Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
matt-rickard.com
Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
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Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
#2It always depends on the context.
You can hire a senior IC who specializes in one thing only and that one thing is what keeps your business running -- doesn't matter if they don't progress further faster.
Or you can hire someone inexperienced and spend X years training them until the intercept. But how long is X? There's a lot of risk to take on here.
Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
#3It always depends on the context. You can hire a senior IC who specializes in one thing only and that one thing is what keeps your business running -- doesn't matter if they don't progress further faster. Or you can hire someone inexperienced and spend X years training them until the intercept. But how long is X? There's a lot of risk to take on here.
In my experience, the short run is always longer than we think, but the long run is always shorter than we think.
Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
#4It always depends on the context. You can hire a senior IC who specializes in one thing only and that one thing is what keeps your business running -- doesn't matter if they don't progress further faster. Or you can hire someone inexperienced and spend X years training them until the intercept. But how long is X? There's a lot of risk to take on here.
In my experience, the short run is always longer than we think, but the long run is always shorter than we think.
Two brilliant comments right away. Wow!
Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
#5This is great advice that entirely ignores the fact that the best way to progress as a developer is to change job (or at least to change team within a company). In a market where moving on every couple of years at most is the aim of young candidates hiring for anything long term is just silly.
Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
#6How do you tell who will learn faster, IQ tests and personality inventories? I don't see how you can put this in to practice when all known forms of interviewing test where the candidate is today, not how fast they can learn.
Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
#7It always depends on the context. You can hire a senior IC who specializes in one thing only and that one thing is what keeps your business running -- doesn't matter if they don't progress further faster. Or you can hire someone inexperienced and spend X years training them until the intercept. But how long is X? There's a lot of risk to take on here.
In my experience, the short run is always longer than we think, but the long run is always shorter than we think.
related, people over-estimate impacts in the short run and under-estimate them in the long run.
For example, a common 2015 sentiment: "self-driving cars are going to put everyone out of work imminently", compare to a common 2021 sentiment: "self-driving cars still aren't fully ready -- they likely never will be".
Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
#8How do you tell who will learn faster, IQ tests and personality inventories? I don't see how you can put this in to practice when all known forms of interviewing test where the candidate is today, not how fast they can learn.
It's far from the only facet, but slope vs y-intercept could be recast as young vs old or newly graduated vs tenured.
Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
#9How do you tell who will learn faster, IQ tests and personality inventories? I don't see how you can put this in to practice when all known forms of interviewing test where the candidate is today, not how fast they can learn.
Internships are a form of interviewing and provide a duration over which you can test how fast the person learns.
Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
#10This is great advice that entirely ignores the fact that the best way to progress as a developer is to change job (or at least to change team within a company). In a market where moving on every couple of years at most is the aim of young candidates hiring for anything long term is just silly.
I actually think the advice is aligned with that. Young candidates have high slope and low intercept. I don't think the aim of ambitious young developers is to move jobs and maximize pay, but rather to be in a role where they can continue to optimize for slope. That's the kind of company you want to build and the kind of developer you want to hire.