Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Jeff Dean, who’s probably the best engineer at Google, used to work at Digital Equipment Corporation. I think he was the 10th or 11th engineer Google hired, and he’s basically responsible for the fact that Google Search works. He did crazy optimizations — back in the day when this mattered — like writing data that you’re going to access a lot on the exterior side of the disc, so it was a bit easier to access. Anyway, brilliant guy, still works at Google. Amazing software engineer. He told me once, while he was just waiting for code to compile, he would just go through a stack of résumés that Google was hiring. This was back when Google had maybe 10,000 people. He still had a pulse on the type of people they were bringing in. You hear stories like this a lot, but very few organizations do it. The best organizations tend to do it. It really matters. It might matter more — especially in the current market that we’re in — it might matter more than capital, just allocating the right people to the right jobs. One of the interview questions I’ve used quite successfully as of late — it’s a very simple one. It comes from Peter Thiel, I believe. It’s simply to ask the person, “How ambitious are you?” A yes-or-no answer, actually, is fine. If they say no because they think you mean something bland and a little mainstream — they say, “No, I’m not ambitious, but I want to do this. ” They say it with great passion and charisma — that’s excellent. If they’re just stumped by the question, they have no idea what they actually want to do — that, to me, is a negative. They might do fine in some jobs where they don’t have much responsibility, but they’re not going to build something for you. But if they can articulate some ambition and simply know what you mean when you ask them, I find it’s a very hard question for people to fake: that if they don’t actually have the ambition, their ability to articulate it with the requisite energy and detail and focus just isn’t there. Of course, the great problem one faces in an interview is that people can fake their answers to questions. If you ask them, “Are you conscientious?” Well, you probably care about that, but they’re just going to say yes. Who would say no? Does it mean they’re conscientious? Of course not. Another idea, I think, that we discuss in the book that works pretty well is repeating questions, which is a bit uncomfortable to do, but can work, especially if you’re asking something that the person may not have an answer for, because they’re thinking about it for the first time. That can be a way to get something out of the are-you-conscientious question, which I agree is tough.…

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