6 ms·

"Hire People Smarter Than You" is bad advice (2018)

47 points by dools 2y ago

karmakaze 2y ago
Here's good advice: "Have the people interviewing hires to be smarter than the candidates." Otherwise you're going to have quite a few folks taking space, holding titles, and collecting paychecks. Even worse they could mess up development processes that only really start to show their costs after a major release or two.
wildermuthn 2y ago
The article isn’t as interesting as the idea that it is possible to identify someone smarter than oneself. Reminds me of PG’s blub paradox: “As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the power continuum, he knows he's looking down. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub.” If being smarter is like being tall, then it is easy to identify someone that is smarter/taller than oneself. But if there is some threshold where smartness becomes a difference of kind rather degree, it may not be possible to identify people who are significantly smarter than themselves. Like the blub programmer, we may mistake people who are smarter than us as… merely weird. They think differently, which we mistake for thinking wrongly. Add into the mix that there are probably multiple types of “intelligence”, each suited to different domains, and the problem is compounded. Speed of thought is different than correctness of thought. The first is easy to identify. The second is a problem that I don’t think we should assume is solved.
marcyschidler 2y ago
[dead]
oglop 2y ago
We hired a genius once. Literally, had the whole over 160 IQ thing going for him. And man was he smart. Amazing memory. Could code circles around people. Everyone hated this guy. He destroyed team morale by being rude and unfriendly at each chance, told us team meetings for building cohesion was an excuse to not work, and it got very bad when members of the community who use the software started complaining about how cold and outright pompous he was. He was a disaster. He would not listen to others. He would not code with others. He would not get behind ideas he had any inking of not liking. He just was awful. Awful. God it was awful. Anyway, yeah I want an intelligent person, but the idea if you just surround yourself with smart people and delegate, then things go well is utter nonsense.
whiplash451 2y ago
> because the people with the most experience and skill are either starting their own businesses or working for the big companies that can afford them. Data backing that claim? There’s a ton of very talented people who don’t want to start their own business, don’t want to be a peon in a large corp and join solid startups instead. Come on.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- dools 2y ago
  > Data backing that claim? There’s a ton of very talented people who don’t want to start their own business, don’t want to be a peon in a large corp and join solid startups instead. Come on Well, the entire thing is anecdotal because I haven't conducted any research. But what I can tell you is that when I was in my 20s I hired some very talented people in their 20s. We are now all in our 40s, and none of us are available for hire by the type of person I was in my 20s. To the extent that we (ie. myself and those with whom I worked) are more skilled and experienced now than we were in our 20s, and to the extent that this career trajectory can be generalised at least enough to make it quite difficult to hire people more skilled and experienced than you are I stand by the claim. Yes there are outliers, but I posit those to be the exceptions that prove the rule.
  - whiplash451 2y ago
    OK, so anecdata disproved by stories like that of Netflix [1]. Thanks. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37102198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37102198
    - dools 2y ago
      Is it? Because what I'm saying is that going up against huge competitors in the quest to find talent is a losing proposition for almost everyone. I think 2014 Netflix is, in the context of this article, on par with an Apple or a Facebook; ie. almost everyone reading this article is not 7 years into creating a very successful global streaming service off the back of a successful video rental company founded in 1997.
to11mtm 2y ago
> “investing in people” and “hiring the best talent” is as expensive as it is naive. All things in moderation. I've seen most of the spectrum at this point of practices. Let's look at the opposite end. Hiring 'cogs'. Every time I've seen this attitude, the result Conway's law being expressed in the business; rube-goldberg type business processes and software that often require 'lots of bodies' but doesn't give optimal results. Even -worse- is when an org has 'cogs' in higher echelons. [0] TBH the most 'productive' places I worked at was one where 'the smartest person in the room' depended on the specific topic. [0] - I'm just saying, you don't get ahead of your competition by starting to do what Gartner says your competitors have already been doing for the last two years.
- datadrivenangel 2y ago
  The cogs end up designing the system. The problem with a system that can be operated by idiots, is that eventually the idiots become the one designing the system!
teqsun 2y ago
For anyone who hasn't read the book "The 48 Laws of Power", I highly recommend you do. Not because you should follow or believe everything in it, but it does really allow you to get into the head of how people in these sorts of powerful leadership positions think and operate. It would seem insane to worry about hiring people "too smart", but when the first lesson in 48 Laws of Power is "never outshine the master" I'm not entirely surprised.
renegade-otter 2y ago
There is that danger of hiring people who turn a simple problem into an intellectual exercise, wasting everyone's time. Also, it's very hard to figure out during interviews if the person is "smarter". What does that mean? They can solve more Leetcode problems?
