Another extremely good signal are people that won’t give up easily.
Tenacity, grit, whatever you want to call it.
All that trumps degrees and knowledge, because all you have to do is spark the interest of this kind of person and they will find a way because they just won’t stop until they do.
I've helped mentor CS students and bootcamp students before (as well as junior devs and interns), and I agree. Asking for help is good, but certain types of people think that learning to program is just a matter of learning all the steps and then doing it, when in reality it requires a more meta level skill of being able to tenaciously pursue a problem until you solve it. You should be asking for help along the way, but you need to have a drive to figure out the problem yourself, regardless of what help others are or are not able to give.
Sometimes students just need a lift up and then they find that ability along the way, but it just doesn't seem to ever surface in others.
There's something that's been bugging me I've been trying to put into words. Lately I've been teaching programming to high schoolers and college students, and I kind of feel like, the sort of people who want to pay someone to teach them rather than figuring it out by themselves are going to have a distinct disadvantage.
Maybe it's just a case of "I did things the hard way so everyone else should too" -- my path was certainly not efficient! But I have to wonder if they lack that "grit", and if it can be taught or if is something innate.
Here's another example which might illustrate the same mindset: I go to IRC as a last resort, because I don't want to ask anything I could have solved in a few minutes by myself (or worse, that I could have found on Google!)
But when I do go to IRC, I formulate my question very precisely, explain the facts, the steps I took, my hypothesis... and 9 times out of 10, just the act of writing the question out causes the solution to become obvious! (Or reveals something I forgot to try, which then solves the problem...)
I definitely see what you're saying. I think many people come to programming with the mindset that it's just like math. Memorize the formulas and the rules, and then get the right answer. So they just want somebody to teach them the formula so they can memorize it. But that's just not how writing software works.
Actually, when I got my math degree I noticed the same two sets of people. The memorizers and the ones who enjoyed solving problems. Software works just like math (where math is doing proofs, often with new things you're not familiar with).
I recommend showing them how to solve various types of problems that developers typically encounter, setting up a project in an IDE, cloning a repo and building it, finding API docs for the specific version being used, etc... That way they know how to get past roadblocks when they encounter them.
I'm currently taking a class, which is not programming related, and it's maddening because the teacher and course material do a very poor job of covering the basics, so from my perspective as an outsider it is near impossible to figure out how everything relates. It's possible that your current students need a general overview of how all the pieces interrelate before they can internalize and build their own knowledge.
This is why I don't buy into the "anyone can code" mindset.
More than being some kind of super genius, to be a successful engineer you need to have the stones to face your stupidity every single day. Most jobs have clear a to b to c to d steps. You know when you're done.
With software dev you faceplant almost every couple of hours until you finally succeed and get that high. Then you start all over again with a new ticket.
Most people have no desire to live that every day. They are happier in excel massaging spreadsheets.
IMO that's the easy part, the hard part is to do all the boring stuff around that. Both of these things require different types of grit or energy or what ever and some freedom and organizational skills, but the tricky problems are the most exciting and motivating.
I think "enthusiasm" is more descriptive than "energy". I typically enjoy interviews since I'm a depth-first learner as opposed to breadth first, and interviews are an opportunity to talk about all kinds of things I've learned.
Depth first learning meaning that I go deep a specific topic before learning adjacent topics (e.g. if building a database access layer + cache, I'll go deep on Redis documentation, which cause me to go deep on specific redis commands, etc. then after redis I move on to cache rehydration strategies, etc).
This is reflected in my enthusiasm in interviews and ability to "talk their ear off" if they are interested in the topic. Maybe I have it backwards, my enthusiasm for learning technologies is why I go deep in the first place.
The most energetic person I know is also the most infuriating to work with. I like him, but he can only listen to one point at a time. He gets very frustrated when the one thing he wants to fix doesn't make the system work. He does not take the time to comprehend how details fit into the larger picture. He does not onboard mental or software tools that would be a force multiplier.
I understand your point, but mediocre decisions made quickly are sometimes better than no decisions made ever; there is a spectrum, and being on either extreme is not good.
Energy is a good signal. Patience is a good signal. Spotting talent is hard!
I would say that energy is an X factor. If you have two candidates and both demonstrate similar system comprehension, go with the one with more energy.
Energy is great for short term success, contemplation is great for long term progress. Maybe hire a mix of tactical and strategic thinkers? And then get them to work together somehow? It's easy to say and hard to do!
Writing about failure is easy, because you get to do it after the fact when everything is obvious.
Writing about your own successes is fun, because you get to talk about something that turned out well.
Trying to tell someone else how to be successful by following what you did is often a fool's errand, because you can never convey all the things you did to be successful; and in the case that you were VERY successful, you have changed the marketplace of products and ideas!
Ah. That makes sense as a strategy for YCombinator. If you fund the energetic ones at YCombinator's minimal level, they either succeed fast or fail fast. If they fail fast, they're quickly and cheaply flushed and require no further attention. The headache for VC firms is the company that takes forever to slowly make their thing work. Or the zombie that has reached breakeven but will never take off. Those require too much ongoing management attention.
Before people start debating the headline, know that the podcast isn't literally saying that energy is the only metric that matters or that energy guarantees success.
They talk about many different dimensions of individuals and how feasible they are to evaluate in the context of an interview.
There are also great tidbits about techniques to help get honest answers from candidates, such as structuring the interview format in ways that leave less leeway for candidates to try to game up the answer they think the interviewer wants to hear.
It's an hour long podcast. I remember it being interesting at the time. Worth a listen.
I've hired in the past a person that spoke minimally during the interview and during work calls (as like, convey the needed info with the least words possible) and he was crushing it at work later.
Also, I've worked with a super energetic person who couldn't stand in his place, talked way too much, was rude, and, in general, unbearable. He was fired later.
I feel like the whole genre of 'How to tell if someone will perform well' is trying to squeeze blood from stone. I've worked with a lot of different people, and the more broad my experiences become, the less I think I am able to tell who is good and who isn't.
