Today’s New York Times has a long article about organic foods, more specifically, about how the FDA-approved “Certified Organic” designation has been co-opted almost completely by industrial food producers, diluting it to the point of meaninglessness. This does not come as a surprise to me. As soon as “organic” became an adjective that people would pay a premium for, it became inevitable that corporations in the food business would want a piece of the action. Now they’re busily diluting the definition of organic so that they can more easily adapt it to their industrial production methods.
Beyond doing things like going to the farmer’s market and buying food from the producers themselves, I have another trick for buying “whole foods” whether I’m at Whole Foods or any other grocery store. I read the list of ingredients. If it has ingredients that I don’t recognize, or don’t seem to belong in whatever it is that I’m buying, I skip it. Sometimes I wind up buying mass market brands, sometimes high end “organic” foods, and sometimes it’s store brand.
The first time I tried this approach was buying honey mustard. I was shocked to find that most of the honey mustards on the shelf didn’t even contain honey, most of them instead contained high fructose corn syrup and lots of other weird ingredients that I don’t recognize. I finally found a bottle of mustard that had a list of ingredients that included ground mustard, vinegar, and honey, and no strange ingredients we don’t have in the cabinet at home. To get back to mass market brands, French’s Mustard is delightfully simple (and awesome).
I realize that familiar ingredients can be produced in unpleasant ways, but there’s a limit to what can be practically achieved in our modern society. The best favor you can do for yourself if you’re not going to restrict yourself to food you or people you know grew is to stick to reading the labels.
What are job interviews for, anyway?
I read two blog posts on Friday that made for an interesting contrast. The first was a post by Mike Loukides arguing that the problem with the economy is not a lack of qualified candidates, but rather a lack of flexibility on the part of employers when it comes to who they hire. The other post I read was by Carlos Bueno on how to get hired at Facebook. He references an earlier post by Steve Yegge on how to get hired at Google.
Not only do the posts from Facebook and Google focus on listing specific skills that engineers they might hire need, but they include skills that engineers will never actually use at work. For example, both of them focus on the need to prepare to program on a whiteboard. I have well over a decade of experience as a software developer, and I’ve never programmed on a whiteboard. I don’t feel particularly uncomfortable with it, but I don’t think it is a clear indication of one’s ability as a software developer.
I don’t worry about how Google and Facebook hire. Their process works well for them, and will continue to, as long as they remain some of the most desirable places in the industry to work. Their method isn’t going to work for your company, though.
For most companies, the way to find stars is to deemphasize skills and to focus on intelligence, attitude, and communication. There are no risk-free hires, and the low risk hires from a skills standpoint often lack creative potential. The skilled, creative people already have great jobs. I can teach a smart person about Big O notation in half an hour. Teaching a poor communicator to be work well with teammates is nearly impossible. Focus on what’s important.
In the end, the excessive focus on skills and experience that seems endemic is hurting more than it’s helping.