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Why Hiring the 'Best' People Produces the Least Creative Results (qz.com)
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report written by Scott E. Page, who explains why hiring the "best" people produces the least creative results: The burgeoning of teams -- most academic research is now done in teams, as is most investing and even most songwriting (at least for the good songs) -- tracks the growing complexity of our world. We used to build roads from A to B. Now we construct transportation infrastructure with environmental, social, economic, and political impacts. The complexity of modern problems often precludes any one person from fully understanding them. The multidimensional or layered character of complex problems also undermines the principle of meritocracy: The idea that the "best person" should be hired. There is no best person. When putting together an oncological research team, a biotech company such as Gilead or Genentech would not construct a multiple-choice test and hire the top scorers, or hire people whose resumes score highest according to some performance criteria. Instead, they would seek diversity. They would build a team of people who bring diverse knowledge bases, tools and analytic skills. That team would more likely than not include mathematicians (though not logicians such as Griffeath). And the mathematicians would likely study dynamical systems and differential equations.
Believers in a meritocracy might grant that teams ought to be diverse but then argue that meritocratic principles should apply within each category. Thus the team should consist of the "best" mathematicians, the "best" oncologists, and the "best" biostatisticians from within the pool. That position suffers from a similar flaw. Even with a knowledge domain, no test or criteria applied to individuals will produce the best team. Each of these domains possesses such depth and breadth, that no test can exist. When building a forest, you do not select the best trees as they tend to make similar classifications. You want diversity. Programmers achieve that diversity by training each tree on different data, a technique known as bagging. They also boost the forest 'cognitively' by training trees on the hardest cases -- those that the current forest gets wrong. This ensures even more diversity and accurate forests.
Believers in a meritocracy might grant that teams ought to be diverse but then argue that meritocratic principles should apply within each category. Thus the team should consist of the "best" mathematicians, the "best" oncologists, and the "best" biostatisticians from within the pool. That position suffers from a similar flaw. Even with a knowledge domain, no test or criteria applied to individuals will produce the best team. Each of these domains possesses such depth and breadth, that no test can exist. When building a forest, you do not select the best trees as they tend to make similar classifications. You want diversity. Programmers achieve that diversity by training each tree on different data, a technique known as bagging. They also boost the forest 'cognitively' by training trees on the hardest cases -- those that the current forest gets wrong. This ensures even more diversity and accurate forests.
The headline is garbage, but there is some truth in the waterfall of words in that summary: we have become a nation of specialists. Not only are we specialists, but the amount to which we've specialized is actually quite stunning.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Well, we all want diversity, don't we?
But it seems evidence in favor is lacking.
Shouldn't there be numerous success stories, even anecdotal, if it's really all that favorable?
While Microsoft Research, which consciously tried to emulate PARC, failed when they hired away scores of top academics and industry researchers in the 1990s?
That would be an interesting comparison for an article.
The entire article is presented without evidence. It's an ideology being pushed and not scientific. I suspect an agenda here especially with the word diversity being thrown around, and a quote from someone at Google (who are experts at not hiring the best and getting mediocre results)
None of us are as dumb as all of us.
Ask instead: what have you contributed to human knowing?
You may phrase that "what have you invented"? (mind, this is independent of patent applications, which often show other and non desirable traits.)
This is a tough question, and is a bit hard on the young, but even the young may have reinvented things. I could have cited several decent responses at age 12, and others might also.
Seeking diversity is a red herring. Seek creativity.
You find the creative by looking for those who create, whatever the externals they face. That is however what you should look for. If they all turn out to be one sex, one race, one nationality, one religion...it does not matter. If they all create, they will continue to do so. If you want to insist on having multicolored drones around to stimulate them, you may, but I will predict this will have little benefit.
The initial article sounds like it comes from a not very creative person bent on attacking the idea of searching for merit, and giving a strawman argument based on wanting A, testing for B where the overlap is low between A and B. Political correctness gone mad.
There are one or two quotes to be found in "Screwtape proposes a toast" (cs lewis) around "parity of esteem" that predict what happens to politically correct nations. Well worth a look, if the original poster is at all able to understand.
