Johanna

I think another important factor in determining happiness is how hard of a line you want between work and home life. One benefit of traditional office environments is that when you physically leave the office, it’s not too hard to flip the switch and go into “home mode”. Sure you may have to deal with the odd email every now and then, but it’s... See more

But, as impressively, she prompts her people to act originally by banning words such as like, love and hate, because, as a basic visceral response, they circumvent any critical thought. Saying why something is loved or hated inspires new, substantial ideas. She inspires originality in her people.”

You want to be very selective about the people you choose to engage with further along in your hiring process. “For every person making it all the way through the interview loop, that can be 20 person-hours,” says Gupta. “If you multiply that by your hire ratio, you’ll see that this is just not scalable. You also have to consider the candidate... See more

How would you improve our interview process? “I find this question powerful for a couple of reasons. One, it's an opportunity to see if they’re willing to speak up. Two, it's a window into their thinking process. When they encounter something that they don't like, do they have the instinct not only to raise why it may be broken but also suggest how... See more

Because scientific papers are not easily accessible, we can’t easily use the data to train generative models like GPT-3 or DALL-E. Can you imagine if a researcher could propose an experiment and an AI model could instantly tell them if it had been done before (and better yet, give them the result)? Because scientific papers are not easily... See more

We pay lip service to the idea of hiring the best people in the world — but in reality, we’re only hiring the best people who happen to be close by. Call me crazy, but I think if we’re going to talk about hiring the best talent available, we should actually try to do that. This means letting go of the idea, at least in IT work, that people need to... See more

But even with project managers, cascading failures remain a risk due to the nature of construction. Construction has the unfortunate combination of building mostly unique things each time (even similar projects will be built on different sites, in different weather conditions, and likely with different site crews) and consisting of tasks that are... See more

Any skill or attribute you claim makes you unique—”I’m really funny”, “I’m good at shining shoes”, “I’m an attentive lover”—you can always find someone else better than you on that dimension. They’re funnier, fitter, richer, sexier, smarter, or better at shining shoes than you are. We can’t help but desperately compete in this unwinnable game of... See more