I've worked with people who have extraordinarily high output, but slowed everyone around them down because they filled absolutely no-one in on their decisions and changes, so we were all left trying to beat the next code-base warping idea.
I've worked with people that accomplished almost nothing, but lifted morale so much that they more than made up for their lack of productivity. (I wouldn't recommend looking for this scenario though, most low-output individuals drag morale down...)
How many marriages do you think would make it 5 years down the road with only a month of knowing each other? A week? A handful of 1-hour interviews? I mean, that's the kind of time commitment you are looking at with a job.
Just filter out people who are obviously bad fits, and fire fast. The diminishing returns of trying X, Y, and Z, to me, just aren't worth it, and if you are a small company, you've got better things to dedicate brain power to.
Also another thing is that someone's circumstances play decently into their work ethic and their team pose - I have seen people play out poorly at one company and then excel at another - at this point unless the person is actively harmful I try to avoid too much overthinking of the whys they dont fit in a job.
Totally agree. And it has become this quest for presumably so-called high performers to enable themselves and tell others how to spot something or someone.
Not only is it boring to listen to, but very much subjective.
You cannot measure quality. Its simply too difficult with all the variables in play over time.
I've also seen people whose output changes. Some people really not developing fast at the start but after a few years, finding a new steep and steady upwards trajectory.
I'd straight up not work for a place that took this approach. Seems like a great way to fuck over the folks who made a big life change to join you. Though this philosophy is probably super effective, as long as you're willing to not think about the effects it has on others. Yikes!
Not in software. At least not in the US. I have very little fear of being let go. If it's not a good fit, I'd personally rather spend my time elsewhere.
I believe the thrust of the GP's point is that your position is quite particular to you, as there are plenty of highly-skilled, highly-paid professional software developers, even in the US, who struggle to find good, well-paid work quickly after being laid off, so have legitimate reason to worry about being let go.
For example, that may be due to any combination of age, skin colour, geography, ethnicity, visa/citizenship, neurodivergence, gender, family dependents, or other factors outside the person's control, helpfully summarised by the umbrella word "privilege".
After all, as is often said here, hiring is broken. It's not enough to be highly skilled.
I had to re-read both your comments carefully to understand them from that perspective.
Though you didn't intend to generalise, your refutation can be (and clearly was) parsed as an assertion about a whole category of people not having the high relative risk, rather than a singular counteraxample to say not everyone in the category has that risk. Your followup comment could also be parsed that way, unfortunately.
I think what motivated Bud's reply, and then mine because your followed appeared to entrench the position, is that it's common around here for people to talk as though virtually all software professionals are paid well and can easily slide into great new jobs as and when they want to, when really there's a huge "underclass" of software professionals who feel shut out of that nice world.
I understand. Sorry if I was unnecessarily curt in the reply. Most of the disagreements I get in replies are reacting to an extrapolation, implication, or association I did not intend to make.
> I think what motivated Bud's reply, and then mine because your followed appeared to entrench the position, is that it's common around here for people to talk as though virtually all software professionals are paid well and can easily slide into great new jobs as and when they want to, when really there's a huge "underclass" of software professionals who feel shut out of that nice world.
I get it. I was once in a similar boat, so I understand the feeling.
This is typical breakup scenario. Yes getting fired sucks, but it’s probably best in the long run. Wasting an employee’s time in an environment where they’re definitely not going to succeed is not good for anyone.
There is an important nuance here in that it assumes that all employers understand that someone being fired can just mean that they weren't a good fit for that particular position. I'm not sure that is universally understood. I would be that most people still look at firing as an indication that the employee is no good. That isn't necessarily correct at all, but unfortunately I do think it's how the majority of people perceive things.
I have some issues with the "fire fast" philosophy, but this is not really one of them. Companies don't generally even divulge that they fired someone when giving a reference. They will say the employee is "not eligible for rehire," which is frequently code for "we fired this person for cause," and is generally interpreted that way. I do wish they would just come out and say that the person was terminated for cause, so others wouldn't have to guess, but that's not even really related to the "fire fast" issue.
Yes, and given that being without employment (really, without income, but those are equivalent for most people) for long enough is literally a life or death situation, you're fully justified in that by lying about it in self defense. If you're privileged enough that not having any income for an extended period isn't a big deal, then, so what? But, if you aren't, lie.
You don't need to lie, but you also don't need to disclose every single thing to your new employer. If you had a short stint at a company, just leave it off. If they ask, just say you took some personal time to figure out what you wanted to do next. I think that's a totally valid description of trying a new job that didn't work out. I know a lot of people who have taken years off for fun. No one questioned it.
"Fire fast" can mean you get canned after a 6 month probation period (I know I was at one place). Explaining a 6 month gap is just barely possible if you leave it off, two of those in a row and it's a substantial chunk of anyone's career.
That's a two way street. An employee who knows he'd be a better fit in some other position should proactively agitate for it, rather than hoping the boss will guess it on his own.
If you assume that the breakup is inevitable, yes. Working through issues is another possibility; firing fast misses that opportunity and sacrifices potential loyalty in the process.
Yeah, the stigma of getting fired is bad for the employee. They may not have been a good fit for your team, but now other companies will automatically feel they're not a good fit for their team either.
Seems to work for Netflix, who is very up front about this philosophy. Of course, a big part of this is they do pair it with an incredibly generous severance package.
Personally, I would jump at the chance to work at a company with this philosophy, even if I ended up being the one getting canned. I don't think I've ever worked at a company that fired "too fast", if anything it was clear that some folks were clearly not going to succeed, but hard decisions were avoided, which took down the productivity of everyone involved, and when the folks were eventually let go or left on their own they usually ended up still being super bitter. A reluctance to fire, in my experience, just really translates into a company that has difficulty making hard decisions.
Yeah, Netflix appears to do it in a reasonable way. I would be perfectly fine taking an offer to work there.
But I've more frequently heard stories of others who see "fire fast" solely as a way to save money and also avoid having to ever train or mentor. That's bad for the employee, and not a place I'd work, if I knew it in advance.
