This link has been bookmarked by 72 people . It was first bookmarked on 17 Jun 2008, by Eddie Osh.
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aminggs"Not superstars: superheroes! People who are freakishly good at what they do. People who finish things so fast that they seem to have paranormal assistance. People who can take in any new system or design for all intents instantaneously, with no "ramp-up"
document article blog steve-yegge softwaredevelopment interviewing recruitment career productivity geoworks amazon google startup import:delicious
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11 Dec 08
don deka"Everyone knows and quotes Joel's old chestnut, "Smart, and Gets Things Done." It was a blog, then a book, and now it's an aphorism."
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10 Nov 08
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Done, and Gets Things Smart
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04 Jul 08
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hey hired brilliant seed engineers.
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engineers you'd personally hire to work with you in your first startup company?
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No! Screw that. You want someone who's superhumanly godlike. Someone who can teach you a bunch of stuff. Someone you admire and wish you could emulate, not someone who you think will admire and emulate yo
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Someone who always seems to be finishing stuff so fast it makes your head spin. That's what my Done clause means. It means they're frigging done all the time.
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They never seemed to be working that hard, but they were not only 10x as productive as their peers, they also managed technical feats that were quite frankly too scary for anyone else. They could (as just one trait) dive in and learn new languages and make fixes to tools that the rest of us assumed were, I dunno, stuff you'd normally pay a vendor to fix. They dove into the hairiest depths of every code base they encountered and didn't just add features and make fixes; they waved some sort of magic wand and improved the system while they were in there: they would Get Things Smart. Make the systems smarter, that is. Sort of like getting your act together, but they'd do it for your code.
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You'll gradually realize that your math deficiencies aren't just something that you might need to beef up on if you ever "need to"; you'll see that virtually every problem space has a mathematical modeling component that you were blissfully unaware of until Done, and Gets Things Smart gal points it out to you and says, "There's an infinitely smarter approach, which by the way I implemented over the weekend."
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your seed engineers: the ones who will make or break your company with both their initial technical output and the engineering-culture decisions they put into place — decisions that will largely determine how the company works for the next twenty years.
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I think, that the Done, and Gets Things Smart folks aren't necessarily your friends. They're just people you're lucky enough to have worked with.
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If you could mix in one Done, and Gets Things Smart person with every five to ten Smart, and Gets Things Done people, then you'd be in good shape, since the latter, being "smart", can hopefully learn a lot from the former.
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And because Done, and Gets Things Smart people are worth their weight in refined plutonium, they're probably reasonably happy in their current position
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eople who are freakishly good at what they do. People who finish things so fast that they seem to have paranormal assistance. People who can take in any new system or design for all intents instantaneously, with no "ramp-up", and who can immediately bring insights to bear that are quite simply beyond your rustic abilities.
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the biggest enemy of geeks is not incompetence, it's arrogance. Not garden variety "I'm smarter than others" arrogance, but "I'm smarter than mostly everyone else, and I don't need to hear what you have to say, because I'm right, and you have nothing of value to say on this subject." It sabotages effective communication and learning by osmosis from coworkers.
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being 'done' more often (and the only way there is to 'do' more efficiently)
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02 Jul 08
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29 Jun 08
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We already talked about that, right? You're a good programmer! Heck, you're a great programmer! You're "smart", so anything you don't know you can go look up if you need it! Right?
Welcome to incompetence. -
How do you hire someone who's smarter than you? How do you tell if someone's smarter than you?
This is a problem I've thought about, over nearly twenty years of interviewing, and it appears that the answer is: you can't. You just have to get lucky. -
But interviews are conducted under pretty artificial conditions, and as a result they wind up being most effective at hiring people who are good at interviewing.
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As far as identifying good people goes, the best solution I've ever seen was at Geoworks, where you were required to do a six-month internship before you could get hired full-time. This seems to be the norm in non-tech departments at most tech companies. They often substitute "contractor" for "intern", but it works out roughly the same. Geoworks is the only company I've seen stick to their guns and make it mandatory for engineers.
