I think you make interesting points, but I respectfully disagree with your conclusions.
You wouldn't recognize a Dennis-Ritchie- or Claude-Shannon-to-be if they would spit you in the face
Nine out of ten times, sure, nobody would recognize Dennis Ritchie in the rough. But if you're hiring the first five employees, you don't care about nine out of ten - you care about that one time you do recognize a promising candidate. Every selective process has a false negative rate, there is no way around that. Amazing people get turned away by all kinds of smart people in all kinds of places all the time. If you have ideas on how to lower the false negative rate without increasing the false positive rate, I'd love to hear how you'd do it.
What gives you the idea that people with such potential would apply at RethinkDB?
Because they already have. Smart and driven people apply for the same reasons smart and driven people do anything - they're interested in the problem, and have an innate desire to solve it. In any case, if you sit around and wait for great people to apply, the sourcing part of your recruiting process isn't done right. If you want great people, you have to go out, find them, contact them directly, and then do everything in your power to close them.
People that botch their interview because they are nervous can't be better than you?
Of course they can, but again, it's about increasing the false negative rate to lower the rate of false positives. I can afford to turn some great people away, but I can't afford to hire someone who isn't great. Any software startup that works on hard technology has the same constraints - if you hire people that are anything less than stellar, you significantly lower your chance of success. In a startup you (mostly) don't have geographical limits for your customers, but the corollary is that you also don't have geographical limits for your competition. When you're targeting every customer in the world, you're also competing with every company in the world. Going into that with anything but the top-notch team is suicide.
What gives you the idea that people with such potential would apply at RethinkDB?
Because they already have. Smart and driven people apply for the same reasons smart and driven people do anything - they're interested in the problem, and have an innate desire to solve it. In any case, if you sit around and wait for great people to apply, the sourcing part of your recruiting process isn't done right. If you want great people, you have to go out, find them, contact them directly, and then do everything in your power to close them.
I'm going to hazard a pretty safe guess that one of the reasons you can blithely assert this is that you've never actually personally known someone with the abilities of a Dennis Ritchie or Claude Shannon. It is easy to overestimate the abilities of the best you've known if you've never known the truly best.
This is not a slight on the abilities of some of the developers you are lucky to have. It is a well deserved compliment to some of the giants of computing.
>> What gives you the idea that people with such potential would apply at RethinkDB?
> Because they already have.
So how much of the company do they own? I ask because I have noticed that people with the combination of talent, experience and work ethic you are looking for are rarely content to be just someone else's employee. They'll either be founders of their own company, or hold a low-employee-number position in someone else's business with plenty of stock options, or work as independent consultants, or otherwise do something where what's in it for them is on a par with what they bring to the table.
The only guys I know like this are holed up in some pure research job at universities, working on problems that interest them so much they barely leave their offices to shower. I'm talking top 50 living programmer material though.
Comments
I think you make interesting points, but I respectfully disagree with your conclusions.
You wouldn't recognize a Dennis-Ritchie- or Claude-Shannon-to-be if they would spit you in the face
Nine out of ten times, sure, nobody would recognize Dennis Ritchie in the rough. But if you're hiring the first five employees, you don't care about nine out of ten - you care about that one time you do recognize a promising candidate. Every selective process has a false negative rate, there is no way around that. Amazing people get turned away by all kinds of smart people in all kinds of places all the time. If you have ideas on how to lower the false negative rate without increasing the false positive rate, I'd love to hear how you'd do it.
What gives you the idea that people with such potential would apply at RethinkDB?
Because they already have. Smart and driven people apply for the same reasons smart and driven people do anything - they're interested in the problem, and have an innate desire to solve it. In any case, if you sit around and wait for great people to apply, the sourcing part of your recruiting process isn't done right. If you want great people, you have to go out, find them, contact them directly, and then do everything in your power to close them.
People that botch their interview because they are nervous can't be better than you?
Of course they can, but again, it's about increasing the false negative rate to lower the rate of false positives. I can afford to turn some great people away, but I can't afford to hire someone who isn't great. Any software startup that works on hard technology has the same constraints - if you hire people that are anything less than stellar, you significantly lower your chance of success. In a startup you (mostly) don't have geographical limits for your customers, but the corollary is that you also don't have geographical limits for your competition. When you're targeting every customer in the world, you're also competing with every company in the world. Going into that with anything but the top-notch team is suicide.
What gives you the idea that people with such potential would apply at RethinkDB?
Because they already have. Smart and driven people apply for the same reasons smart and driven people do anything - they're interested in the problem, and have an innate desire to solve it. In any case, if you sit around and wait for great people to apply, the sourcing part of your recruiting process isn't done right. If you want great people, you have to go out, find them, contact them directly, and then do everything in your power to close them.
I'm going to hazard a pretty safe guess that one of the reasons you can blithely assert this is that you've never actually personally known someone with the abilities of a Dennis Ritchie or Claude Shannon. It is easy to overestimate the abilities of the best you've known if you've never known the truly best.
This is not a slight on the abilities of some of the developers you are lucky to have. It is a well deserved compliment to some of the giants of computing.
>> What gives you the idea that people with such potential would apply at RethinkDB?
> Because they already have.
So how much of the company do they own? I ask because I have noticed that people with the combination of talent, experience and work ethic you are looking for are rarely content to be just someone else's employee. They'll either be founders of their own company, or hold a low-employee-number position in someone else's business with plenty of stock options, or work as independent consultants, or otherwise do something where what's in it for them is on a par with what they bring to the table.
The only guys I know like this are holed up in some pure research job at universities, working on problems that interest them so much they barely leave their offices to shower. I'm talking top 50 living programmer material though.
Nobody should genuinely expect a "Dennis-Ritchie- or Claude-Shannon-to-be". That's just hyperbolic way of saying "good employee".