Do you have any specific advice for finding co-founders or early employees?

Even google has their “SearchWiki” thing, but it supposedly doesn’t affect other users.

In both cases, the index bloat caused many new false positives, and relevance plummeted. They both took years and much time and effort to improve their rankers to the point that they could weed out all the false positives and get back to their former level of relevance.

Briefly, the problem is that forced rank and similar systems create a zero sum game where employee is pitted against employee. It creates a system where people can win by tearing others down inside the company rather than focusing their efforts on working together to compete against those outside the company.

Combine this with the fact that managers rarely are able to do performance reviews correctly — due to lack of information and gaming of the system — and you have a recipe for disaster.

In the end, forced rank typically hurts morale and aggravates attrition because no one perceives it as fairly and correctly done.

A good alternative is to use performance reviews solely to help people improve their skills, give non-monetary compensation for individual rewards, and focus monetary compensation on rewarding teams.

If you’re interested in details, there is much more on that in The Human Equation, Strategic Human Resources, and other good books on human resource management.

I see you mentioned expanding in depth during the interview. That is closest to my personal style of interviewing.

I usually am looking for enthusiasm for a problem, depth of knowledge on that problem, and a willingness to admit the limits to their knowledge. My strategy is to keep asking probing questions about an area of their previous work, going deeper and deeper, asking them to express why it is important, what they tried, and what they could also have tried.

Ideally, not only does the candidate infect you with their enthusiasm for the problem, but they teach you something.

At least in fast-paced software companies, I think these characteristics best determine someone’s likelihood of success. I think it selects for people that can get things done quickly using small teams.

That being said, interviewing is difficult and full of false positives and negatives. Companies like Amazon and Google bias their selection criteria to encourage false negatives — deeming them less risky than false positives — but that sadly does prevent many good people from getting through the door.