Johanna

In the current economic system, unemployment spreads like a virus: people lose their jobs, stop spending money, businesses are forced to shut down, and so on.A Job Guarantee could act as a buffer that absorbs unemployed people before they fall to the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. And this could help to stabilize the economy during... See more

Reflexivity is at work in talent markets as well. (...) No prospect is more attractive to a 10x engineer than working with other 10x engineers, and no opportunity is more irresistible to an investor than funding a team of 10x engineers.

Throughout my career I’ve noticed that when I work about 4-5 hours on something, I’m done. Regardless of whether I’ve allocated 6 or 8 or 10 hours to it, I either finish my tasks, or I run out of runway to finish them. Most of the time spent after that is just obsessive tweaking.

One other thing about meetings in remote companies: working remotely has made me realize how unimportant and ritualized so many meetings are. Often times, I will get 90% of the way through scheduling a meeting in Google Calendar only to ask myself “can’t we just update each other on this project throughout the week via Slack?” Even staff meetings... See more

You need a mission in order to hire well. In addition to wanting to work with a great team, candidates need to believe in your mission—i.e., why is this job more important than any of the others they could take? Having a mission that gets people excited is probably the best thing you can do to get a great team on board before you have runaway... See more

To fairly and evenly weed out candidates — and protect your employees’ time — Gupta also recommends assigning a take-home coding test between phone screen one and phone screen two.“This assignment should be a trivial coding problem,” he says. In the past, he’s assigned something that would take a moderately skilled coder 10 minutes to finish.... See more

So I think efforts like Hoel’s to find the One Thing That Went Wrong in producing geniuses are doomed to fail. But even if I’m wrong, aristocratic tutoring isn’t that One Thing: there are too many counterexamples.