The Curse of Smart People

apenwarrm:

Anyway, this big company that now employs me is rumoured to hire the smartest people in the world.

Question number one: how true is that?

Answer: I think it’s really true. A suprisingly large fraction of the smartest programmers in the world *do* work here. In very large quantities. In fact, quantities so large that I wouldn’t have thought that so many really smart people existed or could be centralized in one place, but trust me, they do and they can. That’s pretty amazing.

Question number two: but I’m sure they hired some non-smart people too, right?

Answer: surprisingly infrequently. When I went for my job interview there, they set me up for a full day of interviewers (5 sessions plus lunch). I decided that I would ask a few questions of my own in these interviews, and try to guess how good the company is based on how many of the interviewers seemed clueless. My hypothesis was that there are always some bad apples in any medium to large company, so if the success rate was, say, 3 or 4 out of 5 interviewers being non-clueless, that’s pretty good.