If you're looking to structure your employees' comp with a heavy equity component that takes a while to vest, "fire fast" becomes especially dangerous for the employee.
"People are fired when they underperform their peers [over some time window]" is much more common, since most organizations have a very fuzzy grasp exactly on value returned per employee.
Candidates should try to be aware of companies that won't give new hires much of a time window to prove their performance level or value creation. Especially if large amounts of their compensation depend on going at least 12 months without getting fired.
Companies indeed often have a fuzzy grasp. But you can do things like point out how your work got the product to market X days sooner, and point out the profit per day of sales times X. Or point out how you fixed Major Customer Y's problem, ensuring a steady revenue stream from that happy customer. Or point out how you sped up the code in the datacenter by 1%, meaning 1% less needs to be spent on the datacenter.
At Boeing, the accountants managed to pin down the cost of one pound of airplane weight. At the time, it was $250,000 per pound. This made it easy to point out to the boss how much money you'd saved the company by doing weight reductions. I.e. if you saved a pound, that was the equivalent of 6 years salary. Time to bring up that raise you deserve!
I pretty strongly disagree this is actually possible (and not just be an exercise of made-up statistics) at any sizable company.
Look at Google for example. I'm quite sure that a very large percentage, if not majority, of the employees at Google produce net negative value. The problem, of course, is that it's impossible to know which ones. I know a bunch of people (brilliant people, mind you) that worked years on products at Google that never shipped, or worked on products that shipped but were discontinued long before they were ever profitable. But Google is willing to make these investments because they believe that, one day, one or two of them will pay off spectacularly.
I mean, Waymo has certainly never been profitable (heck they've barely had any revenue) - what do their employees argue?
The employee needs to be profitable, not the aggregate of all the employees.
As for speculative research projects, nothing succeeds like success (making money). Researchers who produce loser after loser projects I expect would be much more likely to be fired than researchers who had a win big enough to cover their losing projects.
> possible
The whole field of cost accounting is devoted to figuring this out.
Back in the 70s, I attended Caltech when Feynman was on the staff. It came up in conversation that Feynman was making a salary of something like $55,000 (a lot of money in those days). I said what could anyone do to justify paying him such a salary. A grad student laughed and said "you don't understand. Feynman doesn't need to do anything to be worth that salary. He just has to be on the staff, which attracts donor money and draws top talent to Caltech."
Of course, he was right.
But also, Feynman being Feynman, did do an awful lot as well.
In many universities and companies, you'll find such "prestige" staff.
As someone who’s worked at Netflix, I feel the whole philosophy is a little too glorified.
The first thing you have to remember is that Netflix pays a lot (a lot lot). The idea of expecting high performance only works when it’s accompanied with substantial benefits.
Second, Netflix does “fire fast” but not in the sense most people interpret it. New hires are given enough scaffolding to succeed. It’s not like other companies where they expect people to come onboard as revolutionaries and create impact in a month.
Third, high performance isn’t a constant like most people pretend it is. Netflix has managers who understand this fact and support their employees when things go down. They aren’t ruthless maniacs who fire you the first week you take a breather. And most managers who try to copy this elsewhere, miss that point.
I agree with everything you've written, but to be clear, I don't think a reasonable version of the "fire fast" mentality means you throw people in the deep end with no support and then can them at the earliest moment if they struggle.
But I do think it means that when it becomes clear that it's not working out, and the reason for it not working out is pretty fundamental to the employee's personality or aptitude, that you make a decision to let them go quickly and fairly.
It's really easy to have this attitude when you don't really think it will ever happen to you. I'm also guessing you've never been the target of harassment. I don't think you're going to like it as much when you're really excited about the job and on your first day you find out that the superstar developer on the team Gill just doesn't like you, never did. He was the one person who said they shouldn't hire you and is now pissed that he was overruled. Turns out Gill doesn't like not getting his way. You find yourself socially isolated because everyone knows what Gill is like and that he doesn't like you. Being seen talking to you isn't worth getting on Gill's bad side.
You get the shit assignments and code reviews are really rough. Especially the ones where Gill's around. Then you get hauled into the office about some problem with something you did. It isn't clear if it was something you did but it seems to be related to something Gill's working on. Gill's the super star and you're just the new guy so you can guess who caught the heat. It didn't go well when you suggested it might be Gill's fault. Turns out Gill was in the office right before you and he's telling a different story and they let you know what a superstar he is and everything he's done for the company over the years. It's clear that Gill's just going to grind you down as your quality of life decreases, you start losing sleep, acting out from the stress, you snap at your wife, children, and friends because you're still upset about something Gill did to you at work.
See the problem now or are you just imagining yourself as Gill?
On the flip side, firing people around Gill, who he doesn't like, fast will make it apparent that Gill is the problem much more quickly than just keeping everyone around when things aren't working.
It just reinforces what Gill has been saying all along, that most of the applicants out there really suck and it's impossible to find good people. That's why you better listen to him because if he ever decides to leave they're screwed. He's the most dependable employee. After four turnovers of the staff he's still there heroically keeping things going.
This feels exactly how firing at most companies without firing fast works. Whether Gill is a standup upstart decent worker, or ehether maybe yeah Gill isnt really fitting in. There's no process, no review, no structure, and more and more people using gossip & feel to decide where they stand on Gill, & whether or not he's worth a lick or semi productive or mostly not competemt. Doubt circles all of us, almost all of us, to some degree; even the best as they encounter strong & weak situations for them. When doubts start flying many teammates semi-covertly hide it, many attempt politeness, ignorance, keeping it to ourselves. But the picture just gets clearer & clearer, more & more apparent, & oh-they-were-underperforming Gill keeps feeling more pressure to quit.
The structurelessness & lack of a system, pressuring someone out, is no favor for Gill, but it seems like how it usually works.
i've seen 1 person in my career put on a performance improvement plan & let go. i've seen 5 fall out of general favor & get driven off. feels very lopsided & hard to see, grapple with.
> Seems like a great way to fuck over the folks who made a big life change to join you.
