
How Pixar Hires - brm
http://www.edutopia.org/randy-nelson-school-to-career-video
======
dominik
Great video. Some quotes:

"The core of skill of innovators is error-recovery not failure-avoidance."

"Mastery in anything is a really good predictor of mastery in the thing you
want done."

"The proof of a portfolio versus the promise of the resume."

"We want somebody who's more _interested_ than they are interesting."

"People who are interested are much more willing to work on the communication
as a destination not as a source -- and breadth, a broad range of experience
in the world is the thing that fuels that."

"Depth, breadth, communication, collaboration; of these four collaboration is
the most important"

"Collaboration for Pixar means amplification -- the amplification you get by
connecting up a bunch of human beings who are listening to each other,
interested in each other, bring separate depth to the problem, bring breadth
that gives them interest in the entire solution, allows them to communicate on
multiple different levels: verbally, in writing, in feeling, in acting, in
pictures, and in all of those ways finding the most articulate way to get a
high-fidelity notion across to a broad range of people so they can each pull
on the right lever."

~~~
Gonsalu
The theory is great for, as the talker said, innovative fields...

For a programming business which needs, let's say, a Java programmer, I think
it matters more (to the recruiter) that the programmer knows its fu well, than
being very interested; basically, the theory doesn't quite apply to existing
businesses which use common technology.

~~~
arebop
I'm sure most Java recruiters agree with you.

But, as a programmer myself, I've only met a handful of other programmers
whose knowledge I'd value over their interested-ness. I'll probably never have
the opportunity to hire such a person, so when I interview I look for
competence and learning potential (curiousity, humility, ...).

Also, I regard programming as a maximally innovative field. There's no reason
in principle to do the same thing more than once in programming, and the
practical reasons all seem to derive from a combination of mistakes and
misfortune.

------
njharman
I wish I did more of the "accept any offer"/plussing improv stuff discussed in
the first minutes. I'm too curmudgeonly and cynical and self-trained to fill
the devil's advocates role.

I love to mentor. At work, the fields I'm much more experienced in than
coworkers I try to spread my knowledge but there's only so much I can force on
them. And they seem reluctant to ask for help. They want to do it on their
own. I notice them struggling for hours over something we could resolve in
15min working together. I want to boost them up, not make them look bad/one up
them. I seem to be failing...

How can you make people into collaborators?

~~~
inerte
You sound like my boss ;)

Here's my beef against him: Lack of trust. If he says to me: "Do X", then
expect me to do it.

If hours have passed and I still haven't done, and I didn't ask for help, then
something is wrong with me. I have a task and I am not completing it. But you
got to give me the _chance_ to actually do it.

For example, he asked me to test a new mod_rewrite configuration on a server,
and that I should use curl for it. I was going to do it anyway, so I kind let
his comment go from on ear through the other. But then he said, hey, you must
send an specific header because of the way our network is configured. That was
actually useful, because I didn't know about this configuration.

So I typed "man curl" on the command line to know how to send a header. He
said to me:

\- No need to look on man, I will tell you what you need to send the header.
Type -H...

I interrupted him and said:

\- Wow, let me discover how to do this myself. Let me have a chance to learn.

So, here's the thing. There are struggles and there are struggles ;) If I am
_really_ struggling on something that is simple, give me guidelines, tips, and
if I am still failing, then the problem is with me, not you.

You need to learn this about who you're mentoring. When they're struggling
because they can't learn, and when they're struggling because they need to
learn something.

In practice, it's way more complex than this. Looking on "man curl" about how
to send headers takes one minute, so to me it looked like an offense when he
was telling me how to do. Now if he asked me something harder, that would
require me hours of studying, than perhaps he telling me what do would be
better, since the problem will be resolved faster.

As a mentor, that's whay you need to learn. You need to balance all these
factors to decide if you need to step in or not.

But first of all, like I said in the beginning, trust is the first step.
Believe that your student can accomplish something that you thrown at them,
and only interfere when the deadline approaches, and the problem needs to be
resolved right now. And then later, review what happened. Will this person
ever learn this? Is this really that hard that learning about it takes 5 hours
instead of 1 hour? Does that mean perhaps he's not the best person for the
task? Does this mean that he will never be the right person for the task or
will he grok it sometime later?

Questions, questions everywhere ;)

------
bd
Pixar is an incredible company.

 _"If you don't create an atmosphere in which risk can be easily taken, in
which weird ideas can be floated, then it's likely you're going to be
producing work that will look derivative in the marketplace. [...] Those kind
of irrational what-ifs eventually lead to something that makes you go, 'Wow, I
never would have thought about it.'"_

 _"The university's primary purpose is to build morale, spirit and
communication among employees. 'If you could create good filmmakers who would
work here for 25 years, their first five years of film would be really good;
their next five years would be amazing. By the time these people worked
together for 25 years, you would just not believe the things that would
happen.'"_

Pixar University: Thinking Outside The Mouse

[http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-
bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive...](http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-
bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2003/06/04/pixar.DTL)

Also: whacking Ed Catmull with a balloon. Ed _I-coinvented-computer-graphics_
Catmull. Whack on the head with a long thin red baloon.

------
jcs
Fantastic video, thanks very much.

There seems to be momentum gathering to improve education. Watching Bill
Gate's TED video this morning and now this (albeit perhaps more motivational
than educational), I'm aware this is a topic which fundamentally interests me
but haven't considered yet. It seems an area ripe for innovation in the same
way we've seen happen in computing.

~~~
cpr
<http://johntaylorgatto.com/> \-- if you want to improve (primary and
secondary) education, you've gotta first understand the problem. I don't think
anyone's done a better job than John Gatto.

