How to hire the best people you've ever worked with (2007)

http://pmarchive.com/how_to_hire_the_best_people.html

by wyclif • 11 years ago

137 48 11 years ago

geofft2• 11 years ago

Now, you might say, Marc, that's great for a young kid who has a lot of spare time to stay current, but what about the guy who has a family and only has time for a day job and can't spend nights and weekends reading blogs and staying that current?
Well, when you run into a person like that who isn't current in their field, the other implication is that their day job isn't keeping them current.
If they've been in that job for a while, then ask yourself, is the kind of person you're looking for really going to have tolerated staying in a day job where their skills and knowledge get stale, for very long?

If they've got a family to feed, the answer is "yes," right? Or "That's why they're looking for a job with your company."

Alternatively, if they've got an H-1B...

rumcajz• 11 years ago

REST vs SOAP, the new Facebook API, whether Ruby on Rails is scalable, what do you think of Sun's new Java-based scripting language, Google's widgets API, Amazon S3, etc.

Really? Why would anyone learn any of that unless they actually need it to make their work done?

overgard2• 11 years ago

Because learning that kind of thing increases the possibility space of what you can do. Insights usually come from a diversity of knowledge, if you only learn what you need to know you'll be exceptionally average.

DavidWoof• 11 years ago

I agree in theory, but the problem is that everybody has their own personal "10 most interesting things right this moment" list, and they often don't match up even (or especially) among excellent programmers.

So the fact that somebody isn't spending time with your favorite new toy doesn't mean they're not constantly learning, especially when the top 10 list is as ridiculously subjective as the one in the article.

autotune2• 11 years ago

Messing around with an API in your off time is important because it means you can change contexts and get up to speed more quickly without having to learn everything from scratch on the job, and of course context is everything. I'm probably not going to be super into a social network's API but for things that are server-related? Damn right I want to know how build 30 servers with just a POST request, a for loop, and some json data. You can then apply that knowledge to something a bit more boring you might get hired for if needed, like a startup that needs someone who can answer questions about how to properly use their API to make a number of POST requests to send hundreds of orders of glitter to various companies who have not sent a response to said persons job application... in theory of course.

ohyes2• 11 years ago

No it doesn't. It means you have a lot of free time and can be used as cannon fodder for the startup. You will work 80-100 hour weeks producing exceptional work for compensation that is below the area average.

Let's get real, employers /want/ young naive fresh out of college kids who've never been burned and don't know any better than to give their early to mid twenties to a VC/startup for peanuts. Messing around with a rest API is just a sign that you are potential prey, a fresh kill for the hamburger machine.

mattmanser• 11 years ago

To be fair this was 2007, they were interesting things at the time that you might plausibly muck around with for a side project.

AYBABTME2• 11 years ago

Because they're curious about it? The same as they might be curious about the geology of Mars and the history of the world since the Renaissance. Maybe just for the kick of it, or because they have a side project in mind.

wyclif• 11 years ago

Keep in mind this was written in 2007. I don't think all of that stuff is irrelevant by any means, though. Nine years later, the list might look somewhat different, but his point is that it's an indicator of intellectual curiosity, not things that are directly practical for the job the employer is offering.

jph• 11 years ago

My top hiring metric is grit. Wikipedia says it's an individual's passion for a particular long-term goal or end state, coupled with a powerful motivation to achieve their objective.

This perseverance of effort promotes the overcoming of obstacles and challenges... and serves as a driving force in achievement realization.

CryoLogic• 11 years ago

I'm no expert in this area, but when I look for potential co-founders I always think the best metric is how self driven they are. It's so easy to find people who went to school, got the grades and graduated. Its harder to find people who go and do things outside of the standard.

WWLink• 11 years ago

I take it you don't care much for employees that do things besides programming? Like I dunno.. hobbies, and family, and stuff?

Call me lazy if you wish but I almost never want to program during the weekend. That time is better spent with family, or playing games, or washing the car. Or something. Anything really. If I come into work having burned my brain out over the weekend programming something, then I don't produce results that satisfy me. Hehe.

overgard2• 11 years ago

His thing about reading too much into references is pretty bad. Like "moody" = "clinically depressed." Pretty big jump there! Could you really say that about a stranger based on a tepid reference? Maybe their project was stupid, or they had a bad seating arrangement where they were stuck next to an annoyingly chatty person, or they just weren't naturally bubbly, or ... whatever, there's like a thousand possible reasons to consider before you jump to "clinically depressed" with regard to a stranger.

