8 ms·

> Don't look for talent Isn't talent the ability to do things well? Or maybe I lack a nuanced definition of "talent". Or maybe the headline is trying to be sen

by _greim_ 13y ago

> Don't look for talent Isn't talent the ability to do things well? Or maybe I lack a nuanced definition of "talent". Or maybe the headline is trying to be sensational.

loganfrederick 13y ago
I think his point is even more basic, but perhaps more depressing: Finding people who are decent and competent can be hard enough, so you have to cover that minimum bar before you can talk about "talent". Given his industry and as he cites in the post, he probably faces the problem of lots of people who claim to be "writers" more than the average HN user finds people who claim to be "programmers".
hga 13y ago
Indeed; one of my maxims is "Do not do something if you cannot do it well", and I still think it's a good one as long as you adjust that for things like Time to Market (a better thing too late is not really "better", or insert standard Patton quote; military history is useful to learn for striking this balance) and "adequate" especially for those things that must be done but would otherwise not get done at all. But it's implicit in the essay, and I take the headline as not so "sensational" since it's advocating a particular primary focus that's different from a very common and irrelevant one (at least as the primary focus). I've been told this is one of the things MIT looks for in undergraduate applications, "projects" as they put it, but basically evidence that this is someone who does stuff (which I was fortunate to be able to provide in my application). Which of course is one of the reasons MIT has such a reputation, a strong part of the Zeitgeist is doing things. To reify that, I think Richard Feynman, Class of '39, first got interested in the Connection Machine when Danny Hillis was visiting Caltech and they ensconced themselves for a week or so discussing it. However, when he showed up to help the new company (there's an exposition of this that's commonly linked to on HN), things were in chaos, and the only thing they could think of right then was to send him to get office supplies. Which he was entirely happy to do, Nobel Prize winner or not. Hmmm, come to think of it, I've had casual interactions with a couple of Nobelist biologists while studying there, one teaching a class, one was my undergraduate adviser for a term before I switched majors, and they gave off the standard "get things done" vibe, you wouldn't have any idea they'd gotten the prize without looking at their bios.
sliverstorm 13y ago
You can boil the point of the article down to this line: no one is good at identifying talent ahead of time It isn't that you don't want talent, or that talent isn't exactly what you want all of your employees to have, but it is difficult to identify. So, the theory in the article seems to go, instead of trying to measure talent, look for other things in your workers- things that have a non-causal relationship to talent. I swear there is a word for this in statistics- factors which do not have a clear causal relationship, yet still tend to be found together...
- mark-r 13y ago
  Maybe there's a causal relationship but it's just not obvious. See for example http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/08/quantity-always-trumps-quality.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/08/quantity-always-tru...
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    Sure, but point being instead of trying to measure talent itself, you try to measure indirectly.
metaphorm 13y ago
the criticism is that some people believe they can correlate talent with abstract measurements. Tucker is saying you can only reliably correlate talent by evaluating the works of the person.

by _greim_ 13y ago

> Don't look for talent Isn't talent the ability to do things well? Or maybe I lack a nuanced definition of "talent". Or maybe the headline is trying to be sensational.

loganfrederick 13y ago

I think his point is even more basic, but perhaps more depressing: Finding people who are decent and competent can be hard enough, so you have to cover that minimum bar before you can talk about "talent". Given his industry and as he cites in the post, he probably faces the problem of lots of people who claim to be "writers" more than the average HN user finds people who claim to be "programmers".

hga 13y ago

Indeed; one of my maxims is "Do not do something if you cannot do it well", and I still think it's a good one as long as you adjust that for things like Time to Market (a better thing too late is not really "better", or insert standard Patton quote; military history is useful to learn for striking this balance) and "adequate" especially for those things that must be done but would otherwise not get done at all. But it's implicit in the essay, and I take the headline as not so "sensational" since it's advocating a particular primary focus that's different from a very common and irrelevant one (at least as the primary focus). I've been told this is one of the things MIT looks for in undergraduate applications, "projects" as they put it, but basically evidence that this is someone who does stuff (which I was fortunate to be able to provide in my application). Which of course is one of the reasons MIT has such a reputation, a strong part of the Zeitgeist is doing things. To reify that, I think Richard Feynman, Class of '39, first got interested in the Connection Machine when Danny Hillis was visiting Caltech and they ensconced themselves for a week or so discussing it. However, when he showed up to help the new company (there's an exposition of this that's commonly linked to on HN), things were in chaos, and the only thing they could think of right then was to send him to get office supplies. Which he was entirely happy to do, Nobel Prize winner or not. Hmmm, come to think of it, I've had casual interactions with a couple of Nobelist biologists while studying there, one teaching a class, one was my undergraduate adviser for a term before I switched majors, and they gave off the standard "get things done" vibe, you wouldn't have any idea they'd gotten the prize without looking at their bios.

sliverstorm 13y ago

You can boil the point of the article down to this line: no one is good at identifying talent ahead of time It isn't that you don't want talent, or that talent isn't exactly what you want all of your employees to have, but it is difficult to identify. So, the theory in the article seems to go, instead of trying to measure talent, look for other things in your workers- things that have a non-causal relationship to talent. I swear there is a word for this in statistics- factors which do not have a clear causal relationship, yet still tend to be found together...

mark-r 13y ago
Maybe there's a causal relationship but it's just not obvious. See for example http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/08/quantity-always-trumps-quality.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/08/quantity-always-tru...
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Sure, but point being instead of trying to measure talent itself, you try to measure indirectly.

metaphorm 13y ago

the criticism is that some people believe they can correlate talent with abstract measurements. Tucker is saying you can only reliably correlate talent by evaluating the works of the person.