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.
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