Johanna

It’s crucial for us to understand as many mental models as possible. As the adage goes, a little knowledge can be dangerous and creates more problems than total ignorance. No single model is universally applicable – we find exceptions for nearly everything. Even hardcore physics has not been totally solved.

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

Hiring is all about probabilities. When we evaluate a candidate, we are basically just trying to predict whether that candidate will be a success in the position being filled. We're trying to know the future, but we have no prophets and no Oracle.

Working part-time could let developers give their best to a project without the burden of emotional blackmail in the form of “9 to 5”. They could be required to be available for meetings and firefighting outside of their 4 hours, and still have way more free time. With a good developer and a well managed project, you wouldn’t even notice a... See more

Regarding economic factors, it seems that there needs to be a certain level of surplus to support the culture-wide research and development effort that creates inventions. Note that Karl von Drais was a baron who apparently had a cushy job and invented in his spare time. This is common of researchers of that era: they were often aristocrats or... See more

Don’t hire for the sake of hiring. Hire because there is no other way to do what you want to do.

I think that the perception of stagnation in science – and in biology specifically – is basically fake news, driven by technological hedonic treadmill and nostalgia. We rapidly adapt to technological advances – however big they are – and we always idealize the past – however terrible it was.