taoyue.com: Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men | Hacker News Reader

taoyue.com: Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men

taoyue.com

58 pointsbrlewis19 comments

"...they get excited over revolutionary developments but grow weary at repetitive small tasks."

Blast! He's got me. I'm not claiming to be brilliant, but, boy oh boy, do I ever tire of repetitive small tasks. If only there were some way to automate them!

Perhaps, one day, some wondrous machine will be created that will relieve us of the burden of empty, mechanical processes. Mayhaps even a small industry might be built around the design and construction of such machines.

What were Larry Wall's 3 programmer virtues? Impatience, laziness, and hubris?

There is something in what the original author wrote. It sounds like what he means by "brilliant" are the kind of people who describe themselves as "idea guys." And though Google likes to hire PhDs, I hear they too are suspicious of idea guys.

The author is mistaken about Edison, though. He might have had a hard time working for a boss, especially later in his life, but he was not merely an idea guy. Oddly enough, Edison's own PR may be to blame for this. It left people in the early 20th century thinking of him as a lofty genius rather than the tireless tinkerer he had in fact been.

i think that's the problem: having idea people working on details. by definition they're not good at them -- it's like forcing a shape into the wrong hole. their powers are best used in creative positions

but those sorts of positions aren't very standard or given to people just starting out, so it can be hard for them if they start out doing detail work and their difficulty with it gets the better of them and they're perceived as incompetent. even if they manage to stay afloat in the monotony, their strengths are likely to remain invisible in the detail and the higher-ups never see their potential. worst-case scenario of course, but i doubt it's rare

i heard this second-hand, but supposedly IBM has a particular genius somewhere in california. he is very sloppy, is probably a night owl... but when he gets a spark of an idea, whether it be in the middle of the night, a 'task force' is summoned to jot down as much detail about the idea as possible. if that's true then IBM knows the specialty and significance of these sorts of people

looking at it from another perspective, Einstein is probably the most extreme example of an idea person. but despite being terribly lazy, he was able to do many great things because he _didn't consider it work_. an idea person with a passion is something of an unstoppable force

funnily, the lazyness is likely due to the overhead of the mind organizing data into a format which allows specialized (sensory/intuitive,) instant retrieval later on. the overhead is significant, but the gift is powerful. it's present in varying forms and degrees in different people and in extreme cases (like these 'brilliant' guys) is risky like min-maxing

i've found that jungian psychological theories such as MBTI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator provide a good lexicon with which to think about these sorts of things

Actually I meant "idea guys" in the pejorative sense. From what I've seen, good ideas come from slogging it out in the trenches of implementation. Self-described "idea guys" (and this term is almost invariably applied to oneself) are generally useless.

I think you've said as much in an essay or two. What struck me about the 1924 essay was how strong the similarity was between success in early 20th-century grocery stores and success in Internet startups. Determination edges out brilliance in both cases.

Another thing that struck me is that even this grocery store owner noticed the biggest problem with our educational system:

For a time I tried picking these youngsters out of the colleges. But my experience with college men was not fortunate. If I selected good students, I found too often that their leadership had been won by doing very well what their teachers had laid out for them. They had developed a fine capacity for taking orders, but not much initiative.

I think there must be a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches. Pure art or math might be top-down (McCarthy). You might be more of a bottom-up person.

Or did McCarthy create LISP from tinkering with code and seeing the inadequacies in what already existed? I'm afraid I don't know as much about the history as I'd like to.

I don't doubt that work ethic is more important than intelligence, but the author errs by suggesting that brilliance and work ethic are mutually exclusive, or at the least very negatively correlated.

I suspect the reason the author gets it wrong is because he doesn't take into account the fact that intelligence signaling is higher fidelity than work-ethic signaling. That is, going into an interview it's much easier to fake being a hard worker than it is to fake having brilliant ideas. I'll refrain from trying to make a 2x2 matrix in ASCII.

The author has decades of experience with people, and has written a full essay about it. How do you support your claim that he "errs"?

For me, it resonated similarly to the Bipolar Lisp Programmer: http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/bipolar.htm

"No Edison could ever qualify"

I bet Edison does qualify. (Lincoln too)

"In school, the young Edison's mind often wandered, and his teacher the Reverend Engle was overheard calling him "addled." This ended Edison's three months of official schooling" - Wikipedia

Perhaps genius itself is successful mediocrity without any exception. And the other "brilliant men" that he talks about in this article are just bright snake-oil salesmen.

I am only halfway through, but I love this gem: "I was flattered by his interest, so I thought it over. That is, I indulged in what young men frequently mistake for thought. In imagination, I saw my name over the door and myself in a fine glass office looking out and watching clerks taking in money."

His conception of brilliance is different than mine, but there is clarity in what he is trying to communicate.

This kind of gives geniuses a raw deal. Sure, many of them are undisciplined, but their brilliance is useful. If managers just focus on how they don't have the same strengths as the rest of the company's employees, seems like the managers aren't making good use of the company's resources.

Maybe the world has moved toward their speed, nowadays. But, perhaps the /puer aeternus/ will just aim that much higher.

The article makes a good time-contrast with the new ycombinator-type speed of business though, for sure.

> "By constantly thinking about it, madam," her "dear Sir Isaac" muttered.

Heh; there's hope for we dummies.

Now, if only I can be dumb like Newton, I'm golden.

hmm the author (of the original article) seems to have a weakness for falling for schemes sold to him by people possessing what he thinks of as "signals" of brilliance (a PhD, a rumor etc). And then he gets screwed by following their advice. he is susceptible to people possessing a combination of these signs of brilliance and good salesmanship.

I think the article tells us more about the character flaws of the author than make any insightful comments about brilliance vs hardwork (say). To paraphrase PG, even good hackers find it difficult to recognize other good hackers and it is impossible for a non hacker to distinguish between the really good hackers and the poseurs. I would be surprised if the dynamic didn't hold in other fields as well.

I think what the author is trying to get at is that brilliance, ideas, energy etc can be a curse.

I am sure everyone here knows of a few young entrepreneur types jumping from idea to idea never quite sticking with anything for a long enough period. Success is rarely about ideas but about execution. If you look at the most successful entrepreneurs today they rarely got where they were by doing something totally original.

They got where they are through execution. Its about detail and escaping the grasshopper mindset of jumping from idea to idea.

Sounds like the article is describing this guy that left here to pursue an amazing startup in genetic algorithms for financial yadda, but left shards of incredibly clever (wrote his own html parser) but largely unusable bits of applications.

Reminds me of the adage "wise men never claim to be wise" (paraphrasing)...

Seems like a better title for this would be "Why I Never Hire Over-Confident Men". I don't see what's so "brilliant" about confidently making unjustified changes.

I don't think you got the point of the article. It's pointing out that hard work and ethics is mundane but it keeps his company running. The brilliant ones can come in and out but they don't help his company run any better.

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