I also think the thing about drive is a bit naive. If you're dealing with a young unknown quantity than sure, drive can be a useful metric, but on the other hand if you're dealing with a proven reliable professional with domain expertise, who cares if they have drive? I've worked with plenty of really good people that don't want to touch a computer after they go home, and yet are incredibly capable at their jobs, and that's totally fine.

wpietri• 11 years ago

Yeah, I share your concern on drive. People who are incredibly driven are surely going in some direction, but it's not clear to me that it's always the right one, and I've often seen them drive in a direction that is different than where the team is going or what the company needs.

hobs• 11 years ago

Yeah, I prefer vision and ability to deliver over some person's belief in your perceived drive. Its a very simple con to make someone think you are determined, its much harder to con results.

geofft2• 11 years ago

I interpreted that passage as that he had once gotten a review of someone as "moody" and it turned out they were actually clinically depressed, and similarly with the other reviews.

Not much better to extrapolate from one data point than from zero, though!

ntumlin• 11 years ago

Similar to that, when he mentioned constantly interrupting = egomaniac. I've noticed that I'm fairly bad about interrupting people, but I don't think it's because I feel I'm way better than everyone else and my opinion is so important, but that's what my parents and some of my close friends do as well. When I do it with people besides them, I usually stop myself and maybe apologize, but by then it's too late.

I know I must be annoying, but surely that doesn't mean I'm a bad developer.

pm• 11 years ago

I just had to deal with someone like this for six months - he always interrupted people, always thought he knew everything, was a terrible coder but thought he was great. However, he stressed multiple times that he never regarded himself as better than everyone else. His actions said otherwise, and pissed off the team (especially me).

You might be an egomaniac, or you might not. It's impossible to tell from one comment, because you've only mentioned a subset of the behaviours, and egomaniacs don't always have the self-awareness to judge their own behaviour.

If you listen and engage with your peers about programming, and not just dismiss everyone else's opinion outright, then you're probably not an egomaniac.

PakG1• 11 years ago

To be fair, even if you were an egomaniac or thought you were better than anyone else, that doesn't mean you're a bad developer. There are obviously cases where egomaniacs are great developers. Linus Torvalds being exhibit #1. Not defending the practice of thinking you're better than others. Just saying that it's not simply binary.

nommm-nommm2• 11 years ago

Interrupters are people who don't listen to what others are saying. Playing nice with others is usually is required to be a good developer (depending on what you're working on, software is rarely a solo effort).

Not only that, you can learn something from other people as you don't know everything all the time. Constantly learning is required to be a good developer. You can't learn when you interrupt.

I worked with an interrupter, he was one of the most incompetent programmers I've ever seen but wasn't capable of understanding his own incompetence because he was too busy interrupting others.

napperjabber• 11 years ago

It's a culture thing. The trick is to keep from disrupting the conversation flow. - Some natural languages outside of English are meant to interrupt the speaker. A community with a mind is less worried about finishing a thought vs an individual who wants to be heard by the community. - Who ever convinced you you are annoying is just pushing their ideology onto you and you're allowing it to affect you.

jt2190• 11 years ago

The (admittedly unstated) context here is that you're not just hiring someone competent for a job, you're hiring an early employee for a startup. The employee will have a massive influence on the company's future. They will not only be doing the job, they will be defining the job.

(Edit: The table of contents lists this under "other startup essentials.")

JamesBarney• 11 years ago

Specifically, I am unaware of any actual data that shows a correlation between raw intelligence, as measured by any of the standard metrics (educational achievement, intelligence tests, or skill at solving logic puzzles) and company success.

I don't mean to be nit-picky but I enjoy an internally consistent burden of proof in a blog post. In this post he seemed to move the goal posts. He dismisses intelligence as valuable because it doesn't meet an impossibly high burden of evidence. But then argues you should instead should use drive, curiosity, and ethics without substantiating his claims.

For example, test programmers on basic algorithms -- linked lists, binary searches.

Just in pseudocode -- it doesn't matter if they know the relevant Java library calls.

Programming and algorithms are two different sets of skills. Writing a stable, easy to use, useful java/ruby/python/javascript library is a very different skill set from solving algorithmic puzzles, which are both unrelated to recreating a linked list from scratch in 10 minutes on a whiteboard.

danieltillett2• 11 years ago

Yes arguing from your own ignorance is not the most reliable way to convince someone of something.

In regards intelligence it is the only thing other than work tests that has been shown to have any major correlation with job performance.