Most companies are motivated by profit, and will, therefore, gladly pay someone to fill a role that earns them more money than it costs. I don't see severing a non-mutually beneficial relationship as fucking someone over.
If you are in a position that being let go would be horribly detrimental to your personal and financial goals, looking for a company that is very slow to fire may be a good way to go. However, that is for your benefit, not the company's. I was targeting my advice at employers.
Not firing fast is like cutting the dog's tail piece by piece. Every time I have tried to give an employee another chance, I have ultimately regretted it in the end.
He's been pretty up front that he's looking for young people, both in this podcast and on the previous messaging of Pioneer.
The cost to someone in their early 20s to take a job for a month or two and then hop to another one isn't very high compared to someone far enough into their career to likely be making changes for their family and possibly face more judgement for a short stint from future interviewers.
Using language like "fire fast" might presuppose a situation where someone is going to be "hired" - possibly involving a lot of work, life changes, and moving/other expenses - only to have their effort/money wasted when they are "fired fast".
What if instead of "fire fast", the idea was re-framed/restructured into the new employee initially working as some sort of consultant with a short term contract? Use telecommuting/work-from-home or other temporary workarounds to defer expensive/disruptive things like moving to live near the company until after the defined "trial" period. Instead of "firing fast", you either let the temporary consulting contract expire or you proceed with the actual hiring process and the deferred tasks.
Maybe this isn't possible in practice, but it seems like we could design a workaround to this problem if were sufficiently creative.
> think about the effects it has on others
Unfortunately, that takes proactive effort. Unless there is a mechanism to actively incentivize spending time and energy to protect others, most of the time that effort will be spent on "more important" things. ~sigh~
My former company fired bunch of people at the beginning of COVID, because of the reaction of markets and our clients, some of whom left us. The fired employees were either new hires or bad apples. IMO it cleaned up the air a lot at the time.
On the other hand firing people is costly. For small to mid size companies, this advice might not be a as viable as it sounds.
> How many marriages do you think would make it 5 years down the road with only a month of knowing each other? A week? A handful of 1-hour interviews? I mean, that's the kind of time commitment you are looking at with a job.
I've heard people claim arranged marriages last longer, on average, then non. Of course there are all kinds of confounding factors. The number one though seems to be the expectation to make it work instead of just giving up and moving on if things aren't perfect.
> The number one though seems to be the expectation to make it work instead of just giving up and moving on if things aren't perfect.
Cultures that arrange marriages typically do not allow divorce.
Even if we carry that comparison through, the marriages are normally arranged by family, people who have known you your whole life, and probably want you to not hate your spouse. Hiring via references from people that have worked together for a long time are much more useful than interviews and personality tests.
I took a year of sociology in college. One bit of wisdom that out professor gave us was how arranged marriages happen in countries where there is immense pressure to conform to traditional gender roles. He literally described these societies as hammering a person through a form to get the requisite shape the society wanted. In societies like that, you can pair up any two people and it will likely work because both know precisely what is expected of them, and there is immense pressure again to make it work, no matter what.
And going to another extreme - I know couples who have lived together for years before deciding to get married, and the marriage really didn't last very long at all. A lot of sociological explanations but the point I really want to make is you can't always look at something that doesn't work out and assume that you would have made a better decision with more time.
We could double the size of our interview panels and still get people that weren't right.
Your objective is to create good teams, but the goal of Daniel Gross it to find unicorns. That's not the same thing. You could really have the worst culture and the best mismatch of talent and still have a unicorn.
That's the whole job of seed VC investors to be better than random at selecting people who will end up creating unicorns. So I disagree it is "trying to squeeze blood from stone"
> Your objective is to create good teams, but the goal of Daniel Gross it to find unicorns.
That's fair. In the context of placing bets, the dynamic is different, but VCs have the benefit of simply not investing in follow up rounds, which is as close to 'firing' as they can get.
> You could really have the worst culture and the best mismatch of talent and still have a unicorn.
True. However, I'd be willing to bet there is predictive power in how horrible a company's culture is in the early stages.
> That's the whole job of seed VC investors to be better than random at selecting people who will end up creating unicorns. So I disagree it is "trying to squeeze blood from stone"
Of the VCs I know and have met, the successful ones don't give much (almost no) weight to personality tests, outside of more obvious 'red-flags'. The checklist I've seen is:
1) History of entrepreneurial success. This is probably the best way to get in anyone's door.
2) History of domain success. They want to see that you know what you are talking about and come with the connections necessary to make the venture successful.
3) Does the founder's approach to the problem align with the firm's. Most high-quality firms look to invest in areas where their partners have deep domain knowledge, and they look for companies who they believe are making good bets.
There are very "impression" agnostic measures. I wouldn't put a lot of weight on "energy", but hey, I'm not a VC, so what do I know :P
Thank you for saying this. I was going to say the same but in a shorter and more incendiary manner.
The only thing I full heartedly disagree with you is on the fire fast part. It's a lot better to move them into another department.. sometimes it's not the person it's the environment they're put in. If you're too small... this is the part of doing business is to leave them better than you found them.
> people who have extraordinarily high output, but slowed everyone around them
I’m pretty convinced that most high performers follow this pattern. They’re really good at making it very visible all the stuff they’re doing, but they only focus on what’s visible, and leave all the underlying details/maintenance for the “lesser” employees to clean up after them.
Management jumps them from project to project because of how “good” they are, meanwhile every team they leave behind has to pick up the pieces. This has the perverse result of making everyone else appear to be low performers, because they’re too bogged down bailing out the leaky boat.
I worked with a really energetic guy a few years ago, I remember these things - he wrote code that looked sort of like this:
const antilooped = [];
const looped = [];
const looper = data.map((item) = {
if (item.nonX) {looped.push(item) }
if (item.nonY) {antilooped.push(item)}
});
then would not use half of the variables he instantiated, and probably merge looped and antilooped arrays in some weird way. Invariably debugging his code led to me just rewriting it all.