Me doing all the work, and a bunch of other people sitting on their asses.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I don't know who the author was. I am assuming that the author's mother tongue is the Queen's language
The 'waterfall of words', however, confirm my suspicion that the author is no way near the 'best' category
hiring bottom-of-the-barrel folks would be much better at "creative" results, if you define creative to mean wrong.
any smart ass can say 1+1=2, but it takes a truly creative person to say 1+1=3
Or so we have been told.
Y'know, I mock the Randians as much as the next free-thinker, but dammit if some of her screeds aren't proving a bit prescient.
The problem is in what constitutes "the best". I think people often gauge that against what they, themselves, know and/or are good/bad at or against some "standard" even though those may not be good criteria for the actual task or problem at hand. It may explain the perceived value of people who "think outside the box", which are often just instances of non-linear (or right-brain) thinking. Everyone is at a different place on the learning curve. Many people fail to realize that there are many curves and they can intersect and/or overlap in unexpected ways.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
A) doesn't this just change the definition of "best"? If the most effective person is the one with the most diverse way of thinking - that's still "best", it is just a different kind of "best". Are we really saying we're incapable of measuring that?
B) multiple choice test that screen OUT the idiots that don't know their posterior from a hole in the ground would still be effective. Maybe you don't necessarily hire only from the top 5% of scorers, but I'm pretty sure you can still tell the bottom 5% (or 10%, or probably 50%) to take a hike.
This topic is something that I also think about. There's something else besides intelligence and I can't seem to put my finger on it or even what it really is.
Originally I was thinking it was creativity, but even that doesn't match my observations. There's some trait that people have which simply makes them produce wildly interesting things.
These people are considered extremely intelligent once the things they produce are observed. But a key Point here is that these were not considered type A or intelligent people *before* producing there inventions.
In fact what I also find is that these people are willing to try things that intelligent people immediately write off with a short quip.
It's as if intelligence has absolutely nothing to do with it. There's a certain perseverance along with strong willpower and vision that simply can't be quantified.
The most intelligent people I find are the least interested in trying these extremely groundbreaking efforts. They seem paralyzed because they "know" what I am trying is stupid or unsolvable or whatever.
After fudging along without their help eventually something amazing is produced. Suddenly the building blocks I put together are now considered trivial and obvious. These smart paralyzed types are completely blind to the fact that they would never have put together the thing I've created because they were "oh so smart" at the beginning. This has happened enough times in front of my eyes that I wish there was a proper name for it.
I'm dumber than you, not as fast as you, and not as well supported or funded as you. But when I put my hands on the same things your hands are able to be put on, I produce amazing things that Society recognizes while simultaneously telling me I was wrong the entire time I was building it.
It's not just creativity. It's not wisdom. It's not stubbornness. It's not even intelligence. Similar to art, but in the Physical Realm, I just make better moves than you. What the hell is that called?
Real innovation involves changing paradigms, and every definition of "best people" is based on the mastery of those people based on existing paradigms. There is only a partial exemption for people who become famous for creating new paradigms to solve important problems, but they were NOT recognized as "best" until AFTERWARDS. More often, they spend most of their lives fighting against the old paradigms. (Any better sources than The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Kuhn? It's a classic, but old.)
Anecdotal evidence, but I spent many years supporting a highly prestigious research lab, and I didn't see much that I would regard as real innovation. Mostly a stream of minor refinements hammered into patents with the support of skilled lawyers and even though most of them should have failed on the obviousness test. I do NOT think it was a cultural thing, though I should acknowledge (and disclaim?) that the lab I supported was located in a country with a reputation for copying and improving rather than innovating...
Trivial example of a useful innovation that no one has apparently thought of yet: Why isn't there any Android app to turn off the sound for a period of time or on a regular schedule? At least I haven't been able to find one. I already know the answer as regards that research lab: Not likely to generate a patent.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I heard almost the same drivel in a separate news story not two days ago. Coincidence? Where I work, the very best software engineers make contributions worth tens of millions, consistently, whether as part of a team or not. The absolute worst ones make contributions of a similar magnitude, only that they are negative.
performance reviews, and promotion, is guaranteed to produce a whole bunch of the following:
Companies need to recognize the special things I bring to the table. Istead of all the useless criteria, favoritism and social justice, old wives tales and power trips they're focusing on now.
Keep that in mind when you read these posts.
https://play.google.com/store/...
