smallchou.com/blog

Marc Andreessen’s clearly a smart guy. Some interesting thoughts on hiring from him, namely:

Lots of people will tell you to hire for intelligence.

Especially in this industry.

You will read, hire the smartest people out there and your company’s success is all but guaranteed.

I think intelligence, per se, is highly overrated.

…

Most of the lore in our industry about the role of intelligence in company success comes from two stratospherically successful companies — Microsoft, and now Google — that are famous for hiring for intelligence.

Microsoft’s metric for intelligence was the ability to solve logic puzzles.

(I don’t know if the new, MBA-heavy Microsoft still does this, but I do know this is how Microsoft in its heyday worked.)

For example, a classic Microsoft interview question was: “Why is a manhole cover round?”

The right answer, of course, is, “Who cares? Are we in the manhole business?”

(Followed by twisting in your chair to look all around, getting up, and leaving.)

Google, on the other hand, uses the metric of educational achievement.

Have a PhD? Front of the line. Masters? Next. Bachelor’s? Go to the end.

In apparent direct contraction to decades of experience in the computer industry that PhD’s are the hardest people to motivate to ship commercially viable products — with rare exception.