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When was the last time a CEO was (ever) given a work sample test? Serious Question.
Does his or her previous company count as a work sample test?
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And since those qualities are so out of reach for techies they're looked down on.
I think everyone should be highly suspicious of charisma. Charisma is a skill, not a trait, and it's developed by spending a lifetime practicing on people that one thinks are largely beneath one's self.
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And since those qualities are so out of reach for techies they're looked down on.
There are plenty of techies with social skills. 'sama ! :) It must suck to be a techy and have social skills because you'll get pegged as a business gal/guy even if you can hack with the best of em. Most people can't seem to handle the doublethink of two seemingly contradictory capabilities in one person. They need to find a simple job to reduce you to.
"Cannot be ... I NEVER met someone before who was like that. Let's poke around a bit more, I'm sure I'll find the flaw."
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There's a lot of things people should have been doing in 1924, but weren't. I mean, if we're judging by modern standards, allowing women and minorities into senior roles would be one of them. How, exactly, do you do a work-sample test for a chief sales executive anyway? "Hey, can you run our global sales division for a couple of hours, then we can evaluate if your methods really bring in the sales"? Edit: to clarify…
Sell me this pen.
"The continual use of slang expressions is an evidence of mental laziness, and I will not hire a man who depends upon slang to express his meaning. It is a substitute for exact thinking." I found this to be an unusual warning. Is "proper speech" really just a proxy for class in that time period? I'm now very curious about 1920s slang, especially its frequency of use in business settings.
Compare the comments on this site with the ones you see on reddit, where a sarcastic one-liner or a good meme reference can get thousands of upvotes. From my experience of actually writing comments on reddit that have gotten thousands of points - the less thought you put into them the better they'll do. The same is not true on HN where long and well thought out comments do better, and one-liners often get moderated.…
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Which is why you incentivize salesmen via commissions and quickly fire those that are obviously showing up just for the base paycheck.
Employees still optimize for pay / effort, NOT absolute pay. In that respect, commissions are still FAR from perfectly aligning incentives. You can't really be suggesting that commissions are the silver bullet for aligning incentives, as if that hasn't been tried for thousands of years already, with very mixed success :)
Working at a startup helmed by a "brilliant" man as mentioned in the article, I wholeheartedly agree. So much hand waving. So little execution. One month, we were doing one thing that "had to be in the app". Another month, something else. Neither would get the actual attention that needed for them to be implemented properly, and nothing of value was produced. Society places too much importance on the buds of ideas. T…
Incidentally (And I welcome negative points here) a great indicator of the capacity to focus for a long time on boring things and finish, should be college. It's no wonder many hacker geniuses can't finish it.
We should instead learn to recognize human diversity and accept that besides the "well rounded hard worker" that needs to make up at least 50% of any team, we also need to find ways of making use and helping thrive:
- the always starters: the guys that always start new things and have new ideas (that actually work!) but maybe never finish anything -- maybe we should stop pressing them to finish, just rotate them from one department to another and then let the rest work to bring his works to completion
- the motivation dynamites: the people whose minds go up in fire and also set fire to the minds of people around them -- maybe we should use them by rotating them to projects that lack motivation, or use them to launch viral social media campaigns or something
- the distracted geniuses: the thing with the "distracted genius" is that if you teach him how to "focus", he become way more productive but stops being a genius, and you then have another a-little-above-average-chap -- maybe we should use the "ideas volcanos" as a competitive advantage and stop telling them to focus, like encourage them to publish their ideas that cannot be implemented online on a company blog - yeah, the competition will steal some of them, but your company will become uber-attractive and everyone will want to work for "a company from which so many uber-cool ideas come from"
...and then there's the generalization that most of these types of brilliant people are essentially not team players -- they shouldn't be forced to work as part of one team or stick to a team: maybe a corporate environment may just perpetually rotate them from one team/project to another, not even bothering to let them finish what they are doing; maybe a startup should stop trying to get them on-board and just keep them as well paid consultants (and allow them to consult for even a dozen other companies at the same time to keep their minds busy).
...and maybe all the ideas above are wrong, but the point is that we are incredibly bad at making use of brilliant people in business context and focusing on "just use hard working average joes" instead is an avoidance of the problem, not a solution!
It's sad how this sounds so plausible and valid... because even today, we are incredibly bad at managing (or making use of or integrating into a team...) brilliant people and we fail to make use of them and we let them fail because we can only figure out how to make reliable profit by using readily available mediocrity. We should instead learn to recognize human diversity and accept that besides the "well rounded har…
The world only remembers the one who finishes, rather than the one who throws out an idea and then walks off. It may be easy for the brilliant guy to find excuses to not make more commitment and finish, he's just being either lazy or inconfident to implement his own idea. If he never finishes a thing, how can he know if it is good or not? how can he gather more practical experience?
It may or may not be good for the employer, it is definitely bad for the employeed to indulge in not having to finish.