Taste Again & Why Great Recruiters Are Often Introverts

In the last post we discussed the role of taste in sourcing and hiring forward deployed engineers. For recruiters to do that, though, they need to understand the company’s taste. Back to that Atluru post: “Taste is subjective at an individual level — everyone has their own personal interpretation of taste — but it is calibrated from within a given culture and community.” Recruiters need to be well-calibrated on the company’s taste (or else we’re looking at a toothpaste/OJ situation, ha! or my husband and shared plates, ha-ha!)

So while recruiting might seem like a nonstop talking job, and we do a fair amount of chatting, if you ask me, the best recruiters are often introverts. Because to get calibrated, we have to really listen. To what’s said and to what’s unsaid, what’s repeated and what’s dismissed. Understanding a startup’s taste isn’t about quick chats or checklists. It takes deep listening. And that deep listening is what helps find candidates who truly fit a company’s unique vibe

Taste and FDEs

I don’t do much blogging but I keep hearing people talk about taste (for instance Ana Atluru, here) and it feels relevant to my favorite role to recruit for, the forward deployed engineer (FDE). FDEs require a blend of skills that don’t fit into a simple checklist. They need to be great coders, work closely with customers, solve complex problems on the spot, and constantly adapt to changing priorities. Because of this broad scope, what often defines success in the role is less about ticking boxes and an almost indescribable sense of judgment, or… taste.

Taste here means knowing when to dive deep into technical details, when to simplify solutions, and how to balance the competing demands of engineering rigor and customer needs. It’s an instinctive judgment about what’s the right call in ambiguous, fast-moving situations.

Atluru says taste is becoming the moat startups build in a world where features and technology are easy to copy. This is especially true for unique, cross-functional roles like FDEs.

For recruiters and hiring managers, the challenge is understanding what taste looks like for your company’s version of the role and then finding candidates who align with it. I can help.

A few thoughts on “Talent”

In Talent, authors Tyler Cowen and Daniel Grossman pull apart how to evaluate, assess, and match potential candidates to the right opportunities. Unlike markets for things like physical goods or equities, the market for human capital is opaque and illiquid. Price discovery occurs during interviews, pitches, offer negotiations, funding rounds. This process works, kind of, but it’s not great. Some people are too good at interviewing/pitching then their real-life working/executing, or vice versa. Some people are overlooked because the talent “spotters” don’t even really know what they’re looking for, they’re just looking for what everyone else seems to be looking for

With Cowen, and economist, and Gross, an entrepreneur/engineer/VC, you can feel their discomfort with the lack of transparency and the unsystematic nature of this “market” and the book is a list of suggestions to help people get better understand both themselves and potential candidates. Chapters with fun suggestions for interview questions help potential talent spotters with ways to "look past the surfaces”, both in candidates and what the talent assessor really needs. A chapter on identifying talented candidates with individuals encourages spotters to “[k]eep an open mind”.

Have only read about 60% so far so maybe our opinion will change, but so far so good!

"Siting bank branches"

Patrick McKenzie summarizes how banks identify and build out branch locations.

  • This is a fun article and good reminder that while digital banking has expanded, physical footprints remain very important to some of banks’ most important customers.

  • Makes a lot of sense that banks want to avoid local zoning meetings - can be an ugly place, especially for anyone trying to build something new

  • And on curb cuts, a minor detail most people don’t think about: “I love the fractal nature of detail here; every detail about the built world was a painstakingly made decision at some point.”

Wikipedia is easier to use than Lexis and Westlaw

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Maynooth University, Ireland came up with a friendly stress test: creating new legal Wikipedia articles to examine how they affect the legal decisions of judges…

It turned out the influx of articles tipped the scales: getting a Wikipedia article increased a case’s citations by more than 20%. The increase was statistically significant and the effect was particularly strong for cases that supported the argument the citing judge was making in their decision (but not the converse). Unsurprisingly, the increase was bigger for citations by lower courts - the High Court - and mostly absent for citations by appellate courts - the Supreme Court and Court of Appeal. The researchers suspect that this is showing that Wikipedia is used more by judges or clerks who have a heavier workload, for whom the convenience of Wikipedia offers a greater attraction.

Full story here. The researchers suggest taking steps to improve the reliability of information posted to wikipedia, which makes sense. How about improving the accessibility of the law as well? LexisNexis and Westlaw are expensive and, even if you have access to it, just not as easy to use as google, wikipedia etc.

Jitters

The following is from a training we did with CJM Search recruiters and was as joint effort between CJM Search and Silicon Sal, friend of the blog. Anything that sounds wrong or bad is Sal’s; smart stuff’s ours.