You are welcome
Are best filled with generalists. I work on full product teams, not just software anymore. I want maybe a specialist in PCB layouts and maybe bring in a consultant developer for anything new to the team that is a critical component. Everyone else should have a good attitude, opinionated, learn on their own, and have 1 or 2 areas of specialty and be knowledgeable and open in others.
Software teams are usually full of code monkeys, program or product managers that are best used as team secretaries, and people with lead and architect titles that can't program and probably never could.
It sounds like the summary is trying to make a philosophical argument that diversity directly leads to creativity. Any individual, even 'the best', might have tunnel-vision on their purported 'best solution', whereas another person playing devil's advocate may point out other possibilities. A group of people can do a brainstorming session. However, it'd be unfair to harp on tunnel-vision of an individual without also mentioning the potential problem of groupthink, which I'd imagine would be actually more likely if one member of a group is particularly more respected/powerful than the other members. However, even if every member is 'the best' in their field, one narcissistic individual can overpower other members equally as qualified, due to impostor syndrome, leading to the same result.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Now we produce least offensive politically correct ethnically sensitive and biologicall empathetic protocols. And we apply these to every sub category. That produces research that has titles like, " why hiring the "best" people produces the least creative results"
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This article doesn't make any sense.
How about this advice.
Hire the best people. Have them drop their egos at the door. Put them in a room to solve a problem and you will get an optimal, well though out, creative solution.
"The Smartest Person in the Room, Is the Room."
Hire a diverse, mediocre team. Put them in a room and have them drop their egos at the door. You will get a sub-optimal solution because they struggle.
Top Performers attract Top Performers. Low Performers attract Low Performers.
If I need a surgical team, I want the best.
If I need a life saving ER team, I want the best.
If I need a legal defense team, I want the best.
If I need an oncologist team, I want the best.
If I need someone to do work on my car, I want the best team.
If I need someone to manage my finances, I want the best team.
If I need to build a BFR (Falcon Heavy) and launch aTesla roadster into space, I need the best team to figure it out.
If I need to write mission critical code, I want the best team.
"The Best" can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people and be ranked in a variety of ways. To me the best is people who are really good at what they do, can work with other really good people to craft amazing solutions, and care more about good products and outcomes than their own ego.
"The Smartest Person in the Room, Is the Room."
Look for the person who could study. Who had the ability to learn how to study.
Who can be given something new and learn that new method to a good standard.
Thats a skill that takes years of quality education.
Why risk a company, a brand with people who will need "support" due to complex past "issues".
Skilled staff within a company, brand will then have to take time away from their productive, profitable projects to offer support and guidance to below average workers.
A should seek out the best educated workers who can work hard on project that move the brand forward. Not looking after below average workers all day, everyday.
A brand and company is not some place of further education for well below average workers who have no skills.
Look into the past of all people seeking work. Did they study hard, past their exams, tests, show up to their lab work, have a good attitude to study?
Did they spend a lot of time becoming politically active on campus rather than working hard on the course work?
Be aware of educational systems that social advance graduates for political reasons and for virtue signalling to other academics.
Find the people who passed on merit and who have usable skills.
Is their past work littered with poor work quality and complex legal problems?
Why should their issues become a reputation problem for a later brand?
Avoid below average workers, their many problems, their lack of ability to study, their lack of ability to learn.
The reason why a top brand wants the best is every aspect of their tech changes every few years. Staff who cant keep up due to not been able to learn new skills not going to be able to be productive.
A skill for music, art, sport, spoken languages is great for related employment in arts, music, sport.
Been able to keep up with all changes in tech and study new tech skills is a skill worth looking for in staff.
Support a charity for people who need support, don't have the brand become a charity with the best staff having to support new full time workers who cannot be productive.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
First, the goal of the hiring process needs to be decided. What qualities will be best for solving the problem? This could be chosen incorrectly.
Second, the hiring process that best selects for the qualities chosen in part 1 must be decided. This could also be chosen incorrectly.
This process requires superstitious belief on two levels. You need to assume what qualities will be best as well as how to best select for those qualities.
In practice, both could be combined into just one step - deciding what hiring policy is best for yielding a solution - without understanding the qualities required. There could be an entire field of study devoted to finding which hiring policies are best for solving which kind of problems. Assuming this research is done, the hiring process will become a meritocracy once again.