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  > Also, it's very hard to figure out during interviews if the person is "smarter". What does that mean? They can solve more Leetcode problems? Not at all. "Smarter" and "spent enough time grinding leetcode" are almost entirely orthogonal. Trying to measure "smarter" by leetcode is even more misguided than trying to measure "good candidate" by leetcode. I've interviewed a fair number of people. During the interview, we ask them questions, trying to figure out what they know. With this one candidate, though, halfway through the interview we changed - we started asking questions because we wanted to learn things.
  - NBJack 2y ago
    I think they were being sarcastic. But it's a bit challenging to conclusively measure someone's level of "smartness", especially with the usual time constraints of most hiring processes. More importantly, it also depends on what "smart" means to you, the company, etc.
    - maeil 2y ago
      You can definitely test things such as openness to new ideas and proneness to certain biases, which tend to be fantastic indicators. Probably not yet in an automated, 200 applicants per day way. Though I can see LLMs changing this.
    - pixelrevision 2y ago
      And unfortunately “productive” needs to be part of the package. I have worked with some incredibly smart people that I really respected who had a very hard time getting anything done.
- deleted 2y ago
000ooo000 2y ago
Single-sentence paragraphs really set off my LinkedIn hot take/BS detector, and this article has no shortage.
- fragmede 2y ago
  your comment, btw, is a single sentence. what now?
apercu 2y ago
I don't even know what this means. Smarter how? And who is it aimed at? The CEO job is different depending on the size and qualities of a company. I've worked with people who have far more "raw processing power" than me, people who have the ability to focus harder and longer than me, but in most cases they displayed really poor business judgement and often over-engineered solutions.
notjustanymike 2y ago
> When a small business needs expert advice, they can almost always get what they need by hiring expert consultants. Yes let's create an outside dependency on mission critical elements with a business who makes money on billable hours. Meanwhile the smart people you didn't hire took a job at your competition.
- jodleif 2y ago
  This ^ Also it’s not only about smart, it’s about owning and believing in what you do.
  - cwillu 2y ago
    “This ^” doesn't work well when comments are sorted dynamically.
- brunoarueira 2y ago
  Couldn't agree more! Yet, the companies still continue to hire those experts and dump on us the issues when things goes wrong. I'd at least two times at the same company, the CEO called me and want me to fix things built by the experts!
- creer 2y ago
  It's a question of degree also. A small business may not be able to afford a full time X expert. Either at all because they are a small business. Or when X is nowhere near their core activity. X might be mission critical but also not core. Perhaps a lawyer, perhaps a sysadmin, perhaps an architect, etc. A good consultant is a part time adjunct who gives you the hints you need at a price you can afford and then gets out of the way. I think the more frequent problem is that it's HARD for a small business to pick the right consultant. After that, it's hard to establish what is the right question (so that the answer has a chance to be the right answer.) And then it's hard to understand the answer. Still a good idea simply because you can't afford "one of everything". (And then there is the consultant as a justification for something that would be hard to accept otherwise.)
  - 2y ago
randomdata 2y ago
But everyone else is smarter than me. Now what?
- dools 2y ago
  No hiring for you.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
moi2388 2y ago
Why would I want “the best person”? I want somebody who is good enough for what I hire them to do, and who is pleasurable to work with. This does not mean agreeing with everything I say or do btw.
- fragmede 2y ago
  Because that's what the word best means. Your definition of who's best includes a healthy dose of "pleasurable to work with" and "will disagree when appropriate", but others may make different decisions wrt all possible metrics.
YouWhy 2y ago
TL;DR: the article makes a very general statement where common wisdom indicates a variance of nuanced approaches. One end of the spectrum is line staff for fast-iterating low-innovation, low-margin businesses, the talent pool is often commodotized, hence hiring can be be made on cost-efficiency grounds alone. The second end is moonshot winner-takrs-it-all businesses. The risk in not having resilient, mentally flexible, over-qualified core team is abject failure. I wish the article had confronted this subtlety.
_nalply 2y ago
That's kind of paradoxical. If a dumb CEO hires dumber people than them, that's smart. Umm, no wait.
citizenpaul 2y ago
I've always suspected this is simply power dynamic advice. If you look up stats majorityof businesses are started by already rich people or the relatives of rich people(ie a small $10m loan from dad). If you have that power dynamic to have people smarter that you can pay lots of money then it probably is a good strategy. I'm guessing HN is more of the scrappy actual small business you start yourself that most people think about naturally as starting a business.. It is probably really hard to get someone smarter than you to work for when you cannot pay top rates. Why would that person work for you rather than become a better competitor themselves? I'm sure there are lazy smart people out there but I'm guessing its a thin pool and they are probably friends of the already rich entrepreneurs so they will stay in that circle. Again they are lazy so they are not going to want a company that has high risk of going out of business and needing to do the work of looking for a job. You are probably better off as a real self started business finding diamonds in the rough, people that are not generally good but have one or two strong skills that you can offload you own mental/time burden to and get at budget rates.
- dools 2y ago
  I agree, that's more or less the thrust of the article (I have no idea why this comment was downvoted, too ... it's on topic and substantive! Downvotes aren't for "disagree" right?)