And I remember just about the first thing he asked me is if I went to prison in Jylland in Denmark and a big guy named Ole wanted to make sweet love to me would I do it or would I rather die, and then he volunteered he would rather die. This turned out to be his typical lunch time small talk.
on edit: just to be clear, he didn't use the looper array for anything.
People need to be trained at work. There is nothing wrong with a person making mistakes; we all did them. AFAIK the problem is usually mentoring. At work, I observe "leaders" not having time to give a hand and explain stuff.
Otherwise, there is a simple rule for engineers: do not write the code that makes the next engineer fantasize about your death.
People should be on-the-job trained for specific technologies or in new/advanced techniques.
If somebody doesn't understand the fundamentals of writing code for a code-writing job, though, that's a different story. That's what self-study and the education system is for.
If there are severe issues, of course. If someone wrote a loop in a strange way and it was an honest mistake, it's pretty silly to fire them without communicating with them first... and then firing them if they aren't able to turn it around.
In Denmark it's sometimes difficult to fire someone, and some industries are more regulated than others. There were layoffs coming and the manager told me he was on his way out, that is to say if he hadn't gotten a better job at a competitor. No longer doing frontend development however.
As far as his being trained I mean, yes he was young, but this wasn't his first job and as I understand it had certainly talked his skills up in the interview.
> Final thought on this, if I didn't really nail the point already, in the story of a founding company, the main reason why energy matters is you need at the end of the day, whatever the person's hypothesis early on in the business, it's generally wrong. And so what you're trying to evaluate is two things: one, will the market give you enough tailwind and excitement so that you continue bouncing around and trying other things, and two: how many things you're going to try and how quickly you're going to try them, so you know investing in someone who's starting a company and who's energetic is like just having more shots on goal.
Given this quote, I feel like the title needs to be qualified really heavily, it's looking at a very specific type of talent for a very specific type of situation.
Energy sometimes seems to correlate with agreeableness and extroversion. Everyone I've worked with who does this has been a nightmare, I never get any valuable negative feedback and it's impossible to tell when something is going astray when everything is a degree of very positive. Sure, the same is true when everything is a degree of negative (which of course is worse and equally unproductive).
High energy people are also in my opinion the most draining to work with and the most likely to be discounted as juvenile or inexperienced.
In my opinion, the best indicators of talent are being humble, metered, incredibly well spoken / articulate and willing to help someone out of a situation they'd otherwise be afraid to go through with a superior. Handling stress without being a adderral ridden monkey while maintaining resolve is a trait that the most talented brilliant people I've ever worked with have had.
I am begging anyone in this comment section who hires people: do not ask candidates about their favorite movies in the interview process in an attempt to identify talent.
In order to really judge his talent picking methodology, he should fund some of his anti-portfolio or at least people he seems unimpressed by. The trouble with VCs assessing their own talent spotting abilities is investing capital changes the odds of the outcome, it's not a neutral prediction.
This rings true to me. The smartest person sporadically makes important contributions, but the most energetic person pushes things forward every single day.
The most successful person I know has boundless energy at work, and is often used as a resource for many other people, helping them get their work done. She's on the national board of the professional association that oversees her field. She takes exceptional care of her extended family, and somehow manages to squeeze in vacations, nights out dancing, and time with her friends watching football on the weekend. Furthermore, she volunteers for an organization that helps new immigrants feel welcome, get settled, and find employment. Also, she decided to teach at the local college two nights a week for the last few years and gets glowing reviews from her students.
There's a classic classification of military officers.
1. Smart but lazy.
2. Smart and energetic
3. Dumb and lazy
4. Dumb and energetic
Type #4 is dangerous. Those are the ones who energetically do the wrong thing and get people killed. The most famous losing generals (Custer, Cardigan, Burnside, McClellan, Westmoreland) were type 4.
“I distinguish four types [of officers]. There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage.”
> Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions.
Heard this before, always fun, but random observation here... major nod to the Gervais principle? The slackers as the ones with the true model of reality, with a genuine assessment.
After 30 years, dozens of startups and several IPOs... I'm here to say that the combination of energy and tenacity is an amazing predictor of success.
I read this more as "in defensive of high energy people" which then attracts the sort of vitriol you see in the comments section here, e.g. accusations of sloppiness, short attention spans, etc.
Obviously, quality is required to the extent customers judge products in that category. Tesla had/has astoundingly poor quality, and Henry Ford is famous for optimizing-down quality as well.
Years ago I had a phone screening with Daniel Gross when he founded Greplin... Right out of high school.
As someone in my late 20s, I was honestly concerned about working for a teenager; but he left such a mark that every few years I Google him and Greplin. Interesting to see where he goes.
leading is lots of communication. You have to say the same things repeatedly for them to sink in with a group. I'm not sure that it is a bias or more of a function of how people work.
Someone being quiet in personality doesn't mean they're mute or incapable of communicating.
Personality types is an area that has been researched, and I balk at the idea that only a small subset of personality types can be leaders.
I have witnessed energetic optimistic leaders before, and they can people crazy, because they never actually address problems in concrete ways. People experience this all the time in companies: managers getting promoted up the ladder of management, leaving unsolved problems in their wake. The Enneagram personality system address things like this.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] threadAnother extremely good signal are people that won’t give up easily.
Tenacity, grit, whatever you want to call it.
All that trumps degrees and knowledge, because all you have to do is spark the interest of this kind of person and they will find a way because they just won’t stop until they do.
Sometimes students just need a lift up and then they find that ability along the way, but it just doesn't seem to ever surface in others.
Maybe it's just a case of "I did things the hard way so everyone else should too" -- my path was certainly not efficient! But I have to wonder if they lack that "grit", and if it can be taught or if is something innate.
Here's another example which might illustrate the same mindset: I go to IRC as a last resort, because I don't want to ask anything I could have solved in a few minutes by myself (or worse, that I could have found on Google!)
But when I do go to IRC, I formulate my question very precisely, explain the facts, the steps I took, my hypothesis... and 9 times out of 10, just the act of writing the question out causes the solution to become obvious! (Or reveals something I forgot to try, which then solves the problem...)
