I blogged before about how to hire and retain kind, caring people.
You also want to hire technically talented people. Not just people that know the basics of electronics, but the kind of people that have, in the past, tried to harness said power to build a robot that can fight other robots. These people are geeks. You want them on your team.
This is part one of my advice based on my personal experience:
Geeks like to work with geeks
First a story.
When I was in my late teens, I went through a phase of being addicted to Pi. I couldn’t get enough. I would download megabytes and megabytes of it, clogging my dialup connection. Soon it was gigabytes. I would email my friends random parts of Pi with the email subject being “here’s a piece of Pi”. I had a plan to use the university’s printers to print out thousands of pages of Pi in a 9-point font so that I could wallpaper my room in a shade of grey that, only when you looked close, would you realize was actually made up of millions of digits of Pi.
My addiction reached it’s climax when I couldn’t get enough Pi through publicly available means. I wrote an email to a Japanese research institute (which at the time, had calculated the most digits of Pi). The Japanese institute would only share their Pi with other researchers, so I had to use university computers to lie and pose as a fellow researcher. I never really thought about the fact that I didn’t have enough hard drive space to store that much Pi (lesson: Pi doesn’t compress at all — it’s random). Lying and losing all my hard drive space to store text files containing random numbers was the limit. I had to quit cold turkey, and to this day, I have to turn away when I see a screen filled with Pi – my mind starts racing and I get foolish ideas.
Don’t let me start about root 2.
The point of this story? I am a geek.
I get two kinds of reactions when I tell this story to people:
Reaction 1) “I have to go to… umm.. this other place…”
Reaction 2) “Let’s work together somehow”
When we interview for technical jobs, we like to spend time chatting about geeky things we’ve done in the past, geeky stuff we’re interested in, referencing xkcd comics, making fun of people who don’t know how to use VIM, and arguing about which programming language is best.
It works.
“But I am a non-geek marketing/sales/executive-type person who is trying to hire geeks, what’s your advice then,” you ask?
My answer: “I… umm… have to go to… uhh.. this other place…”