Another day and another round of layoffs from tech companies. It’s pretty clear that the tech bull run of the last couple years is slowing down. So what’s actually happening? Not really sure! But let’s stick with what we do know, and then maybe we can branch off and speculate from there:

  • Macroeconomic events are driving uncertainty 

    • The war in Ukraine has caused a massive amount of geopolitical risk that previously didn't exist

    • Related to the war in Ukraine, energy costs are rising and supply chains are disrupted, which have driven up cost of doing business across industries

    • COVID is still impacting businesses and workforces, causing labor shortages and other talent disruptions

    • Inflation has been rising rapidly, which also increases the cost of doing business (through higher cost of inputs, labor, etc) - the Fed has also taken unprecedented steps to curb inflation by raising interest rates dramatically in a short period of time

  • Financial markets react negatively to that uncertainty

    • Financial markets hate uncertainty, because it drives difficulty in projecting how a business will perform (and thus its fundamental underlying value)

    • The stock market has suffered because of this uncertainty, with technology stocks being hit particularly hard (e.g., Nasdaq down ~25% YTD)

    • Due to the market uncertainty and stock market drop, the fundraising environment for private companies has slowed considerably

      • The rise in interest rates also means the "cost of capital" has increased; for the past ~10 years, interest rates have been very low making investing in venture capital a much more attractive investment than say investing in bonds, or steadier, low growth equities - this is no longer the case in today's market

      • Why is that? High interest rates mean that a dollar today is worth a lot more than a dollar 5 years from now. Let’s do that math, just for fun. Where interest rates are 10%, the value of a dollar in five years is $1*(1.10^5) = $1.61. Where interest rates are 1%, the value of a dollar in 5 years is $1*(1.01^5) = $1.05. In a low interest rate world, a tech company's future profits are worth today almost what they will actually be in the future.

  • What does this mean for the companies that we work with?

    • Over the past ~10 years (in the frothy, low interest rate times mentioned before), tech companies were evaluated (both in public and private markets) primarily on top-line revenue growth and their ability to gain market share 

    • With the recent market shifts, companies are now being evaluated more heavily on their ability to drive profits and free cash flow in their bottom line (and not just singularly growth)

    • Because of this, companies likely will shift their hiring strategies towards roles that will drive profitable growth

  • How long do we think this period will last?

    • No one knows, but it is unlikely to end quickly - most companies are developing plans to "weather the storm" of the next couple years, but the environment could shift again rapidly

Anja Shortland on EconTalk on why it's really hard to sell stolen art

Shortland explains how a private database of stolen art, the Art Loss Register, has made the notoriously opaque art market a little less so.

Really enjoyable episode, featuring a James Bond-type character, freeports, “anonymous Russian institutions”, an allegedly authentic Turner, and because it’s an EconTalk episode, a reference to Adam Smith.

NYT on Resumes

Part advice, part history. Here’s a bit:

The internet says Leonardo da Vinci wrote the first résumé in the late 15th century. He pitched his weaponry chops — not his artistic services — to Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan. It seems right that Leonardo would have “Invented résumé” on his résumé, but wrong that he met the future patron of “The Last Supper” by applying for the job of entry-level war maker. A Renaissance man and a career changer.

The only person who went to Stanford GSB to be a poet?

Really enjoyed Dana Gioia on Econtalk. Is poetry back? We had Amanda Gorman at the inauguration. Was Vince Lombardi’s thing at the super bowl kind of poetic? Maybe?

Did some googling after listening to this episode and came across this fun story about Wallace Stevens, poet/insurance executive:

At another party in Key West, in 1936, a swaggering Stevens loudly impugned the manhood of Ernest Hemingway. When Hemingway showed up, Stevens took a swing at him, and Hemingway knocked him down. Stevens got up and landed a solid punch to Hemingway’s jaw, which broke his hand in two places. Hemingway then battered him, but later cheerfully accepted his meek apology. They agreed to a cover story: Stevens had been injured falling down stairs.

Happy (belated) Birthday, J.R.R Tolkien!

He would have been 129 yesterday, January 3, 2021. As we shake off the holiday cobwebs and prepare for a challenging next few months, here’s Tolkien on hobbits:

Nonetheless, ease and peace had left this people still curiously tough. They were, if it came to it, difficult to daunt or to kill; and they were, perhaps, so unwearyingly fond of good things not least because they could, when put to it, do without them, and could survive rough handling by grief, foe, or weather in a way that astonished those who did not know them well and looked no further than their bellies and their well-fed faces.

And happy new year, everybody!

Byrne Hobart on Metis in Big Tech

“An ML-driven approach is only possible at large scale, and scale is only possible through legibility. But it’s the fate of all these legibility-imposers to move past legibility. They impose order on the world, and then they automate the order-imposing process, the order-imposer-refining process, and so on, until the end result is determined by a metis available to nobody.” Essay is here.

Exploiting a remote team's capabilities

We built Checkout to maximize conversion by intelligently prioritizing which payment methods are presented to the customer depending on where they’re located. Whether in Mexico or Malaysia, a company’s checkout experience should feel local and include the payment methods customers are most likely to prefer. One way to more naturally build in local considerations into global products is if they’re built by remote, distributed teams. One member of the Checkout team launched a local push payment method from Singapore and another shipped address collection from Maryland. Given the nature of Checkout, we hypothesize that the more distributed the team becomes, the closer we get to the needs and mindsets of more users.

This is from “Stripe’s remote engineering hub, one year in”. Stripe’s engineering team is now 22% permanently remote.

"Does a USB drive get heavier as you store more files on it?"

“When you save data, a binary zero is set by charging the float gate of the transistor, and a binary one is set by removing the charge. To charge it, we add electrons, and the mass of each electron is 0.00000000000000000000000000091 grams. This means that an empty USB drive (which mostly holds zeros) weighs more than a full USB drive (which has ones and zeros). Add data, reduce the weight. However, you would need to weigh more USB drives than exist on the planet together at once before the difference in weight became easily measurable.” From Science Focus, via Marginal Revolution. Emphasis added.

Hope all of our many many readers are staying healthy!