Use what works until it doesn't then find what works. Repeat.
This problem also arises in choosing political candidates. You must believe that the goal they are trying to achieve is the best goal to be pursued. You must also believe that their proposed plan of action, if it is even stated, will be the best plan to achieve the goal.
Just look at evolution. Everyone knows the healthiest animals that succeed the most are the ones that have the least genetic variation across populations.
Yep. I have Tasker set up to automatically mute my phone when I have a meeting on my google calendar.
The architecture profession has never emphasized grades, realizing that creative design is hardly measurable. There are a lot of successful practitioners with hardly notable academic backgrounds. Who cares if they got good grades if they can produce a great building? It is a stark contrast to the helicopter parent types that force their kids through heavy science and math curriculum, while totally omitting relaxed, creative, and intuition growing explorations that aren't as easily measured.
I'm glad to hear Amazon eschews MBA types, but I'd like to hear of other business grasping the value of a design approach. We've mistakenly use the word "success" for business that make a lot of money, but I see it defined by the usefulness of solutions, individual growth of their employees, long term (>25 years) contributions to their communities, strong consumer reputation, safety and durability of their products, and a noble reputation across several continents. It's a scam that a phone becomes unusable after three years. Is that how we define a successful company?!
Fortunately, the US is still hanging on to a culture that encourages scrappy, non-linear entrepreneurship. I'm frustrated by universities that value grades above creativity, and the current trend where our youth have to compete on such shallow metrics. (Against youth raised by helicopter parents from other cultures with no other purpose than to have the highest GPA.) Fortunately, these are short term problems and creativity triumphs in the long view. It always will. And that's the original American way. But I wonder why so many businesses grow out of this skill to their ultimate decline?
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
... is not the same as wild honey.
This piece is a whole lotta words that convey precisely nothing more than horse shit in a garage.
Some teams work and some don't.
Mostly, it's character that builds good teams.
Members can drive other members.
Like a hit song, team performance is impossible to predict.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
You fucks, science and creativity are not a democracy. Usually one person is right and 99999 are wrong. Diversity and teamwork have their merits but donâ(TM)t fool yourselves. The only âoeteamâ that works is that where everybody has proved their worth and there is mutual respect, the âoeFantastic Sevenâ type of team. Everything else is brainwashing for the masses. Apple is what it is (was) for Steven Jobs and Jobs was an asshole and everything but a team player. So stop reading about what books and studies âoesuggestâ and have at it.
Well, at least we know where to turn when we want to hire a specialist in clumsy, run-on, long-form mixed metaphors.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
...you are obviously not hiring the best people.
The truth is, there is seldom any need for Teams. A competent engineer can do it all by himself. Bridge, sure. A competent guy will also know the borders of his competence to delegate and collaborate as needed.
Now the point of the story is that you must have a Team of creative diverse people no matter what. Because the competent people cannot be trusted and the legions of diverse mediocrity has to be somehow employed.
Good luck with the bridge then. In olden days the Engineer would stand under the bridge on a test run. You cannot expect that from any diverse team where responsibility cannot be clearly assigned.
Who is going to accomplish more interesting things, a competent person who lacks confidence or an incompetent person who has lots of confidence? The former will do safe things very well but they'll never take any risks. The latter will often fail spectacularly but may from time to time hit upon things that other people in the field would have thought would never work. They will however need competent people around them to actually turn it into reality.
A prime example would be the success of Game of Thrones. The showrunners Benioff and Weiss had zero experience at producing a television show. Yet they succeeded at getting permission from George RR Martin to adapt his work where many others had failed. They succeeded because everyone else knew that in order to make anything from the books they had to focus on only a small part of the story and drop the rest. To do the whole story was impossible. But B & W didn't know it was impossible. They didn't know what they didn't know, so they weren't afraid to try to do the impossible. Then they made a pilot and by their own admission it was horrible. It had to be almost completely redone. Their second attempt however turned into one of the most successful shows in history. I would argue though that as they have become more experienced the show has actually gotten worse. It's become more like everything else Hollywood produces, just with a bigger budget than other tv shows. It shows they aren't exceptional producers or writers. They were just in the right place at the right time and didn't know what they were getting themselves into.
