system work. He does not take the time to comprehend how details fit into the larger picture. He does not onboard mental or software tools that would be a force multiplier. Energy alone is not a good predictor.
- DiggyJohnson 5y agoYes, I think many can relate to this. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a top predictor for talent. Can you think of a better proxy that this might have been about?
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago> Energy alone is not a good predictor. I hope that much is obvious to everyone. The podcast isn't literally suggesting that we discard all metrics aside from energy, or that energy automatically results in success. They talk about a lot of different values, the difficulties in measuring them, susceptibility to interviewer bias, and so on.
- eloff 5y agoThere's an exception to every rule. I think the point is that energy may be a good signal. Are there better signals? Spotting talent is hard.
- marcosdumay 5y agoI'm not the GP, but every high-energy person I've met is like this. When people want to get it done right now, they don't tend to make good decisions.
- borski 5y agoI understand your point, but mediocre decisions made quickly are sometimes better than no decisions made ever; there is a spectrum, and being on either extreme is not good.
- Ancalagon 5y agoI agree in theory but in practice this kind of interview would eventually be very easy to game
- petermcneeley 5y agoDoes Daniel Gross fit this description?
- AS37 5y agoThis is a promotional piece for a new book that comes out May 17th (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08R2KNYVX https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08R2KNYVX) One of the authors is known for being a YCombinator partner. The other is known for responding to every email. I'm not sure which is more impressive.
- Animats 5y agoAh. That makes sense as a strategy for YCombinator. If you fund the energetic ones at YCombinator's minimal level, they either succeed fast or fail fast. If they fail fast, they're quickly and cheaply flushed and require no further attention. The headache for VC firms is the company that takes forever to slowly make their thing work. Or the zombie that has reached breakeven but will never take off. Those require too much ongoing management attention.
- PragmaticPulp 5y agoBefore people start debating the headline, know that the podcast isn't literally saying that energy is the only metric that matters or that energy guarantees success. They talk about many different dimensions of individuals and how feasible they are to evaluate in the context of an interview. There are also great tidbits about techniques to help get honest answers from candidates, such as structuring the interview format in ways that leave less leeway for candidates to try to game up the answer they think the interviewer wants to hear. It's an hour long podcast. I remember it being interesting at the time. Worth a listen.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y agoThe headline only claims that energy is the best predictor of talent. HN can't even get that far without adding their own incorrect assumption.
- Razengan 5y agoI don’t know, I’m energetic and lethargic at different times but my output isn’t necessarily tied to my energy levels. Sometimes when I’m not actively working, I’m thinking and planning stuff in my head while seemingly loafing around. Other times when I’m energetic I don’t know what to work on. It’s a cycle. With humans nothing is constant.
- memish 5y agoRelatedly, there's a new interview question going around that likewise functions as a good predictor: What's your opinion of Elon Musk?
- tasubotadas 5y agoI've hired in the past a person that spoke minimally during the interview and during work calls (as like, convey the needed info with the least words possible) and he was crushing it at work later. Also, I've worked with a super energetic person who couldn't stand in his place, talked way too much, was rude, and, in general, unbearable. He was fired later. So... maybe to soon generalize.
- BobbyJo 5y agoI feel like the whole genre of 'How to tell if someone will perform well' is trying to squeeze blood from stone. I've worked with a lot of different people, and the more broad my experiences become, the less I think I am able to tell who is good and who isn't. I've worked with people who have extraordinarily high output, but slowed everyone around them down because they filled absolutely no-one in on their decisions and changes, so we were all left trying to beat the next code-base warping idea. I've worked with people that accomplished almost nothing, but lifted morale so much that they more than made up for their lack of productivity. (I wouldn't recommend looking for this scenario though, most low-output individuals drag morale down...) How many marriages do you think would make it 5 years down the road with only a month of knowing each other? A week? A handful of 1-hour interviews? I mean, that's the kind of time commitment you are looking at with a job. Just filter out people who are obviously bad fits, and fire fast. The diminishing returns of trying X, Y, and Z, to me, just aren't worth it, and if you are a small company, you've got better things to dedicate brain power to.
- hobs 5y agoAlso another thing is that someone's circumstances play decently into their work ethic and their team pose - I have seen people play out poorly at one company and then excel at another - at this point unless the person is actively harmful I try to avoid too much overthinking of the whys they dont fit in a job.
- danielovichdk 5y agoTotally agree. And it has become this quest for presumably so-called high performers to enable themselves and tell others how to spot something or someone. Not only is it boring to listen to, but very much subjective. You cannot measure quality. Its simply too difficult with all the variables in play over time.
- Gravityloss 5y agoI've also seen people whose output changes. Some people really not developing fast at the start but after a few years, finding a new steep and steady upwards trajectory.
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- bryanrasmussen 5y agoI worked with a really energetic guy a few years ago, I remember these things - he wrote code that looked sort of like this: const antilooped = []; const looped = []; const looper = data.map((item) = { if (item.nonX) {looped.push(item) } if (item.nonY) {antilooped.push(item)} }); then would not use half of the variables he instantiated, and probably merge looped and antilooped arrays in some weird way. Invariably debugging his code led to me just rewriting it all. And I remember just about the first thing he asked me is if I went to prison in Jylland in Denmark and a big guy named Ole wanted to make sweet love to me would I do it or would I rather die, and then he volunteered he would rather die. This turned out to be his typical lunch time small talk. on edit: just to be clear, he didn't use the looper array for anything.
