The paragraph was supposed to be descriptive of what one sees in the field, not prescriptive of what managers should do. I can see that it doesn't obviously read that way. Will edit, thank you for the feedback.
Hey Tikhon! The Haskell thing was such a great way to filter for interesting frontier people back in the day, as we both experienced. That was a contrarian bet at the time, but it paid off handsomely for at least a few of us. The number of people we'd get to interview was only a fraction of the broader population, but it felt like 30-50% of the people we would talk to were awesome fits.
I've often heard the idea that you can always teach someone how to code, but you can't teach them to want to be great at it.
At the same time, I think there's a limit to how great someone can get even with a lot of experience. We see that with sports, there's probably a similar limit to cognitive activities too.
You can probably get the average, already smart person, to be a pretty good 8/10 on just about anything, be that music, math, writing, coding. But there are levels beyond that may require natural wiring that most of us just aren't born with. An extreme example of course, but there's no amount of experience I can acquire to get to a von Neumann level of genius, but fortunately we don't need that to build business web apps.
It's perhaps a little reminiscent of stock picking. Everybody wants the best deal they can get away with, everybody wants to get lucky, occasionally you find alpha with "one weird trick", but it turns out you just got lucky, and you regress to the mean eventually.
I think a stock picking analogy is good, but you captured wrong. Most of your portfolio should be status quo but most of your growth will come from the risky investments you took a chance on.
In a noisy environment you can't rely on strategy. Luck is necessary. Therefore risk is necessary
It's interesting that most of us have that story of someone who didn't pattern-match and yet ended up being absolutely stellar. Makes you wonder just how much latent talent is out there not being given the chance for one reason or another. Hope this article reminds people to dig beneath the surface a little more.
And yes, many candidates struggle with performing under the totally unnatural pressure of an interview, so you can cater to them with something like the github project review. Then you end up potentially filtering out people without a rich body of work that can be easily reviewed, which is a trade-off. Actually something I've been meaning to write about, I always say that there's no way to please everybody with an interview funnel. Someone perfectly fine will be filtered out, or turned off, by any of the approaches you choose.
You just need to choose which false negatives you will be ok with.
| In fact what I would like to see is thousands of computer scientists let loose to do whatever they want. That's what really advances the field.
- Knuth
| How do you manage genius? You don’t.
- Marvin Kelly (Director of Bell Labs)
We have thousands of examples, quotes, and clichés where dark horses completely change the field. In CS we see this over and over so much that it's a trope of any successful startup. I just wonder when we'll notice the pattern. With all the clichés like "curiosity is worth 10 IQ points".
I think, at least for the cutting edge, it's easy to understand why these tropes are true. (IIRC Kelly even discussed it) Experts already know what the problems are and are naturally drawn to fixing them. By focusing on impact or importance all you're doing is taking away time from problem solving. Taking time from allowing people to be creative. If creativity wasn't required we'd have already gotten there.
I'm often left wondering how much we waste by trying to over optimize. How much we hurt progress by trying to attach metrics to things that are unmeasurable.
Honestly, the thing I'm most excited to see from a post scarce world is how humanity changes and progresses. When we then have this freedom to explore and innovate. To let people become experts in what they want. To let experts explore the topics they want, without need for justifying their work and the stress of not being able to put food on the table.
But until then, maybe we should recognize that innovation is so difficult to measure and has so much noise that we shouldn't rely too heavily on what the conventional wisdom says. If conventional wisdom could get us all the innovation and was optimized then startups wouldn't exist as established players could just follow a clear playbook and out innovate before anyone even has a chance. It's weird that we both recognize big established players are too big and set in their ways yet we also look to them as the playbook to follow to succeed at where they fail.
I really think there's a lot of untapped potential out there. So many just waiting to be given a chance
Those are fair points. The bit of nuance I would add here is that:
1. Having FAANG-level budgets to hire vs three packs of ramen and a spool of string at the average startup makes it so that you have to learn how to spelunk through less obvious talent, you're looking at very different pools of potential hires.
2. This is written with the first-time YC-style startup CTO in mind who might be in their early 20s and might have never had to interview a single person until that point. I remember none of this being obvious to me the first time around, and I'm still refining my thinking all the time as the projects and markets change
I would extend that even further, I'm a fan of the idea that you should thoroughly vet the founders for excellence if you want to maximize your chances of ending up at a great startup. Not just your eng manager and peers.
Like with your "A player" engineers example, founders need to be exceptional if they want to attract great talent to work for them. So if you're pretty unimpressed with them as you're getting to know the company, the likelihood that the team they hired makes up for that deficiency is very low, and you'll end up around non-A players.
