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Comment by jroseattle | Hacker News Reader

Something I found very interesting was Peter's comment: "You try to hire people you could become friends with." I contrast this with Zuckerberg's approach to only hiring people that he would work for (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-leadership/wp/2015/03...).

It's probably not fair to put these side-by-side due to context, but Peter's approach resonates with me now. Here's how I reconcile this: Peter's "friends" concept is about the long-term effect on yourself (and your team around you). Mark's "work-for" concept is about putting the very best people around you to build and operate a company. They could certainly co-exist, depending on your personality.

Mark's approach (for me) makes great sense on paper, but Peter's approach comes with the value of been-there-done-that. Both have their place, but over the long haul, I can really appreciate what Peter is talking about.

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"Try to hire people you could become friends with" seems like a really bad idea from the discrimination point of view, since people are most likely to view someone of the same race, age, and gender as a potential friend.

Regardless of gender or ethnicity, if everyone you hire is a 20-something graduate of the same top-10 CS programmes what you get is... Google+ (or Wave or Buzz...)

Diversity means you don't get trapped in an echo chamber.

or maybe it means you get Gmail, Google Web Search, Google Apps, Android and Chrome.

Seems like you are using very selective evidence there, or selectively attributing only unsuccessful products to lack of diversity.

Wave was not by a 20-something but by a 40-something. Age has nothing to do with that (the 40-something that lead Wave also created Maps)

And Wave was pretty cool. As a startup it might have even succeeded.

"You try to hire people you could become friends with" is a profoundly stupid maxim.

People who come from conservative and religious societies will always be pressured by friends to not make new friends who are of different ethnicities.

Thiel is basically ensuring each company Will become a little Island of segregation and this is what I have seen in the bay area: companies that are 90% Indian, 90% Chinese, or 90% white guys.

I come from a conservative background and I've never been discouraged from hanging out with different ethnicities and cultures. We are not the strawmen you apparently think we are.

Conversely when a few of my friends family found out I was an atheist they were no longer allowed to associate with me. A select few tried to convert me, others acted outright vitriolic towards me. This was in a major metro in CA. Romantic relationships have also ended in the past when family members couldn't get over my lack of faith.

I come from an incredibly conservative family (literally had pictures of Reagan and Cheney on the wall) and they had no problems with my engagement to an Hispanic woman.

Yes but how would they react to your sister dating a black man?

ya'll are taking this maxim and removing it from the context of hiring. I thought it was obvious he meant, you want someone capable and someone you could be friends with. It's not supposed to be a maxim, it's from an interview.

Speaking as a white American from a very conservative/religious family and social group, I think your view is just as generalized as you imagine conservative/religious groups to be. I have multiple aunts and uncles who are Korean, my first serious girlfriend was black, my best friend growing up was Mexican (as well as having many Mexican relatives), so I would say that our conservative and religious views didn't preclude us from not only being open to other ethnicities, but to embracing them as our own. Granted, I don't think my upbringing was typical of conservative/religious upbringings, but I know it wasn't typical of many liberal/non-religious points of view. I don't think it's something you can shoehorn quite like that. (I would say our religion brought us all together more than anything else).

I think the effect you're seeing (where many Asians, such as Chinese, Korean, or Indian) are more isolated has far less to do with idealogical beliefs, than it does with multiple factors, such as being immigrants in a country that has typically has had a harder time identifying with their culture as well as a large trend of pushing towards higher education, especially in demanding fields such as medicine and engineering.

But I digress :)

If you are comfortable being friends with many different kinds of people, it may be just fine.

If not, you may be bad at leadership regardless.

Please don't delete comments and repost them.

Hiring indiscriminately doesn't sound so great either.

I think this advice was given with the assumption that the receiver is an intelligent human being.

There are many intelligent human beings who suffer from many forms of gender and/or race bias. Our very nature as humans is to surround ourselves with people who look, act, and think like us. Hiring people that could be your friends without having the insight to get beyond the inherent bias in all of us could very easily lead to a corporate structure that is extremely myopic. Not that it won't be successful, just ends up looking like Stepford Corp, look at the boardrooms of the Fortune 500 for many examples.

Hiring someone for the sake of diversity is absolutely stupid. Also, not sure what you are on about? The advice is to hire someone who you could get a beer or shoot a game of pool with after work and carry a non-awkward conversation and talk about overlapping interests. A person of any gender or nationality could potentially fit this bill.

Not sure what part of bias you don't understand or that we as humans tend to congregate with those that are like us. All things being equal but race, a white male will tend to hire the white male, even if he could equally socialize with a candidate of another gender or race. That is why I pointed out that it is best to have the "insight to get beyond the inherent bias in all of us", so we could see that maybe grabbing a beer with someone who doesn't look like us is equally viable. Hiring for the sake of diversity is less stupid than hiring just because you like the same team or drink the same beer, that behavior should have been left at the frat house after you graduated.

I wouldn't say it's stupid so much as variable in its value. Some people are naturally attracted to a wide variety of people, ideas, experiences, and so on. For them, following this advice is likely to turn out well. For others, with narrower horizons, results will be a bit more mixed.

