4. Take people out for a “beer” test as part of interviews.
We would take every candidate to some social outing (typically dinner or beer after work).  In a startup, people work long hours and you want to make sure people fit in and the team and create an even awesomer [1] environment.

Intriguingly, in a “social” environment, the candidate would often show more of their “true colors”. Especially if beer was involved.  This often happened before any beer was drunken – I think it was just a shift to a more social context from a work one that triggered behavioral changes.

A great example is a candidate we rejected post beer test, who was one of the strongest engineers technically that we had ever interviewed.  However, once we made it to the bar he made a lot of really bad off-color jokes that crossed the line and made the team uncomfortable about him.

For many of the people we hired at Viddler we did exactly the same thing. And sometimes with a similar result. First and foremost I want someone I can work hard with. And it is tough to work hard with someone who creeps you out regardless of how good they are.

/via Dick “I’m the CEO at Twitter but really I shouldn’t have let Feedburner die” Costolo.

This is my view of management as administration—as a service corps that helps the talented individuals that build and sell products do their jobs better. Attempting to see management as the ultimate decision makers demotivates the smart people in the organization who, without the authority to do what they know is right, will grow frustrated and leave. And if this happens, you won’t notice it, but you’ll be left with a bunch of yes-men, who don’t particularly care (or know) how things should work, and the company will only have one brain – the CEO’s. See what I mean about “it doesn’t scale?”

Precisely.

First, he speaks about Michael Arrington’s crack at Blaine Cook of Twitter.  In short, Arrington puts a lot of blame on Cook for Twitter’s stability issues and then some “experts” reply in the comments.  Then, he talks about some of the opinions being spewed out about WordPress and its supposed downfalls as it pertains to scalability.

Lin is much more versed in the technology, especially the infrastructure, behind-the-scenes in both of these cases than I am – so I will not be offering my opinions here and ask that you read his.  Also, I will not be linking to the other sources of this story, because I’d rather you read them with his context.

Side note about this link: I found this article through Matt Mullengweg who wrote and published a post called Armchair Scaling Experts which has been taken down since and I don’t know why.

Source: random($foo): Internet Asshattery, Armchair Scaling Experts Edition.