Ideally you'd like to have people that are both competent and confident. But I think the point the article tries to make is just that if the goal is creativity and you can tolerate failures then you don't just want a bunch of people who test well and have no failures on their records just because they never tried anything they could actually fail at.
[...] "Instead, they would seek diversity." [...]
'Diversity', in this context, means 'diversity of skin color'.
Reminds me of the super chicken ted talk... Very interesting talk about why you don't want a group of "Best" people...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
What a surprise, Scott E Page, a political scientist dealing in diversity.
The entire summary and article is a wonderful example of purposeful conflation.
The best teams use different skill-sets and viewpoints to compliment each other. Dare I use that word? "Synergy".
However, selecting and coordinating a well-tuned staff like that is not easy. Good managers are rare. They have to know the corporate kiss-up game, but also relate to and understand technical people and their work.
Table-ized A.I.
So they want people from different fields. I imagine they still want the best of different fields.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
"Why isn't there any Android app to turn off the sound for a period of time or on a regular schedule? At least I haven't been able to find one."
Have you tried LLAMA?
I assert it's all bullsh*t, you have no clue what you are talking about in you desire to assert that diversity is the solution to all problems. I assert that often it is not.
or was it a team responsible?
Once you evaluate this you may come to some conclusions.
Most of the work is mundane and does not require "the best" person in their field to do.
You just need good enough people with decent motivation.
> "When building a forest, you do not select the best trees as they tend to make similar classifications. You want diversity. "
Here is one case that actually restored a rainforest:
https://www.ted.com/talks/willie_smits_restores_a_rainforest
What they did was they hand picked the best trees (sugar palm) to protect area from fires, then they added fast growing and short lived trees to create micro climate for the next plants to come etc. (I really recommend watching the video because what they did was really cool). Only after you had a good base, you could add more trees to create diversity.
In human terms, this would be equal to hiring the best people to make initial designing and planning only after you have something built up and working, you can add lesser humans to create diversity.
Seems to me the chief flaw in this argument is the definition of "best". In this context it is another word like "fair", which means something different to each reader. If you pick the people who best fit the needs of the job you are being sensible and have the best chance of achieving the results described by the "needs". If you hire the best people in a field with no other criteria you get runaway primadonna-ism. If you hire the people in a field who best work with their peers you may get a solution; but, it may be pedestrian. You need the best people in the field who can work together and work creatively if you want serious innovation. So "best" is an inadequate word without modifiers. So this whole article is "fullabaloney".
{^_^}
Last year at work I got to do a character test which turned to be surprisingly accurate. The interesting thing was that the HR was trying to convince the management to take the character profiles in mind when assembling teams (and all this had nothing to do with modern HR diversity strategies - they were honestly trying to improve performance). It is quite sensible really - in my own case I had already paired with a colleague who in my opinion brought traits that I lack and vice versa - the test caught that splendidly. So perhaps we can rely on something measurable?
Creativity as far as I know is still a mystery. There are claims of a correlation between it and character traits but it is not so easy. For example the test "big 5" of JBP's lab finds correlation between trait "openness" and creativity. I scored 93 percentile. And I've never done something big and creative although on a small, everyday scale I have received plenty of comments over the years like "now creative, I would never think to do it this way!". But I know myself well enough to realize that something else must matter too, something that prevents me applying that creativity for something important. Am I too anxious and thus afraid to try my ideas? Am I bad at planning and following through? Are there people who have the best of both worlds - creative and at the same time orderly (interestingly high openness predicts liberal political bias, high orderliness - conservative. Can anyone be both?). Surely in history we have examples of such exceptional individuals but how rare are they?
Would it work then to pair open extroverts with orderly introverts? Would they be able to work together or the difference in style would prove too much of a hurdle?
In conclusion my feeling is that big data/machine learning used responsibly can be very helpful in this matter. Because it seems that the system is complicated enough so that traditional approach might never catch an odd ball correlation like the one that creative people are born mostly in summer (this is fake fact, I thought it up as an illustration); whereas the algorithm will catch it even though you still have to look for causation and explanation (if any).
What does this guy want to say? The tl;dr of the article: it's impossible to say who's best, and companies try to hire people for varied positions, because that's good, and yet some people hire based on tests, and that's self evidently not the best.
