On ludicrous questions

Riddle me this: "Are women who do a pregnancy test more likely to be wishing for a positive or a negative result?" This is the sort of interview questions that we should be asking startup job candidates.

When Google was still a startup, they used to have this practice until it got hammered out of them by pseudo-scientists and HR managers who have never created a thing in their lives.

There's a body of seemingly compelling evidence that supports moving past this sort of interviewing. It suggests these questions are not better at predicting employee success and that, surprisingly, standard HR questions do a much better job.

But these studies measure success based on employee retention, tenure, and periodic evaluations. Here are some limitations to that:

1- The length of an employee's tenure, their promotions, and their evaluation results have little to do with their value. Those are mostly compliance-based and don't necessarily (or likely) map down to team value.

2- Most value gets driven by very few people in a team (Google Price's law). Standard HR processes are stacked against the people who are likely to be the overperformers. So standardization creates a workforce that's equally underperforming as opposed to a heterogenous team where some outliers compensate for the rest, as they should.

The products that your and I tend to build require a different breed of people. Compliant, well-behaved folk who have sensible profiles never come up with anything. They're too busy figuring out the rules so that they can comply with them even better. They are admittedly necessary (but very 4uckin dull tbh... )

Meanwhile, you and I and the rest of the creatives are perpetually curious and genuinely interested in solving problems regardless of the rules. That's why we often come up with malarkey and wreak the occasional havoc. On the flip side, sometimes we stumble on things that pay for our mistakes many times over. A good leader has patience with creatives.

If you hire compliant people you get compliant products that can't compete with the bigger products on compliance. The alternative is to hire irregular people who can compete on irregular paths that the big machines can't process.

Intelligence, curiosity, and drive increase both our risk and upside because they come with a measure of irregularity. For those who can handle it, these traits are easy to smoke out in an interview.

I think we should bring back these silly questions and not let these corporate HR practices seep into our world. It's absurd for a startup to run candidates through standardized HR processes. Instead, they should ask candidates:

"Who's the leader of a group of morons? Is it the dumbest or the least dumb?"

The answer to this ludicrous question can teach us if someone can help us take down a giant because the questions that we have to answer along the way are no less ludicrous and require no less wit and humor.