jseban

What I'm trying to say is: it's a bad idea to hire extra smart individual contributors as a solution to managing complexity, because nobody is smart enough. The cult of genius makes the workplace dysfunctional and inefficient.

That extra intelligence is mostly irrelevant, and sometimes negative.

Managing complexity is done with hierarchy, specialisation and careful organisation of work from accountable managers. You want this organisation to work well, and then you want to hire people who can do an acceptable job and function well within that organisation. And if you are still finding yourself in a chaos of unmanageable complexity, the organisation of the team is to blame.

The hierarchy, specialisation and organisation of the work is not done well enough, and must be fixed. You don't need more horsepower when the steering of your car has broken, that's just going to get you in the ditch faster.

Yeah, I'm speaking in general terms of the software industry, and common hiring processes, which according to your comments you seem to fit into pretty well.

I don't mean to criticise you but rather suggest that the hiring process should focus less on intelligence and coding skills, and try to hire people that have intellect. That can pair judgement with intelligence. That can relate decisions to goals beyond their own personal preferences.

I have too many bad experiences with highly intelligent, but myopic and immature software developers who are left to "self organise" and just end up being lose cannons of raw intelligence, that does much more harm than good.

Software development, is more an organisational problem than a technical one.

The organisation itself is already so vastly complex that no human being can comprehend it, and that's why you have a hierarchy of information and specialisation of roles. Even if your system by some miracle has zero accidental complexity, it's still going to overwhelm even the most intelligent person, just by the amount of essential complexity. So you will need an organisation of hierarchy and/or specialisation to manage this. And the biggest determining factor for how successful you are, is this organisation and how it works as a whole, rather than any individuals superior capacity.

I just think it's a really bad idea to try to hire "extra smart" people to try to solve these issues, because it won't work.

Highly intelligent, (technically) capable and motivated people are probably not in any way correlated with the amount of complexity you are needing to fight with. And if it is, it's most likely negative.

Lack of intelligence is probably not your problem, the computer genius who swoops in and saves the day only exists in movies. You are probably in a much bigger need of accountable management who actually structures the work and aligns the team by making decisions.

There are plenty of reliable, mature, productive people with great team work and communication skills, who will get rejected because they say that they are actually passionate about playing guitar, not programming, and because they can't solve esoteric programming problems on whiteboards.

Your hiring process is not optimised to further business goals, it's optimised for acting out the big bang theory in the workplace.

> Bad news is that most people are not good developers and they don't even know about it because really good developers are so few and concentrated in relatively few places. In effect, most developers will never have a chance to work with one.

Yeah and having an outstanding skill or performance is not important in an average company/organisation, and will most likely give you only trouble. Larger organisations are risk averse, optimised for stability and longevity. Not short term performance. It's not a sports team.

Your goal is to enable your business to make more money, that requires hiring enough competent people that can do the work that needs to be done, to make that money.

Sometimes that work is really not especially interesting, or challenging. Nobody is going to love it, or be passionate about it, and it really doesn't require a person to be more than average in terms of skill, because it's just not that technically difficult.

And that sometimes is the majority of all salaried work, so statistically speaking, that's probably also you and your company.

Why pretend to be a unicorn and only insist on hiring passionate self motivated people who will be a bad fit anyway, and be bored after two weeks.

The hiring process is not for stroking the egos of middle managers who want to feel special.

> Women rate looks as the 4th most important attribute in dating.

You can't ask women this, see instead who the men are that get the most girls, there's your answer. Actions speak louder than words, and women are infamous for their cognitive dissonance in the field of mating.

> pretty people who are single say the same thing about people with money. People with money say this about younger people. Turns out its never their fault, and its just something unattainble someone else has.

And the young, pretty and rich people don't say anything, because they do in fact get first choice.

> So women are gaining things men don't really care for, while losing the things men do select for. On top, their higher socioeconomic status generally translates into a smaller dating pool, as they select equal or higher socioeconomic men.

Yeah it's as if it's been decided suddenly that men are attracted to highly educated high earning women, which really doesn't work. Men are attracted to the prospect of having children, which means youth and health, and there are very real practical matters that have limits to their flexibility.

It would make sense to just not allow men to swipe first at all, it was an obvious improvement when they only let the women start conversations. I think the issue is it will lower engagement.

Because of the biological asymmetry between the sexes. A man can have thousands of children, and women can only have a small amount. It's what drives natural selection and evolution of the species. Some part of the men are supposed to get rejected.

Dating after the online part also sucks, where you pretend to be so busy that you can only meet once a week and only on weekdays, and you can never answer a message in under 24 hours. Don't really see how two people can start to like each other when it's so standoffish.

Who has every hour of their weekend booked? Who doesn't have two minutes to look at their phone in a whole day? It's such bullshit, this game is so exhausting and just zaps out any positive energy you get during a date.

Yeah it's just the way it is. And relationships, and marriage, is an economic union more than anything else, and the main goal is to gather enough cold hard economic value to provide for children, and each other.

> It's not like people are putting dollar values on their dating prospects, from what I've seen.

People (women) are putting dollar values on their dating prospects, from what I've seen, and I don't blame them, it is important. Sure it's not everything, but love is hardly a mystical force completely detached from economy.

> I do think that the problem with most surveys is that there will certainly be biases in self-reported answers.

Yeah and it's very typical with this question especially. You can't ask a woman what she values in a partner, because she will say whatever makes her look like a good person.

That's why so many girls list intelligence as an important thing in a man, and still the most intelligent guys get the least girls.

You need to look at how women actually choose their partners, not ask them how they would hypothetically choose. Look at the men that always have hot girlfriends and what they have in common, that's how you can make an empirical conclusion.

Yeah it makes perfect sense for a woman to maximise their time and resources to their fertile years, and not shift that over to older age.

Funny also how nobody is looking at the expense gap, if women are making the same money as men, then obviously they should share expenses 50/50 as well. How many couples actually do that?

Women are underrepresented in the top level of society, but always turn a blind eye to the fact that they are underrepresented in the bottom of society as well.

Women should get the same share of rewards as men, but not take any of the risks? How does that make any sense?

If women are taking place in the boardrooms, are they also going to increase their share in prisons? Among homeless? Premature death?

And self actualisation is having children anyway, so women are already at endgame. The reason why men work so hard with careers, is because it enables them to have children and start a family, not because it's just fun to play around with money and power.

> Courage, getting out there, skill, practice, being fun to be around, are skills people value much more than looks.

I don't think this is universally true, I bet it works in a lot of cases, but the opposite is often true as well. Try too hard and you look desperate. And looks will always win past a certain level, if you are johnny depp level attractive, you will always get the girls over some average looking guy who is working his ass off.

I bet the same goes for money as well past a certain level.

> There is no gaggle of desperate women running after a succesful hot man in a suit who keeps denying their advances. This is simply not happening

There are gaggles of desperate women running after celebrities. It is happening.