Or to put what the writer says another way: I'm not really one of those analytical types who intends to think of a solution, or actually get to the bottom of an issue, but I have a notion and some irrelevant anecdotes, that would make for a splendid article. And you know, even if I'm not the best, you should hire me, because hiring the best isn't the best.
Unfortunately, the mentality of a lone ranger who builds big intellectual marvels by himself is still alive and kicking, especially in the academia. There are a lot of otherwise fairly smart a-holes that still believe they can do big research on their own, win a Nobel, and get famous without sharing any credit. Most fail miserably when confronted with the very real need of a team. Society still rewards such behavior, because common people are still fascinated by the multifunctional genius myth. It may have worked in the dawns of science, but nowadays it's simply another form of stupidity.
I read TFA looking for the point. It seems the author has never actually built anything, and maybe doesn't understand how people outside of universities actually function.
There is, undoubtedly, a "best" person for a given job, and it is trivially simple to understand that a paper resume or academic ranking is not sufficient to gauge whether that person is the "best" for the position.
Ok, reading the article again just to see if I'm missing something... this article is simply a complete waste of time full of inaccuracies and vague opinion.
Even the ancient Romans understood the social, economic, and political impact of the roads they built all over Europe.
We have always understood those things and as time goes forward so have we. Law professors study social impacts of passing new laws and how you can and can't change society by laws.
I get the feeling that the author isn't very well educated and then just had a epiphany he thought nobody had thought of before him.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
I would like to add something to that. Consider software architects.
- Person A gets a new project, he creates a design that requires 200 people to implement it. Project gets a lot of money and after the project (even it was a big failure) the person A is treated a hero, because now he has experience of leading a huge project. When ever there a big projects coming, person A gets consulted.
- Person B gets identical project as person A, but person B figures out that if you talk with the business owners and clarify some processes they have been doing for years, you can simplify things and do the project with just 5 people. Project gets small budget and is highly successful, but now person B is just a low ranking architect, because he has only done small projects.
> Why isn't there any Android app to turn off the sound for a period of time or on a regular schedule?
I didn't really try to search one, I just typed "android schedule turn off sound" to Google and this came up:
https://android.gadgethacks.com/how-to/set-volume-levels-change-during-scheduled-times-android-0175016/
What is a team? What is team work?
Maybe this could be defined at a company. From observation at company X, mostly it meant sit everyone at a team table, even less than 3 feet from each other. The result seemed more dysfunctional than functional because the project never completed before major change happened. Then from the ashes, at a new location, came even more team tables...
I have found that explaining things to a trainee, discussing an inquisitive one who wants to know why things are fine a certain way helps you see possible improvements. Also when I was at university I totally messed up a maths problem, where I should have made a simple substitution I tried attaching the whole integration by parts, and ended up with complexity that was behind my ability. My tutor got very excited about my mistake, completed the "wrong method" and said that it was a proof of some sort of equivalence that was new to him.
I think you [Wizardess] are talking to me, but I can't figure out where you think what you wrote is supposed to be related to what I wrote, especially when you introduced the word "fair" in some relationship to "best". It also seems that you may have changed your context and are making a different reference to the original article at the end of your comment, in which case your criticism or attack is going in some other direction.
You didn't ask for any clarification, but I will. Do you know what a "paradigm" is? Or perhaps you could clarify what you think I was talking about with "Real innovation"? Or perhaps you have an alternative definition for "best people" that is not related to mastery of any paradigm?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
That you shouldn't choose the best person for the job sound like something the worst people would say .. .. as for not being able to figure out whom is the best; sure.
But to claim that the best can't be creative and that you're better of with people who are subjectively worse at the task? ..
Changing paradigms is easy enough to do if you have the business experience to know better.
This article is full of so many flawed assumptions, it's hard to know where to begin.
"The multidimensional or layered character of complex problems also undermines the principle of meritocracy"
This is a steaming pile of dung.
Believers in a meritocracy might grant that teams ought to be diverse but then argue that meritocratic principles should apply within each category. Thus the team should consist of the ‘best’ mathematicians, the ‘best’ oncologists, and the ‘best’ biostatisticians from within the pool.
That position suffers from a similar flaw. Even with a knowledge domain, no test or criteria applied to individuals will produce the best team. Each of these domains possesses such depth and breadth, that no test can exist.
