Month: February 2015

“The No. 1 reason for our growth is our people, and I would attribute a lot of that to our hiring. It costs a lot more in work and time to have to replace people,” he says.

Spending an insane amount of time on your hiring process isn’t what makes a hiring decision good; it’s what makes hiring managers feel good about making a decision that involves a lot of unknowns and ambiguity. You can see it in the language used in the quote above. It’s still entirely possible to make someone run the gauntlet and end up with a charlatan.

Also, it borders on cruelty. It furthers the dehumanizing nature of the modern workplace where you’re a resource, not a person. Interviews like this are comparable to stress-testing a new piece of equipment before signing a contract with its manufacturer. If it holds under stress, we’ll buy it.

It.

A thing. Not a person. To be used until it breaks and we have to buy another thing to replace the one that broke.

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.” – Palm CEO Ed Colligan, commenting on then-rumored Apple iPhone, 16 Nov 2006

“They’d better think carefully if they want to get into the hard-core manufacturing,” he said of Apple. “We take steel, raw steel, and turn it into car. They have no idea what they’re getting into if they get into that.”

Yup. I’m sure that can’t possibly be harder than building microelectronics.

Someone should show this guy the aluminum carving process used to make the unibody MacBook enclosure.