47 points by dools 2y ago

Here's good advice: "Have the people interviewing hires to be smarter than the candidates." Otherwise you're going to have quite a few folks taking space, holding titles, and collecting paychecks. Even worse they could mess up development processes that only really start to show their costs after a major release or two.

wildermuthn 2y ago

The article isn’t as interesting as the idea that it is possible to identify someone smarter than oneself. Reminds me of PG’s blub paradox: “As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the power continuum, he knows he's looking down. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub.” If being smarter is like being tall, then it is easy to identify someone that is smarter/taller than oneself. But if there is some threshold where smartness becomes a difference of kind rather degree, it may not be possible to identify people who are significantly smarter than themselves. Like the blub programmer, we may mistake people who are smarter than us as… merely weird. They think differently, which we mistake for thinking wrongly. Add into the mix that there are probably multiple types of “intelligence”, each suited to different domains, and the problem is compounded. Speed of thought is different than correctness of thought. The first is easy to identify. The second is a problem that I don’t think we should assume is solved.

marcyschidler 2y ago

[dead]

oglop 2y ago

We hired a genius once. Literally, had the whole over 160 IQ thing going for him. And man was he smart. Amazing memory. Could code circles around people. Everyone hated this guy. He destroyed team morale by being rude and unfriendly at each chance, told us team meetings for building cohesion was an excuse to not work, and it got very bad when members of the community who use the software started complaining about how cold and outright pompous he was. He was a disaster. He would not listen to others. He would not code with others. He would not get behind ideas he had any inking of not liking. He just was awful. Awful. God it was awful. Anyway, yeah I want an intelligent person, but the idea if you just surround yourself with smart people and delegate, then things go well is utter nonsense.