It is, but I think it's no more discriminatory than yardsticks that people use to hire and promote people in today's work place. We'd like to think that we're objective, but if you look at the kind of people that get hired and promoted, they all fit certain type of molds, especially personality.

I don't think "friend" is meant in the context of "someone that you would invite to hang out at a local bar to get some wings, beer, and watch the game".

It's more of "a person whose unique experience, drive and motivation can teach you something and who's pleasant and educational to be around in circumstances outside of employment contract".

A mantra like this has great appeal because who wouldn't want to hire their friends? But many hiring decisions are already biased with this in some way. Hiring is still a hard and unsolved problem.

It seems that him saying that you try to hire people you could become friends with is opaque. How does he determine someone he would be good friends with? Do they have to share the same political views and hobbies? Without more info, it is hard to not view this as: Hire people Peter Thiel could be friends with.

The main advantage of hiring people you would be friends with is that at least you feel comfortable with them even if they're not an optimal hire. It is almost like admitting you don't have a solution to finding good workers, so if you get a bad hire, at least you get along with them.

I see it as Peter saying hire for culture, Mark saying hire for talent.

The answer is, as always, somewhere in the middle. I reconcile both thinking of culture as an hygienic condition, and talent as an order winner. Explaining: if the culture is poor, talent will go unused (it is irrelevant); if culture is good, talent gets used and only then does it make sense to try and hire the best talent.

That's how I took it as well. I remember reading from Max Levchin (?) that a company should hire people exactly like them, culturally, early on.

This helps reduce unnecessary conflict when the only thing you're focused on is growth. A prime example is why early startup employees come from the same school as the founders.

I think later on, bigger companies focus on talent and culture equally (for the most part).

Hiring people culturally similar may sounds sensible in theory, but it may not be sensible in practice.

I haven't seen stats on startup hiring, but I read this about investment, which in my opinion stands a good chance of having a similar effect:

http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/7069.html

"The probability of a successful exit outcome decreases by 18 percent if two venture capitalists who previously worked at the same company partner up in the syndication.

The likelihood of success drops by 22 percent if co-investors attended the same undergraduate school.

The negative effect of shared affinity is even stronger when it relates to ethnicity: Collaborating with someone from the same ethnic minority group comes at the expense of a 25 percent reduction in performance."

Maybe investors are more properly skeptical about dumb opportunities proposed by someone with a dissimilar background. Founders and employees have a much greater need to work together day-to-day and trust each others' judgment.

It's certainly plausible. I can tell a plausible story from the other side though - the primary feature of being a start up is learning, and if it's an echo chamber you're going to be learning the wrong things and relying on things other than facts to dictate your business strategy.

I agree with this summarization as well. What's implicit in both of these (IMHO), is that the type of friends Peter Thiel looks for will naturally be talented. And likewise for Mark, where someone he respects enough to consider working for is likely someone he would befriend.

Big assumptions, but those guys are in the type of position where that's likely a reliable expectation.

> Mark's approach (for me) makes great sense on paper, but Peter's approach comes with the value of been-there-done-that.

Keep in mind that Mark only briefly "worked for" anybody in high school and college, and most of these were contracting positions.

In a way, the only example of people he wouldn't "work for" that we know about is the Winklevosses after he decided to "stop working" on "their idea"

If you combine those two you have PG's advice: "Learn a lot about things that matter, then work on problems that interest you with people you like and respect."

I read it differently. There's two ways to deal with trust:

1. you can try and hedge yourself against employees doing bad things. Like quitting for the competition or passing information. In this model, employees are paid mercenaries and none are crucial to the company. This is favored by corporations as it is good risk management.

2. you only hire people whose values align with yours, and where one strong shared value is sticking together.

The prisoner's dilemma is a good framework to see why either can work.

1. assumes defect/defect, which results in poor but positive outcomes. Corporations are inefficient, but they are profitable. You keep good people by paying them more than the competition, not by building trust and values-based friendship.

2. is cooperate/cooperate, which results in large positive outcomes for as long as you can maintain it, but the first breach of trust (the first instance or even possibility of a defect) results in a catastrophic negative outcome. For example, if you're having a few rough months and your CTO - who built 80% of the site and is the only one who understands the data model - leaves for a better paid job.

This is part of why it is so rare for more efficient upstarts to win against large corporations in their own market - by the time they get big enough, the startup looks too much like a corporation to maintain its cooperate/cooperate environment.

Where things get interesting is Andreesen's "Software Eating the World" essay. Some companies have recently surfaced (Instagram, Whatsapp, most hedge funds) where a small number of people highly trusting each other have managed to scale the outsize outcome to corporation levels.

And I think this is what Thiel is trying to say (or at least what he makes me think about): if your co-founders are practically "family", you might be more likely to go down that path. Whereas Zuckerberg prefers playing it safe, and assuming people will defect and scaling his company accordingly - especially since there is no shortage of capital to keep the best.

If you're not interested in being friends with a person of a certain gender/race/whatever then you probably wouldn't want to work for them either.

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