I feel rather silly commenting as a voice of dissent here, against a man who cannot defend himself, but here goes.<p>These are rather obvious metrics that a child could have drafted. Are you smart? Can do you do things? The problem is that these are subjective measures.<p>A smart person, who sets the world on fire and gets things done, perhaps like Aaron did or could have done, has a different perspective than say a 50-something product manager. They may see smart as seeing the future, where the programmer may see smart as knowing x86 assembly. And the fool may see smart as someone who talks in technical jumble.<p>There is no golden key to hiring folks. My experiences say that in a good company, the manager needing help should be in charge of hiring who he/she deems fit. Some may, perhaps rightly, cry nepotism and other factors may run amok. But putting that weight, and risks, on the manager is the point. If they hire an unqualified buddy, they are responsible and ultimately fail with them. I don't really see this as different than Aaron - someone who has their own metrics.<p>In short, trying to put out any 'guide to hiring people' is a short sighted goal, seeing as everyone has their own experiences and views. This is really no different.
Working out whether someone is smart or not on the basis of how an entirely informal conversation goes makes you extremely vulnerable to biases.<p>Read "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman and you will become much more suspicious of sentiments like "I think it’s pretty easy to tell whether someone’s smart in casual conversation". We are actually extremely bad at guessing people's competences on first encounter, and very prone to cognitive biases such as the halo effect.<p>With no objective measures, it seems this method is likely to be subject to massive bias towards people that you just get on with or like for some reason.
I think the most effective way to hire is to do your best without giving into to grueling whiteboard interviews, and take a chance on someone who seems smart. But also fire the person quickly if it seems like they won't be a good fit. After spending years interviewing people, this is the best conclusion I've come up with, because nothing else works as conclusively. Yes, it's brutal, and a bit ruthless, but effective. Whiteboard interview questions are a terrible measure of whether someone will be able to contribute. Same goes for the other types of interview questions.<p>Of course, you need to give the person a chance to ramp up, etc, but if they can't be a contributing team member in 2 months, then it's better to give them 1-2 month's severance and get rid of them. I know one late-stage startup in the city that is using this technique, and I believe (not sure) that both Amazon and Netflix use this technique as well. It sucks, and kind of creates a bit of a harsh environment, but it's a fast way to build out your team, and probably has the same success rate as any other interview method, if not better because you cull your bad performers quickly.
I think Spolsky originally made this line of thought famous in 2006:<p><a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing3.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing...</a><p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Gets-Things-Done-Technical/dp/1590598385" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Smart-Gets-Things-Done-Technical/dp/15...</a>
As I'm going through a new round of job interviews, this article resonates well. It's kind of sad watching (and being subjected to) some otherwise great companies still going at it the old way as described in the second paragraph.
>"If you ask people at parties to name their greatest strengths and weaknesses or to estimate the number of piano tuners in Chicago, you’ve got bigger problems."<p>Well, it looks like I'm going to have to find better things to talk about...
Really? So just have a nice conversation and ask questions?<p>Of course you want smart, curious people who can learn things and do stuff. These "guides" are just various elaborations of (sadly uncommon) common sense. There's no secret here.
Here is another Massachusetts resident whose life Carmen Ortiz has destroyed that I just read about this week. She finally brought federal drug distribution charges against a family doctor after he lived under a cloud of suspicion during a 7 year "investigation." He was acquitted of all charges:
<a href="http://needham.wickedlocal.com/article/20150515/NEWS/150517160" rel="nofollow">http://needham.wickedlocal.com/article/20150515/NEWS/1505171...</a>