whiplash451 2y ago

> because the people with the most experience and skill are either starting their own businesses or working for the big companies that can afford them. Data backing that claim? There’s a ton of very talented people who don’t want to start their own business, don’t want to be a peon in a large corp and join solid startups instead. Come on.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dools 2y ago
> Data backing that claim? There’s a ton of very talented people who don’t want to start their own business, don’t want to be a peon in a large corp and join solid startups instead. Come on Well, the entire thing is anecdotal because I haven't conducted any research. But what I can tell you is that when I was in my 20s I hired some very talented people in their 20s. We are now all in our 40s, and none of us are available for hire by the type of person I was in my 20s. To the extent that we (ie. myself and those with whom I worked) are more skilled and experienced now than we were in our 20s, and to the extent that this career trajectory can be generalised at least enough to make it quite difficult to hire people more skilled and experienced than you are I stand by the claim. Yes there are outliers, but I posit those to be the exceptions that prove the rule.
- whiplash451 2y ago
  OK, so anecdata disproved by stories like that of Netflix [1]. Thanks. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37102198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37102198
  - dools 2y ago
    Is it? Because what I'm saying is that going up against huge competitors in the quest to find talent is a losing proposition for almost everyone. I think 2014 Netflix is, in the context of this article, on par with an Apple or a Facebook; ie. almost everyone reading this article is not 7 years into creating a very successful global streaming service off the back of a successful video rental company founded in 1997.

to11mtm 2y ago

> “investing in people” and “hiring the best talent” is as expensive as it is naive. All things in moderation. I've seen most of the spectrum at this point of practices. Let's look at the opposite end. Hiring 'cogs'. Every time I've seen this attitude, the result Conway's law being expressed in the business; rube-goldberg type business processes and software that often require 'lots of bodies' but doesn't give optimal results. Even -worse- is when an org has 'cogs' in higher echelons. [0] TBH the most 'productive' places I worked at was one where 'the smartest person in the room' depended on the specific topic. [0] - I'm just saying, you don't get ahead of your competition by starting to do what Gartner says your competitors have already been doing for the last two years.

datadrivenangel 2y ago
The cogs end up designing the system. The problem with a system that can be operated by idiots, is that eventually the idiots become the one designing the system!

teqsun 2y ago

For anyone who hasn't read the book "The 48 Laws of Power", I highly recommend you do. Not because you should follow or believe everything in it, but it does really allow you to get into the head of how people in these sorts of powerful leadership positions think and operate. It would seem insane to worry about hiring people "too smart", but when the first lesson in 48 Laws of Power is "never outshine the master" I'm not entirely surprised.

renegade-otter 2y ago

There is that danger of hiring people who turn a simple problem into an intellectual exercise, wasting everyone's time. Also, it's very hard to figure out during interviews if the person is "smarter". What does that mean? They can solve more Leetcode problems?

AnimalMuppet 2y ago
> Also, it's very hard to figure out during interviews if the person is "smarter". What does that mean? They can solve more Leetcode problems? Not at all. "Smarter" and "spent enough time grinding leetcode" are almost entirely orthogonal. Trying to measure "smarter" by leetcode is even more misguided than trying to measure "good candidate" by leetcode. I've interviewed a fair number of people. During the interview, we ask them questions, trying to figure out what they know. With this one candidate, though, halfway through the interview we changed - we started asking questions because we wanted to learn things.
- NBJack 2y ago
  I think they were being sarcastic. But it's a bit challenging to conclusively measure someone's level of "smartness", especially with the usual time constraints of most hiring processes. More importantly, it also depends on what "smart" means to you, the company, etc.
  - maeil 2y ago
    You can definitely test things such as openness to new ideas and proneness to certain biases, which tend to be fantastic indicators. Probably not yet in an automated, 200 applicants per day way. Though I can see LLMs changing this.
  - pixelrevision 2y ago
    And unfortunately “productive” needs to be part of the package. I have worked with some incredibly smart people that I really respected who had a very hard time getting anything done.
deleted 2y ago

000ooo000 2y ago

Single-sentence paragraphs really set off my LinkedIn hot take/BS detector, and this article has no shortage.

