Hiring

Do not give a command post or an administrative position to anyone who lacks ability, even if his family has served the Asakura family for generations.

Asakura Toshikage samurai house rule

The central problem in big companies, and the main reason they're so much less productive than small companies, is the difficulty of valuing each person's work. Buying larval startups solves that problem for them: the acquirer doesn't pay till the developers have proven themselves.

Buying startups also solves another problem afflicting big companies: they can't do product development. Big companies are good at extracting the value from existing products, but bad at creating new ones.

This essay is derived from a talk at the Berkeley CSUA in May 2005, Hiring is Obsolete

What do I mean by good people? One of the best tricks I learned during our startup was a rule for deciding who to hire. Could you describe the person as an animal? It might be hard to translate that into another language, but I think everyone in the US knows what it means. It means someone who takes their work a little too seriously; someone who does what they do so well that they pass right through professional and cross over into obsessive.

For programmers we had three additional tests. Was the person genuinely smart? If so, could they actually get things done? And finally, since a few good hackers have unbearable personalities, could we stand to have them around?

That last test filters out surprisingly few people. We could bear any amount of nerdiness if someone was truly smart. What we couldn't stand were people with a lot of attitude. But most of those weren't truly smart, so our third test was largely a restatement of the first.

When nerds are unbearable it's usually because they're trying too hard to seem smart. But the smarter they are, the less pressure they feel to act smart. So as a rule you can recognize genuinely smart people by their ability to say things like "I don't know," "Maybe you're right," and "I don't understand x well enough."

In a technology startup, which most startups are, the founders should include technical people. During the Internet Bubble there were a number of startups founded by business people who then went looking for hackers to create their product for them. This doesn't work well. Business people are bad at deciding what to do with technology, because they don't know what the options are, or which kinds of problems are hard and which are easy. And when business people try to hire hackers, they can't tell which ones are good. Even other hackers have a hard time doing that. For business people it's roulette.

Paul Graham, How to Start a Startup - March 2005

Two thirds of CIOs are quaking at their chief executive's view of IT and performance, and see their jobs at risk. So they need to clearly show the quality of IT services in business terms that he or she understands. And only 39 per cent of the CIOs think they have the right people to meet current and future business needs.

Over 50 per cent of the CIOs surveyed were worried about the aging workforce they have, because they have difficulty attracting the right people with the right skills.

INQUIRER, Two thirds of CIOs see their jobs at risk - January 14, 2005

CEOs are demanding accountability and transparency. Why are marketing execs so concerned about ROI metrics? More than ever before, marketing is being held accountable for real results - such as revenue growth and market share. And apparently, it hasn't delivered. According to a recent survey by Spencer Stuart, the average tenure of a CMO in the leading brand companies is less than two years.

CMO Magazine, What's In Store For Marketing In 2005? - January 14, 2005

When writing job listings, some managers and companies will list every skill they wish a potential employee might have as required experience. The following is from an actual job posting on a major job Web site

Adam Kalsey, Writing Realistic Job Descriptions - July 10, 2003