I'm currently taking a class, which is not programming related, and it's maddening because the teacher and course material do a very poor job of covering the basics, so from my perspective as an outsider it is near impossible to figure out how everything relates. It's possible that your current students need a general overview of how all the pieces interrelate before they can internalize and build their own knowledge.
More than being some kind of super genius, to be a successful engineer you need to have the stones to face your stupidity every single day. Most jobs have clear a to b to c to d steps. You know when you're done.
With software dev you faceplant almost every couple of hours until you finally succeed and get that high. Then you start all over again with a new ticket.
Most people have no desire to live that every day. They are happier in excel massaging spreadsheets.
The ability to sit with hard problems and continue to be curious in the face of pain and adversity is a very important skill.
Instructions were to forward his resume if he was passionate about it. Didn’t care what side of issue the candidate was on.
Just that they had an opinion and showed enthusiasm about why their “side” was best.
It worked very well.
Depth first learning meaning that I go deep a specific topic before learning adjacent topics (e.g. if building a database access layer + cache, I'll go deep on Redis documentation, which cause me to go deep on specific redis commands, etc. then after redis I move on to cache rehydration strategies, etc).
This is reflected in my enthusiasm in interviews and ability to "talk their ear off" if they are interested in the topic. Maybe I have it backwards, my enthusiasm for learning technologies is why I go deep in the first place.
Energy alone is not a good predictor.
But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a top predictor for talent. Can you think of a better proxy that this might have been about?
I hope that much is obvious to everyone.
The podcast isn't literally suggesting that we discard all metrics aside from energy, or that energy automatically results in success.
They talk about a lot of different values, the difficulties in measuring them, susceptibility to interviewer bias, and so on.
Spotting talent is hard.
When people want to get it done right now, they don't tend to make good decisions.
Not my personal philosophy but I've seen it used.
Maybe you're thinking hyper activity?
I would say that energy is an X factor. If you have two candidates and both demonstrate similar system comprehension, go with the one with more energy.
Energy is great for short term success, contemplation is great for long term progress. Maybe hire a mix of tactical and strategic thinkers? And then get them to work together somehow? It's easy to say and hard to do!
Writing about failure is easy, because you get to do it after the fact when everything is obvious.
Writing about your own successes is fun, because you get to talk about something that turned out well.
Trying to tell someone else how to be successful by following what you did is often a fool's errand, because you can never convey all the things you did to be successful; and in the case that you were VERY successful, you have changed the marketplace of products and ideas!
One of the authors is known for being a YCombinator partner. The other is known for responding to every email. I'm not sure which is more impressive.
They talk about many different dimensions of individuals and how feasible they are to evaluate in the context of an interview.
There are also great tidbits about techniques to help get honest answers from candidates, such as structuring the interview format in ways that leave less leeway for candidates to try to game up the answer they think the interviewer wants to hear.
It's an hour long podcast. I remember it being interesting at the time. Worth a listen.
Sometimes when I’m not actively working, I’m thinking and planning stuff in my head while seemingly loafing around.
Other times when I’m energetic I don’t know what to work on.
It’s a cycle. With humans nothing is constant.
What's your opinion of Elon Musk?
What's an Elon? I assume not a river.
How did I do?
(https://xkcd.com/178/)
Also, I've worked with a super energetic person who couldn't stand in his place, talked way too much, was rude, and, in general, unbearable. He was fired later.
So... maybe to soon generalize.
I've worked with people who have extraordinarily high output, but slowed everyone around them down because they filled absolutely no-one in on their decisions and changes, so we were all left trying to beat the next code-base warping idea.
I've worked with people that accomplished almost nothing, but lifted morale so much that they more than made up for their lack of productivity. (I wouldn't recommend looking for this scenario though, most low-output individuals drag morale down...)
How many marriages do you think would make it 5 years down the road with only a month of knowing each other? A week? A handful of 1-hour interviews? I mean, that's the kind of time commitment you are looking at with a job.
Just filter out people who are obviously bad fits, and fire fast. The diminishing returns of trying X, Y, and Z, to me, just aren't worth it, and if you are a small company, you've got better things to dedicate brain power to.
Not only is it boring to listen to, but very much subjective.
You cannot measure quality. Its simply too difficult with all the variables in play over time.
I'd straight up not work for a place that took this approach. Seems like a great way to fuck over the folks who made a big life change to join you. Though this philosophy is probably super effective, as long as you're willing to not think about the effects it has on others. Yikes!
The relative risk for an employee joining a new company is WAY higher than it is for that company.
For example, that may be due to any combination of age, skin colour, geography, ethnicity, visa/citizenship, neurodivergence, gender, family dependents, or other factors outside the person's control, helpfully summarised by the umbrella word "privilege".
After all, as is often said here, hiring is broken. It's not enough to be highly skilled.
I stand corrected, thank you.
I had to re-read both your comments carefully to understand them from that perspective.
Though you didn't intend to generalise, your refutation can be (and clearly was) parsed as an assertion about a whole category of people not having the high relative risk, rather than a singular counteraxample to say not everyone in the category has that risk. Your followup comment could also be parsed that way, unfortunately.
I think what motivated Bud's reply, and then mine because your followed appeared to entrench the position, is that it's common around here for people to talk as though virtually all software professionals are paid well and can easily slide into great new jobs as and when they want to, when really there's a huge "underclass" of software professionals who feel shut out of that nice world.
> I think what motivated Bud's reply, and then mine because your followed appeared to entrench the position, is that it's common around here for people to talk as though virtually all software professionals are paid well and can easily slide into great new jobs as and when they want to, when really there's a huge "underclass" of software professionals who feel shut out of that nice world.
I get it. I was once in a similar boat, so I understand the feeling.
that's "quitting fast"—quitting before you even take the job. impressive, you're hired.
Personally, I would jump at the chance to work at a company with this philosophy, even if I ended up being the one getting canned. I don't think I've ever worked at a company that fired "too fast", if anything it was clear that some folks were clearly not going to succeed, but hard decisions were avoided, which took down the productivity of everyone involved, and when the folks were eventually let go or left on their own they usually ended up still being super bitter. A reluctance to fire, in my experience, just really translates into a company that has difficulty making hard decisions.
