mark++

Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men:

There is not a single brilliant man in our organization,” he said. “I am not brilliant myself. I am just an average chap who started in peddling policies, and — knowing my own limitations — felt that I must put in a couple of hours’ extra work every day in order to hold my own against my competitors.

To put it simply, if your interview process has any effect at all, it likely selects “brilliant” candidates. Unfortunately, you really need to hire non-dumb hard-workers.

Some years ago, I played Quake competitively on a national level. Back then, I always preferred to set my character’s color to bright yellow. Some folks would choose brown or green in an effort to blend into their surroundings, but not me. I wanted you to see me coming. I was still going to kick your ass, and I wasn’t going to leave you any excuses.

I’m not sure I realized it before, but this pro-competitive spirit has really stuck with me. I don’t often find this attitude in business — but when I do, it’s like a breath of fresh air.

Take, for example, David Weiss’s recent comments about office-suite file-formats (David works in Microsoft’s Mac BU). You should read the whole post, but here’s an excerpt:

Once upon a time, it was decided that we needed to move to a more open file format. XML was the obvious choice. There were and are a lot of good reasons for opening up your file format. I’m not going to discuss these at length, but one of these in particular is that folks are not forced to use your application to both read and write files that others can use. This is a good thing.

Allowing anyone to read and write your file format is a bold move because it says in essence, “We don’t need a locked-down file format to compete. The format can be available for everyone, and we’ll compete on the ease of use and efficiency of our applications. We have what we think is the best interface for reading, creating and managing Office documents, but if someone has what they think is a better way to build Office documents, wonderful, we welcome it!”

When I read this, I realized why I like this kind of thing. This is yellow-shirt Quaking. Every time I see a business engaging in some anti-competitive behavior I think to myself: wimps!

Take contracts, for example. If your cell or DSL provider was really committed to superior service, they would not lock you in. Lock-in is cowardly.

Warranties, on the other hand, are brave. If your product comes with a lifetime warranty, you are making a bold statement about your faith in that product.

I’m going to keep looking for yellow-shirts. I bet there are a lot out there.

This might save you a few minutes of Googling. Here’s a direct link to a PPD file for a Brother HL-5250DN printer. Enjoy.

I had to remove the Google Reader Shared Items widget from my sidebar. If you got a popup on a previous visit, that was why. It also broke K2’s nifty AJAX search feature.

I couldn’t figure out how to fix it, so I just disabled the thing for now.

Update:
This is fixed now. See Stephanie’s blog for more info.

Tom’s Hardware turns 10 years old today.

I’m not sure I’ve been reading for 10 years, but I definitely remember the sysdoc.pair.com days. Here’s what it used to look like back when I was a college freshman.