- kache_ 5y ago
- elevenoh 5y ago
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoI think I would prefer not to but it is not one of the preoccupying thoughts of my daily routine.
- sublimefire 5y agoPeople need to be trained at work. There is nothing wrong with a person making mistakes; we all did them. AFAIK the problem is usually mentoring. At work, I observe "leaders" not having time to give a hand and explain stuff. Otherwise, there is a simple rule for engineers: do not write the code that makes the next engineer fantasize about your death.
- dymk 5y agoPeople should be on-the-job trained for specific technologies or in new/advanced techniques. If somebody doesn't understand the fundamentals of writing code for a code-writing job, though, that's a different story. That's what self-study and the education system is for.
- yifanl 5y ago> Final thought on this, if I didn't really nail the point already, in the story of a founding company, the main reason why energy matters is you need at the end of the day, whatever the person's hypothesis early on in the business, it's generally wrong. And so what you're trying to evaluate is two things: one, will the market give you enough tailwind and excitement so that you continue bouncing around and trying other things, and two: how many things you're going to try and how quickly you're going to try them, so you know investing in someone who's starting a company and who's energetic is like just having more shots on goal. Given this quote, I feel like the title needs to be qualified really heavily, it's looking at a very specific type of talent for a very specific type of situation.
- 71a54xd 5y agoEnergy sometimes seems to correlate with agreeableness and extroversion. Everyone I've worked with who does this has been a nightmare, I never get any valuable negative feedback and it's impossible to tell when something is going astray when everything is a degree of very positive. Sure, the same is true when everything is a degree of negative (which of course is worse and equally unproductive). High energy people are also in my opinion the most draining to work with and the most likely to be discounted as juvenile or inexperienced. In my opinion, the best indicators of talent are being humble, metered, incredibly well spoken / articulate and willing to help someone out of a situation they'd otherwise be afraid to go through with a superior. Handling stress without being a adderral ridden monkey while maintaining resolve is a trait that the most talented brilliant people I've ever worked with have had.
- AtlasBarfed 5y agoEnergy must be inspired and directed. That is up to leadership.
- jdauriemma 5y agoI am begging anyone in this comment section who hires people: do not ask candidates about their favorite movies in the interview process in an attempt to identify talent.
- plausibledeny 5y agoHow about "if you could be any type of tree, what kind would you be?"
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- didip 5y agoI would assume results is the best predictor of talent.
- kareemsabri 5y agoIn order to really judge his talent picking methodology, he should fund some of his anti-portfolio or at least people he seems unimpressed by. The trouble with VCs assessing their own talent spotting abilities is investing capital changes the odds of the outcome, it's not a neutral prediction.
- kupopuffs 5y agoAh yes, business and science clashing. Classic
- ta8645 5y agoThis rings true to me. The smartest person sporadically makes important contributions, but the most energetic person pushes things forward every single day. The most successful person I know has boundless energy at work, and is often used as a resource for many other people, helping them get their work done. She's on the national board of the professional association that oversees her field. She takes exceptional care of her extended family, and somehow manages to squeeze in vacations, nights out dancing, and time with her friends watching football on the weekend. Furthermore, she volunteers for an organization that helps new immigrants feel welcome, get settled, and find employment. Also, she decided to teach at the local college two nights a week for the last few years and gets glowing reviews from her students. Makes me tired just typing it all out.
- tenebrisalietum 5y agoI'm not high energy and I have to try very hard to assume super high energy people aren't on drugs.
- drBonkers 5y agoYeah, all the comments describing high energy people sound like they're describing people on amphetamines, Adderall or otherwise.
- ta8645 5y agoI assure you that the person in question is just naturally high energy. She drinks socially, but doesn't do other drugs, prescription or otherwise.
- Animats 5y agoThere's a classic classification of military officers. 1. Smart but lazy. 2. Smart and energetic 3. Dumb and lazy 4. Dumb and energetic Type #4 is dangerous. Those are the ones who energetically do the wrong thing and get people killed. The most famous losing generals (Custer, Cardigan, Burnside, McClellan, Westmoreland) were type 4.
- teddyh 5y ago“I distinguish four types [of officers]. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage.” — General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, 1933
- rektide 5y ago> Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. Heard this before, always fun, but random observation here... major nod to the Gervais principle? The slackers as the ones with the true model of reality, with a genuine assessment.
- asah 5y agoAfter 30 years, dozens of startups and several IPOs... I'm here to say that the combination of energy and tenacity is an amazing predictor of success. I read this more as "in defensive of high energy people" which then attracts the sort of vitriol you see in the comments section here, e.g. accusations of sloppiness, short attention spans, etc. Obviously, quality is required to the extent customers judge products in that category. Tesla had/has astoundingly poor quality, and Henry Ford is famous for optimizing-down quality as well.
