A friend sent me this job listing recently, and I see it suffers from a wrong-headed (though well-intentioned) institutional fixation that hiring managers seem to have: that of wanting an “all-star team”.
“we are building an all-star team”
Sigh. This mentality is promoted by smart, successful people like Joel Spolsky:
“You’re going to see three types of people in your interviews. At one end of the scale, there are the unwashed masses, lacking even the most basic skills for this job. They are easy to ferret out and eliminate, often just by asking two or three quick questions. At the other extreme you’ve got your brilliant superstars who write lisp compilers for fun, in a weekend, in Assembler for the Nintendo DS. And in the middle, you have a large number of maybes who seem like they might just be able to contribute something. The trick is telling the difference between the superstars and the maybes, because the secret is that you don’t want to hire any of the maybes. Ever.”
What’s wrong with the premise? Easy – just watch any sports all-star game: they all, each and every one, stink. Why? There is rarely ever such a thing as an “all-star team”. Stars, by definition, are individuals.
Sure – you have the anomalies: the 1927 Yankees, for example. That one magical time when all the stars aligned, the wind blew in the right direction, the grass bent just so, and everyone did exactly what they needed to do every time. They had 6 future Hall-of-Famers on the roster – names you know (and some you don’t): Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Earle Combs, Herb Pencock, Waite Hoyt, Tony Lazzeri. They won 110 games and only lost 44 (it was before the 162 game season).
But even the 1927 Yankees didn’t win every year. Just the next year they still won, but lost a player from tuberculosis. And the next year they only won 88 games.
In 1927, Lou Gehrig batted .375. In 1929 it was only .300.
In 1927 Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs. In 1929 only 46.
What happened? Other teams learned to adapt, the rosters changed, the weather was different, the grass grew differently … in short: the “magic” wasn’t a formula – it was just magic.
In baseball, the All-Star Game is ostensibly a show for the fans (though, given the shortness of each players’ appearance in the game, and how managers might be inclined to less-heavily (or more-heavily) use players from their own teams, you wonder how much of a “show” it really is). A bunch of excellent baseball players who normally play against each other are brought together for a few hours to play with each other… and then go back to being opponents two days later.
I saw this at Opsware: they had a hiring philosophy that you should “never hire someone dumber than yourself” (if you were an interviewer). Theoretically, this should have lead to a corporate environment of smart people. And it did – mostly (I’ll leave-out some of the less-than-stellar hires Opsware made while I was there). But it also lead to having a roomful of smart people – ones who weren’t necessarily really “smart” when it came to talking to other people .. a distinct problem. (Take a look at this Quora entry on things smart people do that are dumb.)
Smart people sitting in a room and solving ideas tend to lead to the architecture astronaut view of the world. (Ironically, the same Joel who only wants to hire the best-of-the-best also realizes that super smart people will tend to get so enamored of their own ideas that they’ll craft little silos where they can sit and happily yammer-on about their pet interest.)
I’ve had the privilege of working with some scary-smart people. And I’ve had the horror of working with some scary-smart people.
Sadly, it is far more often the case that the super smart people I’ve known and worked with have been horrors and not privileges.
We all want to work in the best environments we can – we want good benefits, interesting work, quality family time, great coworkers, awesome bosses … We all like to think that the folks we work with are amazingly brilliant – among the best in their fields. But what is the statistical likelihood of that? Pretty small.
If IQ were the only guide for potential success, you’d think that everyone would want to gravitate towards places that have masses of high-IQ folks. Like Mensa. Like we think Google must be. Or like Dave Eggers’ fictional company The Circle.
But IQ isn’t the only determinant of success – we can see that clearly with some of our most famous politicians, business leaders, cultural influences, etc.
Putting a bunch of smart (or athletic or fast or whatever other term/factor you want to use to quantify “all-star”) folks together in one room to become a team isn’t really realistic. What makes a good team is complex – there’s shared vision, good interpersonal skills, knowing whom to contact for what, and more. It’s not merely having a bunch of people who are “the best” at what they do. It’s having people who can be [close to] “the best” together.
It’s entirely possible to build an all-star *team*, so long as you’re willing to accept that it may not be filled with all-star *individuals*. Look at the Jordan dynasty with the Chicago Bulls. They had a lot of good players, but they weren’t necessarily the pinnacle of the league at their positions. Or take the Yankees in the late 90’s/early 2000’s. Again, a lot of good players, if not the “best of the best”.