fragmede 2y ago
your comment, btw, is a single sentence. what now?

apercu 2y ago

I don't even know what this means. Smarter how? And who is it aimed at? The CEO job is different depending on the size and qualities of a company. I've worked with people who have far more "raw processing power" than me, people who have the ability to focus harder and longer than me, but in most cases they displayed really poor business judgement and often over-engineered solutions.

notjustanymike 2y ago

> When a small business needs expert advice, they can almost always get what they need by hiring expert consultants. Yes let's create an outside dependency on mission critical elements with a business who makes money on billable hours. Meanwhile the smart people you didn't hire took a job at your competition.

jodleif 2y ago
This ^ Also it’s not only about smart, it’s about owning and believing in what you do.
- cwillu 2y ago
  “This ^” doesn't work well when comments are sorted dynamically.
brunoarueira 2y ago
Couldn't agree more! Yet, the companies still continue to hire those experts and dump on us the issues when things goes wrong. I'd at least two times at the same company, the CEO called me and want me to fix things built by the experts!
creer 2y ago
It's a question of degree also. A small business may not be able to afford a full time X expert. Either at all because they are a small business. Or when X is nowhere near their core activity. X might be mission critical but also not core. Perhaps a lawyer, perhaps a sysadmin, perhaps an architect, etc. A good consultant is a part time adjunct who gives you the hints you need at a price you can afford and then gets out of the way. I think the more frequent problem is that it's HARD for a small business to pick the right consultant. After that, it's hard to establish what is the right question (so that the answer has a chance to be the right answer.) And then it's hard to understand the answer. Still a good idea simply because you can't afford "one of everything". (And then there is the consultant as a justification for something that would be hard to accept otherwise.)
- 2y ago

randomdata 2y ago

But everyone else is smarter than me. Now what?

dools 2y ago
No hiring for you.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

moi2388 2y ago

Why would I want “the best person”? I want somebody who is good enough for what I hire them to do, and who is pleasurable to work with. This does not mean agreeing with everything I say or do btw.

fragmede 2y ago
Because that's what the word best means. Your definition of who's best includes a healthy dose of "pleasurable to work with" and "will disagree when appropriate", but others may make different decisions wrt all possible metrics.

YouWhy 2y ago

TL;DR: the article makes a very general statement where common wisdom indicates a variance of nuanced approaches. One end of the spectrum is line staff for fast-iterating low-innovation, low-margin businesses, the talent pool is often commodotized, hence hiring can be be made on cost-efficiency grounds alone. The second end is moonshot winner-takrs-it-all businesses. The risk in not having resilient, mentally flexible, over-qualified core team is abject failure. I wish the article had confronted this subtlety.

_nalply 2y ago

That's kind of paradoxical. If a dumb CEO hires dumber people than them, that's smart. Umm, no wait.

citizenpaul 2y ago

I've always suspected this is simply power dynamic advice. If you look up stats majorityof businesses are started by already rich people or the relatives of rich people(ie a small $10m loan from dad). If you have that power dynamic to have people smarter that you can pay lots of money then it probably is a good strategy. I'm guessing HN is more of the scrappy actual small business you start yourself that most people think about naturally as starting a business.. It is probably really hard to get someone smarter than you to work for when you cannot pay top rates. Why would that person work for you rather than become a better competitor themselves? I'm sure there are lazy smart people out there but I'm guessing its a thin pool and they are probably friends of the already rich entrepreneurs so they will stay in that circle. Again they are lazy so they are not going to want a company that has high risk of going out of business and needing to do the work of looking for a job. You are probably better off as a real self started business finding diamonds in the rough, people that are not generally good but have one or two strong skills that you can offload you own mental/time burden to and get at budget rates.

dools 2y ago
I agree, that's more or less the thrust of the article (I have no idea why this comment was downvoted, too ... it's on topic and substantive! Downvotes aren't for "disagree" right?)