John Carmack on Hiring
I have always focused on hiring for attitude and aptitude. If you have the attitude to learn, and the aptitude to grown your skills, then you&#x27;ll do great at anything you&#x27;re passionate about.<p>I literally hired a guy who was a part-time computer hobbyist but, a full time pool man. I told him &quot;hey how would you like to spend 40 hours a week learning more about computers.&quot; Today he&#x27;s working as a leader in his company&#x27;s security group. He often thanks me for the job, and I always remind him &quot;you did the work, all I did was give you the opportunity&quot;.<p>Sadly as stated in the thread linked, its hard when you have 10k applicants, to treat each as a potentially amazing member of the your team. I still try hard to look for that attitude and aptitude, and if a candidate demonstrates this in our dialog, I will do my best to find a path for them to connect with other opportunities if they&#x27;re not a strong match for roles I&#x27;m filling on my teams.<p>What I know is we&#x27;re born to this world knowing how to eat, breathe, cry, and a couple other things. The rest, all of it, we&#x27;ve learned on our way to this day. Just because the person in front of me didn&#x27;t have the same path as me, doesn&#x27;t mean they won&#x27;t learn to have an incredible impact going forward. Searching for this potential and type of partnership at scale is hard. My heart wants to say it can be solved, but my calendar is an evil overlord that only allows me only so many hours a day to invest in growing my teams...