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However, I'm convinced that it only worked because Geoworks seeded the engineering staff with great people. The founding engineers set up a truly beautiful software engineering environment, with lots of focus on tools, mentoring, continuing education, "anarchy projects" to let off steam and encourage innovation, and a host of other goodnesses.
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I've been a contractor at companies that had no good engineers at all, literally none whatsoever. A mandatory six-month internship at such companies would only serve to lower their average bar, since anybody competent would leave after the six months was up.
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At Google, you don't have to do an internship. However, unlike at most other companies, you're not "slotted" into a real position on the tech ladder until you've been on the job at least six months. During that time you need to prove that you can function at the level you were hired for, and if it's wrong in either direction your level is adjusted at slotting time.
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Geoworks, Amazon, and Google, all of whom had one thing in common: they hired brilliant seed engineers.
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For your startup (or, applying the recursion, for your new project at your current company), you don't want someone who's "smart". You're not looking for "eager to learn", "picks things up quickly", "proven track record of ramping up fast".
No! Screw that. You want someone who's superhumanly godlike. Someone who can teach you a bunch of stuff. Someone you admire and wish you could emulate, not someone who you think will admire and emulate you. -
Someone who always seems to be finishing stuff so fast it makes your head spin. That's what my Done clause means. It means they're frigging done all the time.
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They never seemed to be working that hard, but they were not only 10x as productive as their peers, they also managed technical feats that were quite frankly too scary for anyone else. They could (as just one trait) dive in and learn new languages and make fixes to tools that the rest of us assumed were, I dunno, stuff you'd normally pay a vendor to fix. They dove into the hairiest depths of every code base they encountered and didn't just add features and make fixes; they waved some sort of magic wand and improved the system while they were in there: they would Get Things Smart. Make the systems smarter, that is. Sort of like getting your act together, but they'd do it for your code.
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You can't interview these people. For starters, they're not interested; these are the people that companies hold on to as long as humanly or companyly possible.
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If you could mix in one Done, and Gets Things Smart person with every five to ten Smart, and Gets Things Done people, then you'd be in good shape, since the latter, being "smart", can hopefully learn a lot from the former.
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But when you're starting a company, or an organization, or a big project, the need for Done, and Gets Things Smart seed engineers is desperate. It's dire, in the sense that if you don't get the right seed people in place, you're dooming your organization to mediocrity, if you manage to succeed at all.
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Because technical brilliance, seemingly superhuman productivity, and near-militaristic adherence to software discipline aren't enough. They also need leadership skills. They don't have to be great leaders; in fact in a pinch, just being bossy might work for a while, as long as they're bossing people in the right directions. But they need to have the ability to guide the organization (or new team, or whatever) in uniformly excellent directions, which requires some leadership, even if it's bad or amateurish leadership.
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You still want to hire the Smart, and Gets Things Done folks. But those folks have a long way to grow, and they probably have absolutely no idea just how far it is. So you want some Done, and Gets Things Smart people to guide them.
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23 Jun 08
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sdagueIf you work in tech, read this, and be humbled a bit.
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22 Jun 08
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18 Jun 08
Adriana Lukasinterviews are not a very good way of choosing good people to work for/with you
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Grant WatsonAll too often I find myself on interview loops where the candidate knows a seemingly astounding amount about coding, computer science, software engineering, and general industry topics, but we find out at the last minute that they can't code Hello, World
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Mohit JustBut when you combine the Dunning-Kruger effect (which affects me just as much as it does you) with having one or two things I've been good at in the past, it's all too easy to fall into the trap of thinking of myself as "smart", even if I know better now.
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17 Jun 08
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Joaquim Rendeiro«[Regarding "Smart, and gets things Done":] Unfortunately, "smart" is a generic enough concept that pretty much everyone in the world thinks they're smart. »
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