Don't Look for Talent, Find People Who Do Things | Hacker News Reader

Don't Look for Talent, Find People Who Do Things

tuckermax.me

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I find this particularly tingling because Tucker himself is a perfect example of doing things. He gets a lot of flak from people calling him a poor writer and lambasting him for writing about some of the "finer" topics in life. Yet, he is a New York Times bestselling author, and his detractors are not.

"he is a New York Times bestselling author, and his detractors are not."

Then again, his book makes not being a bestselling author seem like an accomplishment.

"his book makes not being a bestselling author seem like an accomplishment".

And that, my friend, is a GREAT marketing plan. You know how when pg says that if there are two explanations for your situation, and one gives you an excuse to be lazy, choose the other one? Most people choose the excuse to be lazy. That's a big market just itching to pay to have someone tell them what they want to hear.

He's the worst kind of shitty writer. He's clearly intelligent. His writing is shit because he doesn't care.

Why should I spend time reading him if he doesn't put time into the quality of his writing?

Nobody reads Tucker Max hoping to catch a glimpse of literary genius. His stories are pure content, and his audience likes that. Fans want to hear Tucker's stories about sexual exploits and blackout drinking, and don't particularly care whether or not said exploits are described using alliteration.

So you shouldn't spend time reading him, because you aren't his intended audience.

>His writing is shit because he doesn't care.

I am not convinced this is true, nor have I seen a sophisticated analysis of his work that demonstrates this point (though I am open to reading one); it seems that most people assume the point and then proceed from there.

I did write a mostly positive analysis of his work here: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/02/09/hilarity-ensues-tuc... , however.

I'm perfectly okay with thinking that he's a terrible writer who produces absolute dreck while still respecting him for being a creative and hard-working person. He makes the art he wants to make, gets paid very well for it, is prolific, and is hard-working in his field. That deserves respect.

But his stuff is absolute crap.

Tucker argues that his books teach important lessons and are deeper than just "got drunk, had sex." A common theme in a lot of his stories is that he almost always came out the loser — did something incredibly stupid, or lost a friend, or went to jail, etc. Tucker points out multiple times how immature of a person he was when these stories took place. In the end, he is the one hurt the most by his actions. He's matured and learned from his own mistakes.

They're good for a cheap laugh if you're into that sort of thing, but having read I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, I can agree that his book isn't vapid. There is a bit more to it than one would think.

The other day I saw a "looking for technical partner" ad in craigslist by someone who listed "I'm creative" as one of the assets they would be bringing to the partnership.

It made me think about the word "creative". I thought to myself, if I was considering teaming up with this person I would asked them:

"What have you created?"

Often, people confuse swirling ideas seeking form in their head for creativity.

I think the other situation is more common: smart people with swirling unique thoughts keep them hidden because they don't consider themselves creative.

I'm yet to meet such a person. Probably it's just uncommon in the IT crowd, which is highly open to ideas and meritocratic.

How do you know that you've never met a person who didn't share their ideas with you?

I haven't met a person who would be visibly shy to share his ideas with others when I already knew about these. This is of course a skewed sample.

I agree completely. When I was in Art school I was working on a project that instead of using charcoal to create the darks on a white sheet of paper, the assignment was to use a white conte crayon to denote the light areas on a black sheet of paper. I had taken my assignment home and was working on it in my living room when a neighbor and friend of mine knocked on my door and he came in and looked at what I was doing. He was a Mech. E student, and a damn smart person. He told me to my face that he could never do what I was doing because he wasn't creative.

"Creative" doesn't just apply to visual arts - it's a thinking style. And every human, ever, is creative - just in different avenues. And those avenues are all obtainable by all people.

Today "creative" usually refers to originality, not the act of creation. It's no worse than using "engineer" to mean computer programmer rather than someone who works on something with an engine.

Well, if we're getting our etymology on, 'engine' originally referred to any trick, device, or machine. An engineer was someone who created engines. It only took on the association with steam locomotives in the 1800s.

I would also like point out that early computers were also known as analytic engines.

there are lots of smart people with good ideas. there are very few smart people with good ideas who have MADE SOMETHING based on one of those ideas.

Actually making things - finished things - is the hard part. For one, almost anything worth creating involves substantial schlep, and people lack the patience for the schlep. For another, creative people continually have new ideas, and it's very easy to drop that boring schlep in favor of the shiny new idea.

