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Comment by solve | Hacker News Reader

Indeed, he's definitely talking about SALES people, who use their sales tactics to sell him on themselves. Definitely not talking about "book smarts" brilliance. The author probably intentionally mistitled the story for attention.

That said, there's a good lesson - if you hire sales people, their most attractive target will always be selling themselves to the guy who's writing their paycheck. It will not automatically be the actual customers or whatever you think their incentives are "supposed" to be.

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The weird thing is, why didn't he hire this person in a way that posed less risk to his business? Why is he handing over a gigantic check worth 140,000 of today's dollars? Isn't this person crazy, or at least a terrible businessman? Yet here we all are, listening to his advice. The longer I think about this the more I dislike it.

It sounds like just 40% of a year's severance. Not too much to walk away.

And it's a parable, not a true story. The timing was 1924 - the roaring 20s. It's a commentary against the flashy types, in defense of the folks who put their heads down and work.

Um, he's using this whole episode as an example of what not to do, not what to do. He says right out that hiring that person that way was a mistake. The whole point of the article is to help people avoid the mistakes the author made. How many articles that get to HN's front page are basically the same thing?

Right, but I'm saying it's the wrong counterexample.

This is "I got fucked up and crashed my Ford into a tree, so I'm never buying a Ford again."

I mean,

If I repeatedly get fucked up and crash Fords over the course of my life while having much better luck with other cars, I might start looking for a causal relationship.

Exactly: that's what the author of the piece is doing. He's had bad luck with a certain type of person while having much better luck with other types of people, and he's analyzing the reasons for that.

Sounds like a rationalization for a gap in management capabilities. Much easier to find fault in tall people or people that talk fast.

An insightful business owner will review their own psychology first and ask others for their impression in a way that doesn't reveal their bias.

I agree it's a terrible hiring mistake. But this is a story about a mistake he made. Without it, there would be no story. (And hopefully he didn't make the same mistake afterward)

Exactly. The lesson isn't to not hire brilliant or average people, but to trial people more gradually. The made up story also attempts to draw a conclusion from an anecdotal level of "evidence." Doesn't seem to stick for some reason.

Risk reductions can be:

  - invite people over to hang out, hack on something, or work on whatever they're working on
  - start people on a contract gig
  - maybe another contract or what works for them
  - have an extremely informal non-interview, interview process 
  - trial period
  - eventually FTE status in a set time-frame if both sides want it

I prefer working on contracts that are renewed every now and then. In that way my contributions are constantly evaluated and if for some reason I'm not producing results then there's not a lot of drama involved in letting me go. And I think taking pressure of of clients helps them in the long run to focus on results vs just my salary.

I think that's actually his point: that its better to hire an ordinary employee who will work hard at a realistic goal than to hire a flighty genius, whether self-appointed or not.

"Does he finish what he starts? Geniuses almost never do."

"These are quite simple rules...No Edison could ever qualify."

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.

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 inspire that kind of patronage and had to rely on more prosaic methods.

What Edison did possess was a remarkable capacity for what he called "hard work". Making the light bulb practical was something anybody could have done, if they'd had the willingness to burn through months of time and money performing dull experiments over and over and over again.

There was still a lot of low-hanging technological fruit in Edison's day, but 'low-hanging' didn't mean 'easy'. He made a business out of working harder than anyone else did to make contraptions practical.

People pooh-pooh him as unoriginal, dull, but that's the sort of man his work needed. He was also smarter than people gave him credit for, though he didn't match the sheer brilliance of Tesla. His industrial research facility at Menlo Park was the first of its kind, he set a lot of standards in the field and had a lot of influence. It's considered by many to be his most important innovation.

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.

Which is why you incentivize salesmen via commissions and quickly fire those that are obviously showing up just for the base paycheck.

Employees still optimize for pay / effort, NOT absolute pay. In that respect, commissions are still FAR from perfectly aligning incentives.

You can't really be suggesting that commissions are the silver bullet for aligning incentives, as if that hasn't been tried for thousands of years already, with very mixed success :)

I'm not suggesting there is a "silver bullet" for aligning incentives that exists (commissions can be abused by focusing on short term gains at the detriment of the companies long term goals etc etc), but commissions for goal completion is a step in the right direction compared to just writing someone a blank check because their resume looks pretty.

Additionally, employees optimizing for pay/effort instead of max pay is still a win for the company so long as the employee brings in marginally more than they cost.

If it is far from perfect, you can define perfect?

Fantasy.

Well, make nonlinear commissions then! :P

made me laugh

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