Sholto Douglas: evaluation

Transcript context

…“If you do everything, you'll win.” Exactly. I think from my side that quality has definitely been important: agency and work. There are thousands, probably tens of thousands of engineers, at Google who are basically equivalent in software engineering ability. Let's say if you gave us a very well-defined task, then we'd probably do it with equivalent value. Maybe a bunch of them would do it a lot better than me in all likelihood. But one of the reasons I've been impactful so far is I've been very good at picking extremely high-leverage problems. I mean problems that haven't been particularly well-solved so far, but perhaps as a result of frustrating structural factors like the ones that you pointed out in that scenario before, where they're like, “we can't do X because this team won’t do Y. ” Well, I'm just going to vertically solve the entire thing. And that turns out to be remarkably effective. If I think there is something correct, something that needs to happen, I'm also very comfortable with making that argument and continuing to make that argument at escalating levels of criticality until that thing gets solved. I'm also quite pragmatic with what I do to solve things. You get a lot of people who come in with, as I said before, a particular background or a familiarity. One of the beautiful things about Google is that you can run around and get world experts in literally everything. You can sit down and talk to people who are optimization experts, TPU chip design experts, experts in different forms of pre-training algorithms or RL or whatever. You can learn from all of them and you can take those methods and apply them. I think this was maybe the start of why I was initially impactful, this vertical agency effectively. A follow-up piece from that is that I think it's often surprising how few people are fully-realized in all the things they want to do. They're blocked or limited in some way. This is very common in big organizations everywhere. People have all these blockers on what they're able to achieve. I think helping inspire people to work in particular directions and working with them on doing things massively scales your leverage. You get to work with all these wonderful people who teach you heaps of things. And generally helping them push past organizational blockers means that together you get an enormous amount done. None of the impact that I've had has been me individually going off and solving a whole lot of stuff. It's been me maybe starting off in a direction, and then convincing other people that this is the right direction, and bringing them along in this big tidal wave of effectiveness that goes and solves that problem. We should talk about how you guys got hired. Because I think that's a really interesting story. You were a McKinsey consultant, right? There's an interesting thing there. I think generally people just don't understand how decisions are made about either admissions or evaluating who to hire. Just talk about how you were noticed and hired.…

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