I got married recently. I’ve also had the fortune of working with many smart, capable people (mostly engineers and designers) over the last few years, so I have a few thoughts on people selection.
The thing that tripped me up for a very long time is what quality to look for in people.
Select for high agency. You will thank me later.
Elad Gil has a great post about hiring people, and that applies to people in all walks of life (relationships, career, friends etc).
He shows a 2x2 matrix (from Jack Welch) with the x axis being productivity, and y being culture fit, divided into 4 quadrants. The most dangerous quadrant is the person who is productive, but is not a culture fit.
In any good culture, the #1 attribute is agency. High agency is downstream of a good culture, because it means 3 things about the person:
- Will have the right attitude (high agency = I blame myself and no one else),
- Work to get things done fast,
- Do things they’re not asked to move the project forward.
Here are some tests (or examples) of high agency:
- How quickly are they offer to accept an offer letter, and fly down to start working?
- Are they willing to hop on discord and find answers from industry experts to ensure the rest of the team isn’t blocked?
- Are they willing to call the vendor (service provider, accountant, lawyer etc) or request permission 20 times to get the thing done before actually giving up or deferring the task?
These are unusual outside of brute force skill application, but far more important.
If AI is going to commoditize skills, then it’s best to prepare to do out-of-distribution things to get out-of-distribution results.