I know a ton of wonderfully creative minds, full of great ideas, that have never accomplished anything. They never finish, either due to frustration with the schlep, or by starting something new before they ever finish what they were working on. Those people are NOT good creative partners, generally. They'll flake out when the going gets tough - and if what you're doing is interesting enough to be worthwhile, it WILL get tough at some point.

I wonder how that compares to these results:

http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/10/selecting-tal...

My gut reaction is that there is sample restriction going on: that there is a minimum intelligence create a large volume of coherent software. Additionally, there are a number of practices that are illegal in the US (not sure about other countries) like structured interviews, so the list of things that companies can use is somewhat limited.

I can't work on projects outside of work because I work ~12 hours a day, 6-7 days a week and there's no way I can free up the long periods of time needed to create something good. I can't talk up my technical accomplishments in an interview because my job isn't particularly technically demanding or interesting, beyond the company name. I think I'm a good interviewer except when it comes to talking about anything I've actually worked on after college (1 year ago). Any tips on how to get past this?

Wait, you're working 60+ hours on boring crap that doesn't advance your career?

WHAT THE HELL?!? STOP THAT!!

Take another job. ANY other job. Flip burgers if you must. Get your priorities in order. 60+ hour work weeks on something you don't utterly love leave you no time to have a life, much less build a career.

And sometimes you desperately need money.

Not often, plenty of people survive with very little, even in developed nations.

I owe 5 figures and make 4. Any money I make goes to rent and ramen. I would kill for consistaint work programming, which is the only thing I am really good for.

I like to ask people about what they do in their private life. What are their hobbies. Do they have a lot going on? People who keep themselves busy tend to have a strong motor and usually apply that to their work life as well. Similarly, people don't do much of anything outside of work can bring this habit into the workplace.

"In my free time I try to keep my house clean enough so that the kids don't manage to vibrationally attune it to the elemental plane of trash."

"Oh, was that not what you wanted me to say?"

That isn't the same as "a person who doesn't do much of anything".

I think it's more in the spirit of "what hobbies do you have" / "what kind of activities do you like".

Have you tried having small kids and managing to get some free time for hobbies? It's more challenging than it seems, and usually takes 6-7 years to resolve itself.

Yes. Both with autism. It is challenging, but not impossible. You have to do more than just a hobby. You have to manage time, energy, and money.

Wow. Our younger is only slightly autistic, and the elder has already grown up. Two simultaneously would be challenging indeed!

It is. We have to make sure each of us still goes out. Both together when we can arrange a baby sitter after they are put to bed, and alone when we have an event or something we want to go to. It's tiring. They are wonderful children though. Incredibly happy and affectionate.

You are acting like somebody should care that you have kids. Seriously, who gives a fuck. Either you are a good fit for the job or not. Your "poor me" life circumstances are your own and frankly nobody cares. There is a reason why it is illegal to ask maritl status, etc. They are not relevant to a job.

You are acting like the original suggestion was not 'judge people's ability to do the job by how they use the time they have outside of work'. If you don't give a fuck they have kids, don't ask about what they do outside of working hours.

"Dogshit developers get paid 50k to start. Good ones are over 100k. You just have to have actual skills."

Because how much someone makes determines if they're dogshit or not.

I think you have your cause and effect backwards. Being paid 50k doesn't make you a bad developer. But bad developers tend to get paid less. At least, one would hope...

Developer pay seems to be mostly based on "years worked", not on merit.

That depends heavily on who the developer in question works for.

pretty much. the only time you can really use income to try and glean the quality of a developer is if they have alot of years of experience but still aren't being paid very much.

Location, location, location matters too. $50k in Alabama is at least $100k in SF.

After rereading that, I think all he is saying is that $50k is the floor. In other words, if you can get in the door you're making $50k no questions asked.

Also, that number seriously depends on market. I work in a place that's absolutely lousy for coders and 50k is pretty typical here. I'd move if I hadn't put down deep roots.

http://thecodist.com/article/interviews_can_be_a_terrible_wa...

> Don't look for talent

Isn't talent the ability to do things well? Or maybe I lack a nuanced definition of "talent". Or maybe the headline is trying to be sensational.