Thank you! I wanted to mention toasted coconut flake snacks as well, but the sentence was long enough already. If your company has those in the kitchenette, you're definitely well-capitalized.
And yeah, high agency is really trendy at this moment in the startup sphere, but hunger is not talked about enough IMO. Maybe because it's too obvious to be even worth mentioning.
Good article, reflects my experience hiring at a small services firm, too.
One thing I'd add re: "non-obviousness." There are also tarpits; people who make you think "I can't believe my luck! How has the market missed someone this good!?" At this point, I have enough scar tissue that I immediately doubt my first instinct here. If someone is amazing on paper/in interviews and they aren't working somewhere more prestigious than my corner of the industry, there is often some mitigating factor: an abrasive personality, an uncanny ability to talk technically about systems they can't actually implement, a tendency to disappear from time to time. For these candidates, I try to focus the rest of the interview process on clearing all possible risks and identifying any mitigating factors we may have missed while getting the candidate excited to work with us assuming everything comes back clean.
Great point, definitely a possibility. I think I've gotten lucky in the past here where either the process caught that kind of abnormality early in the funnel, or these folks just happened to actually be super early in their careers and just hadn't had anybody take a chance on them.
Do you find that in the tarpit scenario they will typically have a work history hinting at these quirks?
One person had 3-4 positions out of college, all between 8 and 14 months. Turns out they would join a large company, do nothing, and wait until they got let go. Not sure why they tried this at our smaller org, where the behavior was much more obvious.
Another flag for me is when an earlier-stage candidate claims deep expertise in multiple not-closely-related technologies. We hired one person who had deep ML, databases, and cloud services expertise - we have people like that on staff, so no problem, right? Turns out they struggled to do any of those (despite great performance on the take-home and really good, almost textbook-y answers in the interviews - this was before FinalRound and similar, so I assume they just prepped really well and had help from a friend). Now, I try to tease out the narrative of how they developed expertise in each area (e.g. "I started as a business analyst making dashboards, but then I got really interested in how databases worked and ended up building my company's first data warehouse"), which tends to be pretty illuminating in its own right. This sounds a little obvious, but a surprising number of candidates will explain their work history without ever mapping it to the skills they developed at each role unless prompted.
There were a few with really good resumes who got caught out during the interview process. Testing explicitly for humility in the interview helped a lot with this.
Thanks for writing this. As an IC, I read this more from a perspective of "how can I be better at my job and derive more satisfaction from work".
Personally, I think my biggest gaps are around "hunger" and "agency"... I have these things at times, sporadically, but I have difficulty sustaining them long enough to become a really high performer at most jobs. Eventually I get kind of burnt out and stop really giving my all, then transition to something else within a year or so.
I have a high-pedigree CV, so people generally want to hire me, but I often don't live up to their expectations because of this.
So hard to say in abstract without knowing more. I always wonder if this is something you can fix through process and habits, or if this is something you just need to feel intensely first, and only then will the right behaviors will emerge.
For example, if you're feeling comfortable and handsomely compensated at your current job, and you have the sense of security that you'll keep being hired forever, why would you burn the midnight oil and go the extra mile? Is your lifestyle going to change at all if you get to that next level? You might work longer hours, experience more anxiety and stress, and get barely any upside in return.
My hunch is that the human brain is efficient. It won't make you work any harder than you need to if you have obtained the thing you already want.
Maybe the real question here is whether you truly desire to be this aspirational high-performer, or if that's an idea you're romanticizing, something you feel you should aspire to, but you don't genuinely crave it. You end up fighting between the idealized you and the practical you. Which may explain why you're burning out and losing steam eventually, you can only force yourself to do something you don't feel like doing for so long before the body rebels.
Interesting framing, and definitely cutting close to some uncomfortable psychological questions. I don’t think I care much about being a high-performer for its own sake, but it definitely sucks to disappoint people. And I have the sense that there are people out there who experience a lot more joy and engagement with work, which is certainly something I want.
It’s possible that I just have the wrong personality to be a high-performer, and I should embrace being a somewhat overpaid flâneur. Or maybe I just haven’t found the right environment.
For now, I’ll keep following Derek Sivers’s advice [0] to relentlessly steer towards the things which give me that spark of excitement and motivation.
Thanks, this might come in handy. Currently, 4 years in the business. Working for an S&P500 company at the moment, but I am considering running my own thing or joining a startup as the next stop.
I would love to learn if many of these ideas are applicable in the S&P500 world, and if not, why that is the case. A little outside of my first-hand experience for me to have an opinion there.
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