Bullshit. If you're unable to identify the best, then you're a failure at managing your team. Part of being a good leader is knowing who knows what, and who's good at what, and when you need to bring in help. At the top level, no matter how complex the problem, someone has the big picture. They don't need to know the details of the problem, they need to know that they've got the best people they can addressing those details. The article makes the broad claim that no test can exist without any evidence to back it up.
Upwards of 50,000 papers were published last year covering various techniques, domains of enquiry and levels of analysis, ranging from molecules and synapses up through networks of neurons. Given that complexity, any attempt to rank a collection of neuroscientists from best to worst, as if they were competitors in the 50 meter butterfly, must fail.
Sigh, using as extreme of an example as you can find doesn't make meritocracy a failure, nor undermine it. That said, all 50,000 of those papers will likely be peer reviewed, and to a certain degree ranked, and referenced by other papers, or debunked.
.
Just another day in Paradise
The best team is composed of people who,when taken in total, have all the requisite specialized knowledge and insight to analyze a problem and develop an optimal solution. It is hard to determine in advance who those people are.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
The article's author argues that you shouldn't hire the objectively "best" person for the specific job but rather hire the person who adds the most diverse knowledge to the team. But isn't the person who adds the most to the team objectively the best person for the job?
The author goes on to describe hiring processes I've never seen in 30 years of interviewing, working and hiring. Ranking resumes with analytics? Rankable multiple choice skill tests during or as a prelude to the interview? Do these things exist? In companies that actually stay in business?
I say they do not. The author creates a straw man to argue his point about diversity in hiring. That logical fallacy contaminates his conclusion.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
The article and the post here show such a naive and fundamentamental lack of understanding of so many things it's difficult to know where to even begin addressing its issues. Sigh. It was clearly both written and submitted by someone with very little actual experience with much of anything. Research may be fun, but conjecture and projection are not real life, nor are they particularly useful in and of themselves. And we wonder why the quality of everything from code to human empathy has dropped through the floor in the west. . . Pitiful, and I can tell you this: I wouldn't hire either the author or the poster. People have always worked in teams, the basic premise of the piece is uninformed, and I wouldn't hire anyone as green as either the poster or the author.
I can't think of any "music by committee" that's any good. A couple people working together in a band? Sure... but today's pop music is not a beacon of imagination. Perhaps diversity means throwing in some rap in the middle of an R&B song.
No, you don't want diversity. When a company is faced with extremely difficult tasks and insane deadlines, the last thing you want is diversity (and I don't mean diversity in the sense of skin color). You want the strongest, most experienced team you can possibly put together. Every member has to be strong in several areas. Every member has to be willing to work long hours, go in nights and weekends, whatever it takes. To accept less is to plan for failure.
Been there, done that, got the scars and t-shirt to prove it.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
Hire large pools of people, put them to work on your problems, and keep the ones that are delivering and that can work effectively in a group. The ones that can't you release them. And be nice when you do so.
What a bunch of meandering bloviation.
Huge inaccuracy. The Romans did indeed build roads specifically for the environmental, social, economic, and political impacts. Though their environmental goals didn't include saving pandas.
With such a glaring mistake right at the beginning of the spew, it seems unreasonable to be convinced that the modern world is too complex to allow for meritocracy. Instead it seems reasonable to conclude that knowing how to assemble productive teams is beyond the abilities of this writer and other hacks who couldn't make the grade.
Place a bunch of the "best" of anything in the same room and the conflicting egos will eventually result in a fiasco. Oh, some results will be obtained but they'll only be what the dominant personalities wanted.
Companies that only want the best people are established, and have deep enough pockets to pay.
That's exactly the wrong kind of environment for creativity, regardless of whom you hire. If you hire the best creative person, you get a person who's quickly frustrated by a company that's highly overprotective of their existing bugs and design flaws. If you hire the best non-creative person, you just fed the premise that the best aren't creative because you selected the person such that you provided a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I'm a 25 year software veteran who has fostered my creativity as a trainable skill. My creativity has never assisted me in my career, nor has it helped in any bigger corporation software endeavor, sure people like to leverage it when they are in a bind, but the day-to-day is filled with eye-rolling and unbelieving statements that we can improve things. In some ways, I pay for the less skilled who have said similar things in the past, but the difference is my track record of delivery. Every now and then I get a manager that is less risk adverse, and I get to roll out a new product that increases the revenue stream by about 10 million per year. Then it's back to the "he's had a few good calls in the past, but we can't do that.... tradition!" treadmill of people who can't manage, so they see management as staying in the same place competitively as possible.
