Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men (1924)

"You are a quick starter, but a poor finisher"

I worked with soooo much people that are like this.

I start working at a company and those people stick out. They know stuff about everything, write thousands lines of code a week and start new projects like nobodies business.

First I admired them, because they seem to be the better developer, the 10x engineer everyone talks about.

But somehow these people were never reliable. Probably a intrinsic feature of their characters.

It takes time to learn new things and it also takes time to start new projects, this just doesn't scale if you start projects faster than you finish them.

First they blow you away with new things and later they can't keep up.

Some of the values are quite dated (eg criticising someone for having no savings because they spent all their money caring for their sick family, because they "never made a profit for themselves"). I'd also challenge his assumption that somehow common people just intrinsically know what most people want: that may have been a fine assumption for a 1920s grocer, but doesn't translate so well to the technology and global markets of 2016. Still, overall a good read.

Perhaps it's the culture of " brilliance" that ought to be criticised. I come across plenty of tech-startup junkies, who love the lingo and talk a big game about the latest libary/product/other person's startup that just got funded, but produce very little themselves. I hired one such fellow recently, and he completely dropped the ball both in the actual work, and mangled the relationships with every client he was in the same room with. Worse still, he put phenominal effort in to explaining to me why my feedback (as somone who has spent most of his career managing clients, and built these relationships over years) was actually wrong, and he in fact was not doing shoddy work or frustrating the people who cut our cheques.

The reference fails me. What does "the greatest organization in human history was twelve humble men, picked up along the shores of an inland lake." mean?