

Why don't companies hire "idea" people?  Is it because they think anyone smart can get good ideas? - amichail

In my experience, "idea" people and analytically strong people  are different sorts.  And so it would make sense to hire "idea" people.<p>But apparently, few companies agree.  They see analytically strong people as strictly better than everyone else.
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Alex3917
An idea is only worth something when it's put into a fixed medium. We refer to
people by the medium they work with. People who turn ideas into code are
called coders. People who turn ideas into writing are called writers. etc.

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amichail
Coders generally don't turn their own ideas into code. They are given
something to work on.

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nostrademons
The bottleneck is almost always implementation. Therefore, it makes sense to
hire more implementation people. If you hired more idea people, you'd just
have more ideas that you don't have time to implement.

And large companies _do_ hire idea people. That's what corporate research labs
and fellowships are for. But you need a _really_ strong track record to
qualify for those, because if only a limited number of ideas can make it to
implementation, you want to generate only the best ideas.

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amichail
Bottleneck to what? The bottleneck to success is the idea. Without a good
idea, you have nothing.

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mrtron
The bottleneck to success is not the idea. It is the execution of a idea.

Right now, there is a great example of this that is rapidly evolving and you
can follow easily. Facebook apps. Do the best 'ideas' for Facebook apps
dominate? No, the apps that take any idea and execute well are the ones that
tend to dominate. Speed is a big part of the game - the first to market tends
to spread the best.

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aswanson
I used to wonder this myself. The answer I come up with is that companies have
a check that they can cash pending execution of a series of finite steps. In a
reasonable mature enterprise these steps are defined and one needs a person to
execute a subset of these steps.

An idea introduces a probabilistic component to this that the person in charge
of hiring has not considered because he/she has no _incentive_ to do so.
He/she will definitely receive negative feedback if the series of finite steps
to the money they are in charge of is not properly executed. In short, no
reward and definite risk is bad for a company drone, in general. No straight
path to money != good.

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brlewis
Put yourself in the position of a company. You decide you need an "idea
person" position. You post an opening and collect resumes. How do you decide
whom to call? Whom do you interview? How do you decide whom to hire?

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amichail
I would conduct phone interviews asking people to brainstorm in real-time. I
would then invite the most promising candidates to an interview where they
would be asked to do more brainstorming in real-time.

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brlewis
You, I, or anyone else who attempts this, would make a sincere effort to
assess their brainstorming abilities. What we would end up with, though, is an
assessment of how similar their ideas are to ours. Ideas like ours will sound
best.

