I couldn't find the text of this joke, attributed to Dirac. I'll paraphrase.
A man walks into a pet store. There's a parrot for $100, it says this parrot speaks perfect English . The one next to it is $1,000, and says, This parrot speaks 12 languages fluently.
Then there's a bedraggled looking, droopy, parrot, and its label simply says One Million Dollars.
Does it sing opera and has successfully run for President? the man asks with a sneer.
This parrot, says the store owner, _thinks_.
That's what this entire post is about - how to evaluate people with a series of attributes, score, correlate, blah blah blah.
Hire them, see if they think. If they don't, fire them. It's cheaper than this credential/signal rigmarole, most of which is about CYA legal b+llsh1t. Yes, it's a simplistic strategy and it doesn't work for Shoogle, Banthropic, Goober, whatever. You know what, boo f*cking hoo. You're a trillion dollar company, suck it up. You have a zombie horde at your doors and you're just upset the "true gems" are hard for you to spot amongst the slavering masses. You're going to heartlessly lay them off anyway in a few years. You SHOULD feel this pain and anguish of having to sort through them, constantly regretting all your choices. That's the only way to have balance in the Universe.
There’s an old Malcom Gladwell podcast episode, I think the show was Revisionist History, where he says he’s an interview nihilist. As long as the person seems reasonably capable, and can probably do a bit of what you need, hire them. Interviews are so hard to get right that what you’re saying ends up being most effective.
Edit: Didn’t link it initially because I thought it would be hard to find. Turns out it’s not. https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/hamlet-w...
That sounds like a corollary of the Diamond Paradox. If there's any cost at all to price-shopping, then once you're at one store that sells the thing you want, it's usually not worth continuing to shop around.
Tangent: people do a lot of stressing out lately about which LLM they should be using for a certain task. I bet this advice applies there, too.
Unfortunately from an organizational perspective, a bad hire could cause so much damage through incompetence let alone malice, that making no hire the default unless they're a perfect cinnamon roll of a fit, is actually a good strategy.
> a bad hire could cause so much damage through incompetence let alone malice
The fact that an organization cannot deal with such a case is a bigger problem in the first place. Eliminating incompetence and malice is among the basic skills of an organization.
Our hiring dis-function is because there a lot of people that dislike conflict and firing someone.
ie - people that are incompetent at their role of people managers.
Why is incompetence so discussed for ICs but rarely for management?
Maybe if more managers were competent and less conflict-averse they would do their jobs better and cycle out incompetence and bad intentions faster.
Ah wait, but middle managers specifically choose conflict-averse, easy to control, domesticated people. That's why you find this particular type of personality in management so often.
So the issue is incentives as well and bigger than initially thought.
[dead]