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Re: Rapid Hiring & Firing to Build the Best Teams
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Posted: Feb 19, 2010 4:32 PM
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Paul sounds a lot like my CEO and CTO, so it would be weird for me to criticize him. They like to say that there are personality alignments and talent alignments, and that in order to work at this company (a) the people you work with have to like you (b) they have to be able to make use of whatever skills you advertised to join that group
I am not sure I understand the back-and-forth on this blog entry.
I pretty much don't like working with people who spend all day watching Youtube instead of solving problems elegantly.
I don't like working with people who have meetings just to have meetings. I don't like the people in the meetings who prolong the meetings by asking questions. I don't like people who don't realize the person asking questions is clueless and has given up caring 10 years ago, and has mostly just mastered the art of bullshitting that they are involved.
Today, I was on the phone with a salesperson, and was just up front about what my needs were and that I didn't know all the fancy terminology on the products in a catalog I was looking at. I just cut to the chase. I didn't want to waste her time or mine. Yet some people in corporate America realize this is how they can spend time.
I'm also not sure humble, confidence, and kindness is such a big deal. Most people I run into have these charactertistics. Where most people lack character and/or intelligence is the inability to tell their boss "your specification doesn't make any sense because X, Y, and Z result in such and such logic problem".
Then there are customers who call me up in a panic because their boss wants such and such done do this all the time. They're "on the clock" and feel pressure, so they simply STOP thinking and all they can do is repeat over and over what they see on the screen: "The numbers don't add up! It's a bug!" And I just have to re-affirm: "It's not suppose to add up. Your boss is asking you for a report that you do not have data to provide." When you realize that this is how they behave not just with you (a third party) but also at work all day long, you start to realize you're fortunate to be working where you are.
Some people, even when they realize problems, don't want to report them, because they interpret reporting problems as causing grief for themselves: it is one more thing to keep track of.
The above characterizes the foot draggers.
Then there are the empire builders.
Empire builders think you are there to make them money, and that they provide the "real" service to the customer. Their real objective is simply to lock in as many customers as possible on their product, and ascend the corporate ladder on that single success. If they can cash out with stock options, they will then tour the country telling university students and aspiring entrepreneurs everything-there-is-to-know about startups, because, you know, they got lucky once and now know everything there is to know!
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