But I've more frequently heard stories of others who see "fire fast" solely as a way to save money and also avoid having to ever train or mentor. That's bad for the employee, and not a place I'd work, if I knew it in advance.
If you're looking to structure your employees' comp with a heavy equity component that takes a while to vest, "fire fast" becomes especially dangerous for the employee.
1. provide more value than you cost the company
2. make sure the boss knows (1) for you
Candidates should try to be aware of companies that won't give new hires much of a time window to prove their performance level or value creation. Especially if large amounts of their compensation depend on going at least 12 months without getting fired.
At Boeing, the accountants managed to pin down the cost of one pound of airplane weight. At the time, it was $250,000 per pound. This made it easy to point out to the boss how much money you'd saved the company by doing weight reductions. I.e. if you saved a pound, that was the equivalent of 6 years salary. Time to bring up that raise you deserve!
Look at Google for example. I'm quite sure that a very large percentage, if not majority, of the employees at Google produce net negative value. The problem, of course, is that it's impossible to know which ones. I know a bunch of people (brilliant people, mind you) that worked years on products at Google that never shipped, or worked on products that shipped but were discontinued long before they were ever profitable. But Google is willing to make these investments because they believe that, one day, one or two of them will pay off spectacularly.
I mean, Waymo has certainly never been profitable (heck they've barely had any revenue) - what do their employees argue?
The employee needs to be profitable, not the aggregate of all the employees.
As for speculative research projects, nothing succeeds like success (making money). Researchers who produce loser after loser projects I expect would be much more likely to be fired than researchers who had a win big enough to cover their losing projects.
> possible
The whole field of cost accounting is devoted to figuring this out.
Back in the 70s, I attended Caltech when Feynman was on the staff. It came up in conversation that Feynman was making a salary of something like $55,000 (a lot of money in those days). I said what could anyone do to justify paying him such a salary. A grad student laughed and said "you don't understand. Feynman doesn't need to do anything to be worth that salary. He just has to be on the staff, which attracts donor money and draws top talent to Caltech."
Of course, he was right.
But also, Feynman being Feynman, did do an awful lot as well.
In many universities and companies, you'll find such "prestige" staff.
The first thing you have to remember is that Netflix pays a lot (a lot lot). The idea of expecting high performance only works when it’s accompanied with substantial benefits.
Second, Netflix does “fire fast” but not in the sense most people interpret it. New hires are given enough scaffolding to succeed. It’s not like other companies where they expect people to come onboard as revolutionaries and create impact in a month.
Third, high performance isn’t a constant like most people pretend it is. Netflix has managers who understand this fact and support their employees when things go down. They aren’t ruthless maniacs who fire you the first week you take a breather. And most managers who try to copy this elsewhere, miss that point.
But I do think it means that when it becomes clear that it's not working out, and the reason for it not working out is pretty fundamental to the employee's personality or aptitude, that you make a decision to let them go quickly and fairly.
It's really easy to have this attitude when you don't really think it will ever happen to you. I'm also guessing you've never been the target of harassment. I don't think you're going to like it as much when you're really excited about the job and on your first day you find out that the superstar developer on the team Gill just doesn't like you, never did. He was the one person who said they shouldn't hire you and is now pissed that he was overruled. Turns out Gill doesn't like not getting his way. You find yourself socially isolated because everyone knows what Gill is like and that he doesn't like you. Being seen talking to you isn't worth getting on Gill's bad side.
You get the shit assignments and code reviews are really rough. Especially the ones where Gill's around. Then you get hauled into the office about some problem with something you did. It isn't clear if it was something you did but it seems to be related to something Gill's working on. Gill's the super star and you're just the new guy so you can guess who caught the heat. It didn't go well when you suggested it might be Gill's fault. Turns out Gill was in the office right before you and he's telling a different story and they let you know what a superstar he is and everything he's done for the company over the years. It's clear that Gill's just going to grind you down as your quality of life decreases, you start losing sleep, acting out from the stress, you snap at your wife, children, and friends because you're still upset about something Gill did to you at work.
See the problem now or are you just imagining yourself as Gill?
On the flip side, firing people around Gill, who he doesn't like, fast will make it apparent that Gill is the problem much more quickly than just keeping everyone around when things aren't working.
The structurelessness & lack of a system, pressuring someone out, is no favor for Gill, but it seems like how it usually works.
i've seen 1 person in my career put on a performance improvement plan & let go. i've seen 5 fall out of general favor & get driven off. feels very lopsided & hard to see, grapple with.
dont appreciate your malice.
Most companies are motivated by profit, and will, therefore, gladly pay someone to fill a role that earns them more money than it costs. I don't see severing a non-mutually beneficial relationship as fucking someone over.
If you are in a position that being let go would be horribly detrimental to your personal and financial goals, looking for a company that is very slow to fire may be a good way to go. However, that is for your benefit, not the company's. I was targeting my advice at employers.
The cost to someone in their early 20s to take a job for a month or two and then hop to another one isn't very high compared to someone far enough into their career to likely be making changes for their family and possibly face more judgement for a short stint from future interviewers.
What if instead of "fire fast", the idea was re-framed/restructured into the new employee initially working as some sort of consultant with a short term contract? Use telecommuting/work-from-home or other temporary workarounds to defer expensive/disruptive things like moving to live near the company until after the defined "trial" period. Instead of "firing fast", you either let the temporary consulting contract expire or you proceed with the actual hiring process and the deferred tasks.
Maybe this isn't possible in practice, but it seems like we could design a workaround to this problem if were sufficiently creative.
> think about the effects it has on others
Unfortunately, that takes proactive effort. Unless there is a mechanism to actively incentivize spending time and energy to protect others, most of the time that effort will be spent on "more important" things. ~sigh~
My former company fired bunch of people at the beginning of COVID, because of the reaction of markets and our clients, some of whom left us. The fired employees were either new hires or bad apples. IMO it cleaned up the air a lot at the time.