Edit. This paper make for a great read on this topic.

1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227600464_Stubborn_...

dlss• 11 years ago

Conscientiousness is also correlated with job performance, and is about on par with IQ for predicting lifetime earnings. Agreeableness (also a Big-Five trait) is also quite important in cooperative settings (though both have small effects relative to IQ for single shot task performance).

http://www.gwern.net/Conscientiousness%20and%20online%20educ... has a nice overview of the literature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientiousness does a reasonable job describing the trait.

Edit: while we're listing large causal factors for work performance, I feel appalled I forgot to mention genetics... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9739126

silvestrov• 11 years ago

I'm guessing all his candidates have high IQ as the lower ones already have been filtered. He is not talking about the difference between 100 IQ and 140 IQ, but e.g. 130 and 140 IQ.

So I read it a bit differently: he doesn't think that intelligence doesn't matter, but at the high end of the scale, intelligence doesn't matter as much as drive. High intelligence can't make up for lack of drive: A person with 130 IQ with a lot of drive is better than 140 IQ with low drive, but no matter the amount of drive, an 80 IQ person is not usable as a programmer.

Similar to: if a jobs offers you $50,000 and another $100,000, most will take the second job without hesitation. But if you have to choose between $250,000 and $300,000 the difference in wage might not matter as much as other aspects of the job, e.g. location, what to work on and the colleagues.

aka The law of diminishing marginal utility.

ishener• 11 years ago

just in case people miss that: this was written by Marc Andreessen

untilHellbanned• 11 years ago

Most people softball deficiencies in people they've worked with when they do reference calls.

Everything these days is so PC that I wish people would even softball the deficiencies. We are in the age of recommendation inflation. Everybody is "great". There is no "but...".

mabbo• 11 years ago

Google, on the other hand, uses the metric of educational achievement.
Have a PhD? Front of the line. Masters? Next. Bachelor's? Go to the end.

That's... That's not really true at all. While I interned there (during my bachelors) I met a lot of people without their masters. One guy had only his high school diploma.

s3nnyy• 11 years ago

Although a degree seems to be a poor predictor of performance in a software engineering role (http://blog.alinelerner.com/how-different-is-a-b-s-in-comput...), I am sure the percentage of people with degrees at Google is higher compared to "normal" companies.

I have some insights in Google-Zürich and the percentage of Masters and PhDs is above average compared to other companies. (Disclaimer: I live in Zurich and I used to code for a living. Now, I hire engineers for different companies in Switzerland. If you look for a tech-job in Zurich, check out my story "8 reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT" on https://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-t... or ping me at the mail-address in my HN-profile.)

d23• 11 years ago

I know it's Marc Andreessen and I know it's a nit-pick, but did he never learn how to use a paragraph? Short, standalone sentences can be powerful to make a point, but they can be tiring when used every single paragraph.

tokenadult• 11 years ago

The blog post says, "Specifically, I am unaware of any actual data that shows a correlation between raw intelligence, as measured by any of the standard metrics (educational achievement, intelligence tests, or skill at solving logic puzzles) and company success."

That's just an argument from ignorance. According to Hacker News comment karma scores, one of my most popular comments ever was a comment that included a FAQ about what the research shows about company hiring procedures.[1] What the research says is that for hiring workers for any kind of job, a work-sample test and a test of general intelligence are about tied for effectiveness in identifying good job candidates. ALL hiring procedures sometimes miss good workers, and all hiring procedures sometimes result in hiring lousy workers, but if you want to optimize, the way to optimize is to hire workers who are good at doing the specific tasks you are hiring for (that's what a work-sample test shows you) and how have good general cognitive ability, which shows as well as any indicator that they can learn to do new tasks in the future. References to the research literature are available in my previous comment, linked in the footnote. Anything else you do in hiring, for whatever reason, has less benefit to your company than checking whether job candidates can do the job tasks and checking whether the job candidates are smart or dull.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543

stanleydrew• 11 years ago

It seems most people have missed what he actually said, which was that he's not aware of research linking employee intelligence to "company success". Employee intelligence may well be linked in research to employee success, but he didn't suggest otherwise.

Employee success and company success are two different outcomes of interest.

ccvannorman• 11 years ago

TLDR: There are thresholds for intelligence and pre-existing ability, but focus on three things: Drive, Curiosity, and Ethics.

I have also heard "Hire for intelligence and attitude", which I also agree with. A good attitude will take you far.

How to hire the best people you've ever worked with (2007)

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