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Favoring specialization over intelligence is exactly wrong, especially in high tech.
“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”98 That’s what Albert Einstein claimed,
Once you hire those learning animals, keep learning them!
Your objective is to find the limits of his capabilities, not have a polite conversation, but the interview shouldn’t be an overly stressful experience. The best interviews feel like intellectual discussions between friends (“What books are you reading right now?”). Questions should be large and complex, with a range of answers (to draw out the person’s thought process) that the interviewer can push back on (to see how the candidate stakes out and defends a position). It’s a good idea to reuse questions across candidates, so you can calibrate responses.
“How did you pay for college?” is another good one, as is “If I were to look at the web history section of your browser, what would I learn about you that isn’t on your résumé?”
When Eric became CEO of Novell in 1997, he got some great advice from Bill Gates: Spend 80 percent of your time on 80 percent of your revenue. But this rule can be deceptively hard to actually follow.
Innovation—Create the Primordial Ooze
70/20/10 became our rule for resource allocation: 70 percent of resources dedicated to the core business, 20 percent on emerging, and 10 percent on new.
Computers push humans to get even better, and humans then program even smarter computers. This is clearly happening in chess; why not in other pursuits?