Another thing these teams had going for them was they were collections of some of the most competitive players in the league. Those teams were successful for so many years because those players threw everything they had into their games. You need a combination of “good”, and “true believer”, not “best in the world at everything or at least their little niche.”
Now there’s a take I hadn’t thought of, Eric – and one that needs much mulling 🙂
There’s more to it than this though; a part of the problem is that people don’t understand what kind of “smart” they’re looking for. There are many kinds of smart; the typical US employer focuses on two kinds of smart whilst ignoring two other important kinds of smart.
Firstly and historically US employers, hiring managers look at degrees, and qualification, which as many people are now starting to realise, was a great way to create drones during the industrial revolution; “We take a guy, teach him by rote, a bunch of facts, or tasks so he’s able to repeat and regurgitate that information at will”. The second kind of smart that employers look for is actually experience, or perhaps “how much immersion has this guy had in various environments, or how many tours of duty has he had in companies that we respect or want to be like?” Hiring a guy with this exposure is great if you want him to be able to do for you, what he did for the last company that was great, but there’s no indication that he’s able to do anything differently or new. As you quite rightly stated already, the guys with the high GPAs, and other honours allow it to cloud their thinking and often times believe themselves to be the smartest guys in the room at all times. Just because someone worked at Facebook, doesn’t mean they’re a star, it means they were in the right place at the right time. Just because someone was the twentieth hire at salesforce.com doesn’t mean they’re awesome, it means that they’ve been at the company a long time. We can’t assume that just because they were there that they they were awesome, all we can assume is that they did enough to retain their position.
Almost every company (startup or blue chip) is trying to (or wishes it could) encourage entrepreneurial spirit, to be able to create the next iPhone/iPod/Twitter/Salesforce.com/whathaveyou. The problem is that these kinds of ideas frequently come out of startups because the people who come up with them often don’t get hired or don’t fit within a corporate environment, traditional hiring processes are designed to exclude and separate out these mavericks. Quite often these people who almost always have a mix of creative (vision) AND critical (logical and objective) thinking, many have been college drop-outs (they have cool ideas and quickly see the university they are studying as irrelevant, which they often are with the exception of a handful of professions.
Some companies are trying to get better at hiring smart, creative people, without actually knowing what qualities they’re looking for, because they don’t understand what makes the individuals tick, it’s a bit like trying to find your destination without a map, by driving through every town you come across to see if it matches a photograph you have, until you find the one you think is right.
“Smart” people are no good to anyone if they can’t critically think (understand, validate, verify, hypothesis, analyse, repeat) their way out of a problem because this particular scenario wasn’t covered in their course; Smart people are no good to anyone if they can’t take two abstract concepts and combine them to a creative (vision) end (SMS + Web = twitter). These are the qualities that companies and hiring managers need to be focusing on; these are the qualities that our colleges and schools need to be developing. The more we focus we put on teaching to test (SATs, GPA, BSc, PhD, MBA), and their associated scores and qualifications, the more people you’ll get with awesome memories that can pass exams really well, let’s hope there’s a job out there for them where they get paid to pass exams.
Sorry for the long post, but it’s a problem that a lot of people are trying to solve everyday, without ever defining the problem, its variables, the scope of the problem, and hence unable to define what an answer to that problem might look like.
Perhaps “all star smart + humble” would be the criterion instead. I do agree with this statement of his – I’ve realized it time and time again, cleaning up the work of now-gone developers: “It’s because it’s much, MUCH better to reject a good candidate than to accept a bad candidate.” They really make you pay long after they’re gone.
You show me “smart + humble”, and I’ll hire them every time.
Sadly, the vast vast majority of “smart” are anything but “humble” 🙁
Reminds me of the speculators I met a few years ago in MA: they wanted to know how to find the next Google, Crocs, whathaveyounot.
I told them the absolute truth: you figure out today what 6-9 years will want in 5 years, and you’ve got a guaranteed winner.
Or, you invest in every “crazy” business concept (with an execution plan behind it) you find – that’s how you manage to “get in on the ground floor” of the next Google.
Or, even better, you go build what you want to see/use and tell others. Odds are, if you want it, someone else will, too.
The team dynamic, aka “plays well with others” (http://antipaucity.com/2011/09/15/the-ticket-smash-raw-metrics-and-communication-how-to-have-a-successful-support-organization/#.U7rVF41dWuI), is the single most important thing you can bring to an organization: if you’re NOT such a player, you need to go do your own thing – and be the best you can be there.
This seems to correlate with my hypothesis: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-surprising-problem-of-too-much-talent/
nice find, Eric