Johanna

There are two possible mistakes you can make — you can either hire the wrong person or fail to hire the right one. None of us like to say no, but you should bias toward the latter. And doing so early in the process, even with limited data, saves time for everyone, including the candidate.

Even if you have a candidate that would be brilliant at doing your particular task, but wouldn’t be very good in another team, that’s a No Hire. In software, things change so often and so rapidly that you need people that can succeed at just about any programming task that you throw at them.

Something that you personally can replicate is replication. Watching someone else do it is also pretty close, since you still get to see it for yourself. Something that a big lab would be able to replicate is not really replication. It’s nice to have confirmation from a second lab, but now you’re just taking two people’s word for it instead of one... See more

People have an enormous capacity to make things happen. A combination of self-doubt, giving up too early, and not pushing hard enough prevents most people from ever reaching anywhere near their potential.

Small sample sizes. We also need to know that the study was big enough to justify the claims made. For example, it’s pretty obvious that men are on average taller than women. But to have a good chance of detecting this difference in an experiment, you’d need at least 20 people to find a statistically significant result. Unfortunately, such huge... See more

In summary, I claim that some of the reasons why so many people who have greatness within their grasp don't succeed are: they don't work on important problems, they don't become emotionally involved, they don't try and change what is difficult to some other situation which is easily done but is still important, and they keep giving themselves... See more

Milton Friedman famously declared that the welfare state and open immigration cannot coexist; otherwise, the former would serve as a powerful attraction, encouraging low-wage foreigners to move in and putting the system on dicey financial footing. That’s a big oversimplification, for a number of reasons. But any country thinking of embarking on a... See more