On the other hand firing people is costly. For small to mid size companies, this advice might not be a as viable as it sounds.
I've heard people claim arranged marriages last longer, on average, then non. Of course there are all kinds of confounding factors. The number one though seems to be the expectation to make it work instead of just giving up and moving on if things aren't perfect.
Cultures that arrange marriages typically do not allow divorce.
Even if we carry that comparison through, the marriages are normally arranged by family, people who have known you your whole life, and probably want you to not hate your spouse. Hiring via references from people that have worked together for a long time are much more useful than interviews and personality tests.
We could double the size of our interview panels and still get people that weren't right.
That's the whole job of seed VC investors to be better than random at selecting people who will end up creating unicorns. So I disagree it is "trying to squeeze blood from stone"
That's fair. In the context of placing bets, the dynamic is different, but VCs have the benefit of simply not investing in follow up rounds, which is as close to 'firing' as they can get.
> You could really have the worst culture and the best mismatch of talent and still have a unicorn.
True. However, I'd be willing to bet there is predictive power in how horrible a company's culture is in the early stages.
> That's the whole job of seed VC investors to be better than random at selecting people who will end up creating unicorns. So I disagree it is "trying to squeeze blood from stone"
Of the VCs I know and have met, the successful ones don't give much (almost no) weight to personality tests, outside of more obvious 'red-flags'. The checklist I've seen is:
1) History of entrepreneurial success. This is probably the best way to get in anyone's door. 2) History of domain success. They want to see that you know what you are talking about and come with the connections necessary to make the venture successful. 3) Does the founder's approach to the problem align with the firm's. Most high-quality firms look to invest in areas where their partners have deep domain knowledge, and they look for companies who they believe are making good bets.
There are very "impression" agnostic measures. I wouldn't put a lot of weight on "energy", but hey, I'm not a VC, so what do I know :P
Well, there seems to be an awful lot of blood . . .
Oh! I bet it's from the wringing but not the stone. Nice illusion, though.
The only thing I full heartedly disagree with you is on the fire fast part. It's a lot better to move them into another department.. sometimes it's not the person it's the environment they're put in. If you're too small... this is the part of doing business is to leave them better than you found them.
I’m pretty convinced that most high performers follow this pattern. They’re really good at making it very visible all the stuff they’re doing, but they only focus on what’s visible, and leave all the underlying details/maintenance for the “lesser” employees to clean up after them.
Management jumps them from project to project because of how “good” they are, meanwhile every team they leave behind has to pick up the pieces. This has the perverse result of making everyone else appear to be low performers, because they’re too bogged down bailing out the leaky boat.
const antilooped = [];
const looped = [];
const looper = data.map((item) = {
if (item.nonX) {looped.push(item) }
if (item.nonY) {antilooped.push(item)}
});
then would not use half of the variables he instantiated, and probably merge looped and antilooped arrays in some weird way. Invariably debugging his code led to me just rewriting it all.
And I remember just about the first thing he asked me is if I went to prison in Jylland in Denmark and a big guy named Ole wanted to make sweet love to me would I do it or would I rather die, and then he volunteered he would rather die. This turned out to be his typical lunch time small talk.
on edit: just to be clear, he didn't use the looper array for anything.
Otherwise, there is a simple rule for engineers: do not write the code that makes the next engineer fantasize about your death.
If somebody doesn't understand the fundamentals of writing code for a code-writing job, though, that's a different story. That's what self-study and the education system is for.
Training them is the lowest risk and lowest cost option of these.
As far as his being trained I mean, yes he was young, but this wasn't his first job and as I understand it had certainly talked his skills up in the interview.
Given this quote, I feel like the title needs to be qualified really heavily, it's looking at a very specific type of talent for a very specific type of situation.
High energy people are also in my opinion the most draining to work with and the most likely to be discounted as juvenile or inexperienced.
In my opinion, the best indicators of talent are being humble, metered, incredibly well spoken / articulate and willing to help someone out of a situation they'd otherwise be afraid to go through with a superior. Handling stress without being a adderral ridden monkey while maintaining resolve is a trait that the most talented brilliant people I've ever worked with have had.
That is up to leadership.
The most successful person I know has boundless energy at work, and is often used as a resource for many other people, helping them get their work done. She's on the national board of the professional association that oversees her field. She takes exceptional care of her extended family, and somehow manages to squeeze in vacations, nights out dancing, and time with her friends watching football on the weekend. Furthermore, she volunteers for an organization that helps new immigrants feel welcome, get settled, and find employment. Also, she decided to teach at the local college two nights a week for the last few years and gets glowing reviews from her students.
Makes me tired just typing it all out.
1. Smart but lazy. 2. Smart and energetic 3. Dumb and lazy 4. Dumb and energetic
Type #4 is dangerous. Those are the ones who energetically do the wrong thing and get people killed. The most famous losing generals (Custer, Cardigan, Burnside, McClellan, Westmoreland) were type 4.
— General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, 1933
Heard this before, always fun, but random observation here... major nod to the Gervais principle? The slackers as the ones with the true model of reality, with a genuine assessment.
I read this more as "in defensive of high energy people" which then attracts the sort of vitriol you see in the comments section here, e.g. accusations of sloppiness, short attention spans, etc.
Obviously, quality is required to the extent customers judge products in that category. Tesla had/has astoundingly poor quality, and Henry Ford is famous for optimizing-down quality as well.
As someone in my late 20s, I was honestly concerned about working for a teenager; but he left such a mark that every few years I Google him and Greplin. Interesting to see where he goes.
Ick. It’s a really unfortunate bias that quiet people can’t be viewed as good leaders.
Personality types is an area that has been researched, and I balk at the idea that only a small subset of personality types can be leaders.
I have witnessed energetic optimistic leaders before, and they can people crazy, because they never actually address problems in concrete ways. People experience this all the time in companies: managers getting promoted up the ladder of management, leaving unsolved problems in their wake. The Enneagram personality system address things like this.
Regardless, seems like a bad idea as blanket advice for all roles.