The Curse of Smart People

A bit over 3 years ago, after working for many years at a series of startups
(most of which I co-founded), I disappeared through a Certain Vortex to
start working at a Certain Large Company which I won’t mention here. But
it’s not really a secret; you can probably figure it out if you bing around
a bit for my name.

Anyway, this big company that now employs me is rumoured to hire the
smartest people in the world.

Question number one: how true is that?

Answer: I think it’s really true. A suprisingly large fraction of the
smartest programmers in the world do work here. In very large
quantities. In fact, quantities so large that I wouldn’t have thought that
so many really smart people existed or could be centralized in one place, but
trust me, they do and they can. That’s pretty amazing.

Question number two: but I’m sure they hired some non-smart people too,
right?

Answer: surprisingly infrequently. When I went for my job interview there,
they set me up for a full day of interviewers (5 sessions plus lunch). I
decided that I would ask a few questions of my own in these interviews, and
try to guess how good the company is based on how many of the interviewers
seemed clueless. My hypothesis was that there are always some bad apples in
any medium to large company, so if the success rate was, say, 3 or 4 out of
5 interviewers being non-clueless, that’s pretty good.

Well, they surprised me. I had 5 out of 5 non-clueless interviewers, and in
fact, all of them were even better than non-clueless: they impressed me. If
this was the average smartness of people around here, maybe the rumours were
really true, and they really had something special going on.

(I later learned that my evil plan and/or infor