- gwbas1c 5y agoYears ago I had a phone screening with Daniel Gross when he founded Greplin... Right out of high school. As someone in my late 20s, I was honestly concerned about working for a teenager; but he left such a mark that every few years I Google him and Greplin. Interesting to see where he goes.
- bmitc 5y ago> They also explore why the strongest leaders are energetic, enthusiastic, and funny. Ick. It’s a really unfortunate bias that quiet people can’t be viewed as good leaders.
- sethammons 5y agoleading is lots of communication. You have to say the same things repeatedly for them to sink in with a group. I'm not sure that it is a bias or more of a function of how people work.
- bmitc 5y agoSomeone being quiet in personality doesn't mean they're mute or incapable of communicating. Personality types is an area that has been researched, and I balk at the idea that only a small subset of personality types can be leaders. I have witnessed energetic optimistic leaders before, and they can people crazy, because they never actually address problems in concrete ways. People experience this all the time in companies: managers getting promoted up the ladder of management, leaving unsolved problems in their wake. The Enneagram personality system address things like this.
- w0mbat 5y agoThis is just a recipe for hiring extroverts and rejecting introverts which is a terrible idea unless you are hiring for sales.
- tchock23 5y agoThat is what I was wondering. Does ‘energetic’ just mean extroverted? Are there energetic introverts? Regardless, seems like a bad idea as blanket advice for all roles.
- hrez 5y agowhat's worse than a fool? - a fool with a lot of energy
- UncleOxidant 5y agoI tend to agree with this. In my experience (over 35 years in tech now) generally the most successful people have the most energy. I recall being invited to dinner to my wife's boss' house back in the early 90s. After dinner her boss ran each of his 4 kids up the stairs on his shoulders. This was after a very long day of work - his habit was to show up in the office at 6AM and work till 6PM. I was super impressed (and somewhat envious TBH) by his energy - I wouldn't have been up for that after even 8 hours of work and we were about the same age. He was already quite successful back then but now he is the CEO of Intel - not surprised at all that he ended up in that position. I've worked with a lot of very smart people over the years who just didn't have much energy. It's not that they've all been unsuccessful, but they aren't as successful as someone who may not be quite as smart but has much more energy. I put myself in that category - I don't have the energy to be super successful and I've realized it for quite a long time (probably going back to about the time of that dinner) -I'm not going to create a startup or be a CEO/CTO. We aren't all gifted with a high-energy physiology and that's fine - we can still have a decent career. When you find the rare individual who is very smart and has a lot of energy they can go very far indeed.
- BLanen 5y ago> Daniel is an expert on spotting talent. Why? He's a 31 year old from a startup which left zilch to the world.
- twayt 5y agoEnergy is also the best predictor of stimulant use. Anyone can do that. A good predictor is something that is highly correlated with the thing you care about and not anything else.
- civilized 5y agoJoke's on him. I'm talented as hell and my energy is shit.
- graycat 5y agoIn this thread, there seem to be two situations: (1) A VC (venture capital investor) evaluating the founder of a startup and (2) a manager hiring a subordinate. For (1) the VC, my summary view is that the VC criteria, what VCs pay attention to, is growth in traction -- they want the graph of traction over time to be "up and to the right". For more, they look at the size of the market. For one more, maybe consider if there is a "Buffett moat", that is, a barrier to entry for would be serious competitors. Maybe they look if the startup is in a field, space, they are interested in. Finally, if all these look good, they look to see if anything is seriously wrong. At times I have suspected that some VCs write essays on their investment criteria that, really, are intended broadly to get attention, have their name better known, and in particular to get applications from founders, that is, "deal flow". Then I would insert into this thread that, once a startup looks good in the above criteria, "energy" will not receive serious evaluation. Or, the above criteria are the real ones and will NOT be ignored or overruled, and if a startup has done well on those then other criteria, e.g., "energy", must be close to irrelevant. Or, if a startup looks good on the above criteria, then passing up the opportunity for a unicorn for relatively subtle reasons will be regarded, by the VCs partners, as foolish. For (2) the manager, I would hope that he (or her, here and elsewhere) has a situation, that is, some work to be done, has that work fairly well defined, regards currently his team as too busy to do that work, so wants to hire. In that, the main criteria should be, can the candidate do the work the manager has in mind? I would insert into this thread: That situation should be rather clear and definite and not subtle or complicated.
- mriet 5y agoI have rarely heard such a good example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. I stopped listening after the first 5 minutes but I believe he literally says that he has "1% of the appropriate knowledge to answer this question." I continued to listen anyways. 1% is almost the definition of beginner for Dunning-Kruger[1]. "Spy the Lie" or "How Emotions are Made" are both good books that go into depth about why it's near impossible to accurately judge anything about what or how someone is thinking and that there are no* accurate universal theories about human thinking or the link between human behaviour and human thought. (Feldman Barrett extensively footnotes her research in HEaM and it's really impressive.) So, in short, this is an armchair psychologist who's gotten lucky in his particular area of the world (probably California?). [1] If you read carefully, you'll realize that I don't believe in Dunning-Kruger either, given what I say. Sorry!