Lone Gunman

You could hire through open source like GitHub (“we hire ‘The Girl or Guy Who Wrote X,’ where X is an awe­some project we all use or admire”) or use a check-list to recog­nise com­pe­tency (pas­sion, self-teaching, a love of learn­ing, intel­li­gence, hid­den expe­ri­ence and knowl­edge of a vari­ety of tech­nolo­gies) and no doubt find some fine programmers.

You could also take a sim­i­lar approach to hir­ing mar­keters, writ­ers, design­ers and those in many other indus­tries, too. While this may guar­an­tee com­pe­tence, it does not guar­an­tee suc­cess (busi­ness and/or interpersonal).

Com­bine the above with the approach Steve Jobs takes to inter­view­ing (via Ben Cas­nocha) and you may be on to some­thing (empha­sis mine):

When I hire some­body really senior, com­pe­tence is the ante. They have to be really smart. But the real issue for me is, Are they going to fall in love with Apple? Because if they fall in love with Apple, every­thing else will take care of itself. They’ll want to do what’s best for Apple, not what’s best for them, what’s best for Steve, or any­body else. […]

How do I feel about this per­son? What are they like when they’re chal­lenged? Why are they here? I ask every­body that: ‘Why are you here?’ The answers them­selves are not what you’re look­ing for. It’s the meta-data.

Take heed of how Aaron Swartz hires pro­gram­mers using three ques­tions (via kot­tke) and you’re likely to end up with the best can­di­date. Those three questions:

• Can they get stuff done?
• Are they smart?
• Can you work with them?

And to answer those questions:

• To find out if they can get stuff done, I just ask what they’ve done. If some­one can actu­ally get stuff done they should have done so by now.
• To find out whether someone’s smart, I just have a casual con­ver­sa­tion with them. […] Under no cir­cum­stances do I ask them any stan­dard “inter­view questions”.
  • First, do they know stuff? Ask them what they’ve been think­ing about and probe them about it. Do they seem to under­stand it in detail? Can they explain it clearly? […] Do they know stuff about the sub­ject that you don’t?
  • Sec­ond, are they curi­ous? Do they rec­i­p­ro­cate by ask­ing ques­tions about you? Are they gen­uinely inter­ested or just being polite? Do they ask follow-up ques­tions about what you’re say­ing? Do their ques­tions make you think?
  • Third, do they learn? At some point in the con­ver­sa­tion, you’ll prob­a­bly be explain­ing some­thing to them. Do they actu­ally under­stand it or do they just nod and smile?
• I fig­ure out whether I can work with some­one just by hang­ing out with them for a bit. […] The point is just to see whether they get on your nerves.

The endow­ment effect, sex in adver­tis­ing and pric­ing anchors: all bits of ‘shop­ping psy­chol­ogy’ we’ve heard before.

Ryan Sager looks at these shop­ping per­sua­sion tech­niques we should be aware of, adding a few small pieces of infor­ma­tion that may be novel:

• Endow­ment effect: We place a higher value on items we own, and just by sim­ply tri­alling goods (try­ing on clothes, test­ing soft­ware, cars, etc.) we start to feel ownership.
• Own­er­ship imagery: Feel­ings of own­er­ship (see above) can be induced by thought alone.
• Roman­tic prim­ing: We (men, not women) increase spend­ing on items of con­spic­u­ous con­sump­tion when roman­ti­cally primed (i.e. induced to think about sex, men pur­chase items as a sig­nalling behaviour).
• The ninety-nine pence/cent effect (psy­cho­log­i­cal pric­ing):

A recent study in the Jour­nal of Con­sumer Research found that when pens were priced at $1.99 and $4.00, only 18% of the par­tic­i­pants chose the higher-priced pen; but when the pens were priced at $2.00 and $3.99, 44% of the par­tic­i­pants selected the higher-priced pen.

A Work­ing Library’s Ways of Read­ing could be called the nine rules of read­ing, writ­ing, and learn­ing.

My favourite three:

Always read with a pen in hand. The pen should be used both to mark the text you want to remem­ber and to write from where the text leaves you. Think of the text as the start­ing point for your own words.

Read­ing and writ­ing are not dis­crete activ­i­ties; they occur on a con­tin­uum, with read­ing at one end, writ­ing at the other. The best read­ers spend their time some­where in between.

A good reader reads atten­tively, not only lis­ten­ing to what the writer says, but also to how she says it. This is how a reader learns to write.

via rober­togreco

Whether or not you believe this to be (as Joel Spol­sky does) the “best post […] about A/B test­ing, ever”, it def­i­nitely is one of the eas­i­est to under­stand and one of the few posts on split test­ing that is sta­tis­ti­cally sound (i.e. useful).

Is [a given A/B test] con­clu­sive? Has [vari­ant] A won? Or should you let the test run longer? Or should you try com­pletely dif­fer­ent text?

The answer mat­ters. If you wait too long between tests, you’re wast­ing time. If you don’t wait long enough for sta­tis­ti­cally con­clu­sive results, you might think a vari­ant is bet­ter and use that false assump­tion to cre­ate a new vari­ant, and so forth, all on a wild goose chase! That’s not just a waste of time, it also pre­vents you from doing the cor­rect thing, which is to come up with com­pletely new text to test against.

Nor­mally a for­mal sta­tis­ti­cal treat­ment would be too dif­fi­cult, but I’m here to res­cue you with a sta­tis­ti­cally sound yet incred­i­bly sim­ple for­mula that will tell you whether or not your A/B test results really are indi­cat­ing a difference:

1. Define N as “the num­ber of trials.”
2. Define D as “half the dif­fer­ence between the ‘win­ner’ and the ‘loser’.”
3. The test result is sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant if D² is big­ger than N.

Update: Now even eas­ier, thanks to the online split test cal­cu­la­tor.

Writ­ten in early 2006 shortly after Disney’s acqui­si­tion of Pixar in a $7.4 bil­lion all-stock deal, Busi­ness­Week looks at the rela­tion­ship between the Dis­ney and Apple CEOs and where their rela­tion­ship may lead.

Pre­scient in that it accu­rately pre­dicted the Apple TV and the iPhone, the arti­cle also briefly looks at Jobs and his product-first mindset:

“The great thing about Steve is that he knows that great busi­ness comes from great prod­uct,” says Peter Schnei­der, the for­mer chair­man of Disney’s stu­dio. “First you have to get the prod­uct right, whether it’s the iPod or an ani­mated movie.” […]

Time and again since, Apple has eschewed calls to boost mar­ket share by mak­ing lower-end prod­ucts or expand­ing into adja­cent mar­kets where the com­pany wouldn’t be the leader. “I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do,” Jobs often says. […] “Qual­ity is more impor­tant than quan­tity, and in the end, it’s a bet­ter finan­cial deci­sion anyway.”

via @venturehacks