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Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men (1924)

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Re: Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men (1924)

#201

Post by tsotha »

thebokehwokeh2 wrote: post #87

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…

I hear you. I once worked at a company that went down the tubes because they gave an idea guy free rein and he was depending on underwear gnomes. It was a profitable $40m company when I arrived, but I saw the writing on the wall and left after three years. Two years later one of its competitors bought it for a song.

Re: Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men (1924)

#202

Post by hyp0 »

vinceguidry wrote: post #184
bitkrieg wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So a sales and marketing genius then?

He was good at it. He was no genius. Tesla turned out to be the better showman. Edison's envy of Tesla's flair for the dramatic led him directly to his ghastly practice of electrifying stray animals to portray AC as unsafe. Whereas Tesla almost managed to get a gigantic pie-in-the-sky wireless power transmission experiment funded using little more than his famous mad-scientist mystique. Edison couldn't hope to inspir…

Agreed. His hard work actually fits the article's concept of a non-genius pretty well. He had a very strong constitution.

One thing is a little misleading though: he established a laboratory, with a group of inventors. I believe this was the first industrial-scale research laboratory in the world - like PARC. So much of the "hard work" is the hard work of all these other men - and they happily welcomed his name on their invention, even in cases where he didn't do much, they wanted his name there.

So although he did invent a lot personally, perhaps his greatest achievement was being able to lead and inspire intelligent and hard-working men to do what he did (as you say). Jobs and Wozniak rolled into one.

Re: Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men (1924)

#203

Post by nnq »

echaozh wrote: post #200
nnq wrote: post #198

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…

Though I really like your idea, and think that I may fit into 1 or more categories described in your post, I don't think it is a good thing for the brilliant guy. 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 implemen…

The thing is that there's huuuuuge road between 'kind-of-working prototype' and 'something deliverable to the client'. And it takes very different kinds of people for the portions of it.

A "brilliant never-finisher" is great for the idea->'kind-of-working prototype'/PoC, and yes, I think they should struggle to at least get to this, not just throw an idea. But the thing is that this is usually just 20% of the road, and they'd bee useless or even damaging for the rest of the 80%, so it's better to let them move on. And the 'damaging' part is very real (!!): someone who keeps pouring new and better ideas into a project that already has the ideas it needs to be a product is actually bringing negative value by increasing time-to-market, even if everyone only perceives the fact that the product would not even exist without him and that all his ideas are great.

By letting the 'brilliant non finisher' start a new project (just give him something challenging and an almost-zero budget until he's really needed again if the company doesn't have the resources for something else), you're avoiding a potential big loss or even a catastrophic failure (imagine the competition brings something inferior to market, grabs to whole market share, and then even poaches the brilliant guys from you afterwards). The only cost to pay would be that you need to keep paying the brilliants for the rest 80% of project duration to keep them for feedback and new projects, while they climb rocks or sip cocktails and you and the rest of the team sweat your guts out (hard to swallow) OR finance some micro-pet-projects to keep their minds working (hard to support).

Re: Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men (1924)

#204

Post by roel_v »

noisy_boy wrote: post #199
vacri wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't tell me how the applicant will manage a department or implement new techniques. It's a test for line sales staff, not departmental managers.

Most of the sales managers I've seen rose from the ranks of line sales.

But that's not the question. This question is 'how do we find the best guy for the job.' Saying 'this is how we always did it' is circular reasoning.

Re: Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men (1924)

#205

Post by k__ »

nnq wrote: post #198

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 always starters

I have the feeling, that everyone who don't want to do real work, is this kind of person...

There are a big bunch of people out there with ideas, but only a fraction of them will realize their ideas.

This is why there are "non-technical-founders" (I have this idea, I just need someone _helping_ me to implement it) and why developers are paid so much money.

Because everyone can have ideas, but not everyone can make them work.

Re: Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men (1924)

#206

Post by lmm »

bennyg wrote: post #177
wavefunction wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edison was not a genius. He was good at sales and marketing, however.

I hate thinking like this. You can't say Edison didn't have a monumental impact in getting electricity to proliferate at reasonable prices across the country.

No, but you can say he wasn't a genius. In a way that makes his achievements more impressive: he wasn't the smartest kid in class, but he worked hard (and fought dirty) and turned himself into a household name.

Re: Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men (1924)

#208

Post by JohnDoe365 »

> victory comes to companies, not through the employment of brilliant men, but through knowing how to get the most out of ordinary folks.

Definitely my favourite stance. Does that mean Go will succeed, while Rust want? In absolute terms of money, not outstanding iceberg projects??

Re: Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men (1924)

#209

Post by lmm »

interstitial wrote: post #195
Kluny wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I must be in the lower echelons of this secret HN club, because I cannot see the score on any comment. I thought it was the general and public absences of meaningless internet points that kept the comment system of HN in check.

You can't see the score on other people's comments, but if you click your username at the top you can see the scores for your own.

Re: Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men (1924)

#210

Post by jib »

nnq wrote: post #198

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…

A lot of people want to be "the idea guy", because it's cool and relatively easy. The problem is that ideas are cheap.

The value of any given idea is really low - I would argue that for many organisations ideas even have a negative value on average, because you are going to spend a lot of time dealing with the idea without it actually becoming something that generate value in the end.

Even if you have an idea, that works, and that will generate significant value if realised, until that idea IS realised, it is a negative cost.

People who can generate a large amount of those ideas are a commodity.

People who can cheaply identify an idea that can be realised and that have access to resources to realise it, and that can go through the process of actually realising the idea are not a commodity.

The bottle neck for putting new ideas to market is not the idea generation, and so the people who consider themselves "always starters" is not a scarce resource, hence I dont need to rotate them from department to department - every department I have already have access to more than enough good ideas, so adding the "always starter" to that department would be a negative cost.

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