I think his point is even more basic, but perhaps more depressing: Finding people who are decent and competent can be hard enough, so you have to cover that minimum bar before you can talk about "talent".

Given his industry and as he cites in the post, he probably faces the problem of lots of people who claim to be "writers" more than the average HN user finds people who claim to be "programmers".

Indeed; one of my maxims is "Do not do something if you cannot do it well", and I still think it's a good one as long as you adjust that for things like Time to Market (a better thing too late is not really "better", or insert standard Patton quote; military history is useful to learn for striking this balance) and "adequate" especially for those things that must be done but would otherwise not get done at all.

But it's implicit in the essay, and I take the headline as not so "sensational" since it's advocating a particular primary focus that's different from a very common and irrelevant one (at least as the primary focus).

I've been told this is one of the things MIT looks for in undergraduate applications, "projects" as they put it, but basically evidence that this is someone who does stuff (which I was fortunate to be able to provide in my application). Which of course is one of the reasons MIT has such a reputation, a strong part of the Zeitgeist is doing things.

To reify that, I think Richard Feynman, Class of '39, first got interested in the Connection Machine when Danny Hillis was visiting Caltech and they ensconced themselves for a week or so discussing it. However, when he showed up to help the new company (there's an exposition of this that's commonly linked to on HN), things were in chaos, and the only thing they could think of right then was to send him to get office supplies. Which he was entirely happy to do, Nobel Prize winner or not.

Hmmm, come to think of it, I've had casual interactions with a couple of Nobelist biologists while studying there, one teaching a class, one was my undergraduate adviser for a term before I switched majors, and they gave off the standard "get things done" vibe, you wouldn't have any idea they'd gotten the prize without looking at their bios.

You can boil the point of the article down to this line:

no one is good at identifying talent ahead of time

It isn't that you don't want talent, or that talent isn't exactly what you want all of your employees to have, but it is difficult to identify. So, the theory in the article seems to go, instead of trying to measure talent, look for other things in your workers- things that have a non-causal relationship to talent.

I swear there is a word for this in statistics- factors which do not have a clear causal relationship, yet still tend to be found together...

Maybe there's a causal relationship but it's just not obvious. See for example http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/08/quantity-always-tru...

Sure, but point being instead of trying to measure talent itself, you try to measure indirectly.

the criticism is that some people believe they can correlate talent with abstract measurements. Tucker is saying you can only reliably correlate talent by evaluating the works of the person.

This is the kind of post I wish there was a downvote for on HN.

I honestly don't know why this blog post is so highly rated on HN. He is just recapping what other people have been saying in news articles and blog posts.

I read this whole post before realizing it was written by that prick, Tucker Max. I wish I could unread it.

I do agree with your sentiments on Tucker Max, but I think the message is worthwhile no matter the messenger.

A lot of people need to have this idea hammered in over and over until it sticks. Ironically most of them probably don't read HN.

What gave it away? Was it tuckermax.me domain before you got to the website, after it loaded, the sidebar bio, or the huge banner at the top?

I don't like X, therefore I won't consider X's arguments.

That strategy seems like a great way to never learn anything except whatever confirms your own biases.

I didn't say he wasn't right about this. Just regret that I provided traffic to his site.

That still makes no sense.

I agree, re. makes no sense; the man wrote a fine article. I have read one of Tucker Max's books and I am not proud to admit it. But this was one heck of a well-written article.

Honestly, outside of the crazy hyperbole leading up to the (terrible) movie, he wrote some good stuff on his old blog, and the assistant he mentions(Ryan holiday) wrote a fascinating book called trust me in lying.

I'm not sure why this is highly upvoted, but I would recommend reading "How to Disagree": http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html to those who have.

shameless autopromotion, a.k.a. my viewpoint: http://blog.cyplo.net/2011/07/24/how-to-hire-people/

Pro-tip: don't just link your blog post, give us an executive summary. If you won't make the effort to do at least that, I wouldn't expect many to make the effort to click your link.

thanks :) to you point: I think the recruitment process should be less automated and more humane. One should just sit and try to work with another person, as they would be their work partner.

Agreed, have heard good reports of companies contracting prospectives for a day or more to actually work on something on the company's todo list, and doing it with pair programming.

Joel said this well a while back: Smart and gets things done.

"Creative". No.

"Creative and willing to invest financially". Yes.

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