Johanna
@johannaeinsiedler
Notoriously Curious, Data Science Nerd & Entrepreneurship Advocate
Author of CuratedCuriosity - a bi-weekly newsletter with hand picked recommendations for your information diet
Johanna
The optimal time to make a decision about the candidate is about three minutes after the end of the interview. (...) I ask interviewers to write immediate feedback after the interview, either a “hire” or “no hire”, followed by a one or two paragraph justification. It’s due 15 minutes after the interview ends.
Joel Spolsky • The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing (version 3.0)
Software entrepreneur Ray Ozzie has a specific technique for handling potential interruptions — the four-hour rule. When he’s working on a product, he never starts unless he has at least four uninterrupted hours to focus on it. Fractured blocks of time, he discovered, result in more bugs, which later require fixing.
Shane Parrish • Maker vs. Manager: How Your Schedule Can Make or Break You
Happy in spite of. Happiness is not a passive condition dependent on external events, nor is it the result of our personalities – just being born a happy person. Instead, happiness requires a conscious shift in outlook, in which one chooses – daily – optimism over pessimism, hope over despair.
Karl Pillemer, Interview No. 2
Hiring Advice and
Projects have very low expectations, which is great. Projects also usually mean less people and less money, so you get the good parts of both flexibility and focus. Companies have high expectations—and the more money out of the gate and the more press, the worse off they are (think Color and Clinkle, for example).
Sam Altman • Projects and Companies
Finally, to repeat one more time: productivity in the wrong direction isn’t worth anything at all. Think more about what to work on
Sam Altman • Productivity
This is the big one. If you’re conducting blue sky imagineering improv meetings on a regular basis, that’s very tough to pull off remotely. There’s something about the physical presence of people in a room, seeing their faces, hearing their voices, watching their body language, that is far more conducive to quickly bouncing ideas around and... See more
First Round Capital • Here’s Why You’re Not Hiring the Best and the Brightest
How to Drop Out
ranprieur.com
When you begin to get free, you will get depressed. It works like this: When you were three years old, if your parents weren't too bad, you knew how to play spontaneously. Then you had to go to school, where everything you did was required. The worst thing is that even the fun activities, like singing songs and playing games, were commanded under threat of punishment. So even play got tied up in your mind with a control structure, and severed from the life inside you. If you were "rebellious", you preserved the life inside you by connecting it to forbidden activities, which are usually forbidden for good reasons, and when your rebellion ended in suffering and failure, you figured the life inside you was not to be trusted. If you were "obedient", you simply crushed the life inside you almost to death.
Freedom means you're not punished for saying no. The most fundamental freedom is the freedom to do nothing. But when you get this freedom, after many years of activities that were forced, nothing is all you want to do. You might start projects that seem like the kind of thing you're supposed to love doing, music or writing or art, and not finish because nobody is forcing you to finish and it's not really what you want to do. It could take months, if you're lucky, or more likely years, before you can build up the life inside you to an intensity where it can drive projects that you actually enjoy and finish, and then it will take more time before you build up enough skill that other people recognize your actions as valuable.
To make this approach work, you also have to fire humanely. This may seem like a contradiction in terms, but by “firing” I don’t mean the traditional, disgusting practice of marching people to the door in humiliation.