every company has the same hiring criteria

the primary contrarian belief this essay puts forth is: experience is not worth hiring for

this article summarizes all the advice on hiring i’ve read into three pillars, such that all other advice can be ignored — it is an attempt at over-generalizing. It will outline how I will take this to the extremes and how we will implement it at our company.

skeleton:

• how i got to this

  • read a bunch of stuff

  • came up with my own

  • kept seeing it while reading other’s advice now

  • generalizing it w/ evidence

• generalizing it to company values [hard] like amazon, facebook, uber [early], and ourselves

• does experience matter? does anything else matter?

  • experimental current textql solution: [cc Mr. Beast memo]

storytelling part

i’ve hated reading all the advice on hiring in the world. it feels like a giant checklist that just grows larger and larger, as every famous person has their own unique angle to it. at some point, i made up the idea of agency x competence in my head - and it seemed to be a better distillation that fits in my brain

then i came across someone with very high competence and agency, but wanted to take max-cash in compensation. this made me uncomfortable. i realized there are character traits i’d been taking for granted that exist on a totally different axis. so i added “character” to my list.

the list was:

• things that rhyme with agency (drive, hustle, ambition)

• things that rhyme with competence (intelligence, skill, talent, IQ)

• things that rhyme with character (integrity, morals, conviction, ethics)

when i went back to reading - i realized i kept hearing these 3 things over and over agian

examples of other people using this advice

in reading The Nvidia Way (Jensen), the Everything Store (Bezos), Marc Andreessen’s blog, Reed Hasting’s Netflix Culture Memo, and How to Make a Couple Billion Dollars (Jacobs) - I kept seeing the same 3 things over and over again

Jensen Huang calls them [see Jensen’s thing here]

• Brains (Intelligence)

• Guts (Agency)

• Heart (Character)

Bezos tells his team to ask [see Bezo’s thing here]

• Will you admire this person [Character]

• Will this person raise the average effectiveness of the group they’re entering? [Agency]

• Along what dimensions might this person be a superstar? [Intelligence]

Marc Andreessen calls them [see Marc’s thing here]

• Drive (Agency)

• Curiosity (Intelligence)

• Morals (Character)

Reed Hastings calls it “Big-Hearted Champions who pick up the trash”

• Big Hearted (Character)

• Champions (Intelligence)

• who pick up the trash (Agency + some Character)

Brad Jacobs calls them [see Brad Jacob’s thing here]

• Intelligence

• Hunger (Agency)

• Integrity (Character), and Collegiality (seems to roll into Character)

generalizing it to company values

I hate company values and how vacuous they tend to be. to learn more about why, see this incredibly funny article by benn stancil and then take a look at our hiring page. you should have a good sense of what matters to me then

"Second, it’s not clear what values are meant to represent. In some cases, they’re presented as personality traits, as a kind of corporate Myers–Briggs. Lego is imaginative and creative; Twilio is curious; EY values “teaming.”6 In other cases, however, values are framed as binding contracts to which both the company and its employees are accountable. Snowflake’s values are vaguely threatening. Coinbase, famously, makes being mission first a condition of employment. Lockheed Martin’s core values—printed on an “Ethics Awareness Training” PDF and shared alongside something called the Code of Ethics and Business Conduct—are basically a DocuSign from a lawyer.” ~ benn.substack.com

funnily enough, these 3 frameworks feel like they generalize really well into company values. also, I’m aware I’m already generalizing too hard here, and this is a domain where over-generalization is the biggest problem. hopefully this act of self aware metacommentary makes me seem like i have more to say

you can compress most good company values into these 3 axis!

Amazon!

Facebook’s early values loaded up pretty heavy on “drive” over and over again

Travis Kalanick’s Uber values seem to be different ways of saying “Drive” over and over again

although if i’m being super honest, the TextQL values we first produced were also just the word “drive” over and over and over again

ownership, realism, urgency, and aggression are basically other ways of saying “get lots of stuff done”

now if i’m being really self critical - as i review a bunch of these values, “unpretentious” - or a cluster of traits that seems to revolve around “humility” jumps out at me as sometihng that doesn’t fit very well

to me, humility is a matter of good character.

am i using that as a catch all - by lumping “humility” with “integrity” under “character”? maybe. sue me. its my framework

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testing myself for bullshit

ok cool, here’s 3 new nebulous good words no one disagrees are good. what real thing are you acutally saying?

i’m saying that testing for these 3 are all that matter. none of the titans of industry include “have they done the job before” in their priorities. none of them list your resume. none of them list previous job titles or technologies… or god forbid a “skills” section

the first item on most job postings are “years of experience” — yet none of them seem to care about years of experience or “have they done it before”

if you search up “good interview quesitons” you get a thousand list of traits to test for w/ a thousand questions to ask - but this should make it clear that every single test or question you’re asking should revolve around

it seems like the only thing that matters is being a smart generalist

• are you competent? prove it

• are you high agency? prove it

• do you have integrity? prove it

the biggest thing i’m personally concluding is: being a specialist w/ prior experience does not matter.

and my current hypothesis what we should do next: TextQL should never put “YoE” in any job posting it makes, ever.

we will hire smart generalists w/ high agency, intelligence, and good character forever.

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ok what about really specialist roles like law? like we’re being sued for edge law-situations w/ the supreme court?

ok ok ok fine there’s a solution for this: tools

in this case, tools for specialized work are “consultants”

this is a policy favored in the mr beast manual - about using consultants, but instructing his team that they should continue to be the agents pushing the task forward and exercising ownership

the principle agent and agency never shift to the consultant - it always continues to be the teammate