Say it this way say it that
round about is where they shat
butter cup rakes paycheck mello
brain exposed just banana jello
burmashave
Real innovation involves changing paradigms, and every definition of "best people" is based on the mastery of those people based on existing paradigms. There is only a partial exemption for people who become famous for creating new paradigms to solve important problems, but they were NOT recognized as "best" until AFTERWARDS. More often, they spend most of their lives fighting against the old paradigms. (Any better sources than The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Kuhn? It's a classic, but old.)
Anecdotal evidence, but I spent many years supporting a highly prestigious research lab, and I didn't see much that I would regard as real innovation. Mostly a stream of minor refinements hammered into patents with the support of skilled lawyers and even though most of them should have failed on the obviousness test. I do NOT think it was a cultural thing, though I should acknowledge (and disclaim?) that the lab I supported was located in a country with a reputation for copying and improving rather than innovating...
Trivial example of a useful innovation that no one has apparently thought of yet: Why isn't there any Android app to turn off the sound for a period of time or on a regular schedule? At least I haven't been able to find one. I already know the answer as regards that research lab: Not likely to generate a patent.
True innovation and success is a random search. So many things have to line up exactly at the right time at the right place.
Humans want to see patterns and find them. Most of them fail statistical tests.
A few rules are true but there are so many false ones our there.
Very much the start up model.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Well, I work in an industry where everyone hires the best. And by best, I mean highest keyword score matching fake resume for a employee who is different from the one who interviewed who is willing to work for 60K a year.
Google stopped being innovative a long time ago. Whatever they're doing isn't really working. Google now copies everybody else's innovation, from VR to Alexa.
that human resources doesn't understand. They don't get the best because they don't know what best is. Fire them to save money. Fire excessive management also ( eg. practitionless director_of_operations ). Forget mission statements. Forget performance reports (if they were useful, management would fire excessive management). Forget meetings too (waste of company time).
Changing paradigms is easy enough to do if you have the business experience to know better.
And that's why it happens all the time. Not.
Most people can't see the boxes they are trapped in and are therefore unlikely to get outside of it. Even worse, most of the businesses that try anything even slightly different fail. Serial wannabe innovators are actually surprisingly common, notwithstanding both those constraints. Successful serial innovators? Not so much.
My problem appears to be that I can't figure out what is supposed to be the box. I seem to have suffered some sort of zen breakdown or collapse, and everything is on top of everything else, but none of it matters much to me. The world will continue changing as it wishes and I don't even feel much reaction when my predictions or suggestions are "resolved" in either direction.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I think I agree with you about the randomness component of the success part, but not so much as regards innovation. The long-term average is for things to get better (though paid for in entropy dollars and time). It's just that from our short-term perspectives things do look rather random. To paraphrase MLK, the arc of progress is long, but it bends toward reality. (However I might be wrong believe that there is such a thing as reality?)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
This is an example of someone writing something just to irritate people and get a response. It is best in this case just to ignore them.
Only one mispronunciation from a different set of criteria.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
When I first got into tech in the 90s, companies hired people who could figure things out. Didn't matter what it was, you could drop one of them in and they'd find a decent solution.
Now that the industry has matured, companies only hire experts. You need 10 years of experience in that technology that has only been publicly available for seven years (can't tell you the number of times I've seen this on job descriptions).
These are two very different mindsets, with very different approaches to problem solving.
Also, back then companies hired nerds, now they hire rockstar, superhero, brogrammer, hypster "personalities" ('cause, ya know, you gotta get right up in their face in order to "disrupt" them, yo). It's as though HR "thought leaders" have never heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect. The people who are the most confident are very rarely the best at anything other than singing their own praises.
So, I agree that hiring "the best" probably doesn't mean hiring creative people. However, in a industry that is as mature as tech, do you really need creativity? How much creativity does it really take to keep Facebook or Twitter chugging along?
> a biotech company such as Gilead or Genentech would not construct a multiple-choice test and hire the top scorers
Who would be idiotic enough to select *any* skilled professional based upon a multiple-choice test?
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw
Casteism