Enjoying the journey, Musk’s hiring strategy, and the 1st important earnings period

Life… Is for Living

Goals, plans, strategies, interviews, tasks, deadlines. All cool, all important! So is the 5 o’clock tea. Take a break, look around, breathe. Live the moment, feel the vibe, match the energy.

The odds of you being born are at least 1 in 400 trillion. It’s all I got to say this week ❤️

TOOLS

🤔 Samsung Labs proposes a set of new neural architectures and training methods to advance the neural head avatar technology called MegaPortraits. I played a bit with this tech and the only use case I found for now is to create memes. I’m curious to see where this goes and hopefully, not political propaganda.

📱 Notion transitions from hybrid to native apps and deploys a large number of updates related to performance and user experience. They show a performance comparison between the old and new app with the iOS launching 2x faster, while improving 3x on Android.

That’s how you move users from Confluence to your product, performance matters a lot for productivity apps.

Some React Native devs don’t feel the vibe - maybe the lesson here is ‘don’t tie your identity to a framework so you can always do what’s right for your users?!’ I had a fair share of discussions regarding the stack we should build on and, in the end, there are just two types of makers: the ones who care about creating a product that they believe should exist in this world, and the ones who care about a specific tool/framework/language.

🍹 Not many product announcements this week, it’s summertime when the weather is fine.

TEAM

🤲 Elon Musk’s brilliant hiring strategy uses the 2-Hands Test, instead of degrees.

What the two-hands test does is field candidates without traditional gatekeepers like degrees. Instead, it qualifies candidates through first-hand experience and hands-on testing.

First-hand experience Though there’s much debate surrounding experience versus education, it’s not simply that experience matters more than education. Rather, experience is a form of education. And in many ways, it’s the best education.

Hands-on testing A job interview is a test, but rather than actually examining a candidate’s capabilities, many companies simply work to evaluate a candidate’s knowledge. However, this is a fatal flaw, as there is a major difference between memorizing and parroting information and actually understanding how something works. To overcome this challenge, put candidates to the test with highly relevant hands-on testing.

To test candidates effectively, give tests (a task or assignment) that most closely match what the role itself may encounter. To yield an accurate measurement of one’s ability to effectively perform the position’s tasks, be sure that the test’s scope is limited to the resources necessary to perform said test or task.

I have only one mention to this, the interview task or assignment doesn’t necessarily need to be a Home Take away assignment. At Cledara, when hiring for the design team, the ‘task’ is a 15 minutes live session in Figma or Figjam, where we evaluate the thinking process.

Hiring is easy, firing is hard. Which makes hiring even harder!

MARKET

👍 YouTube rolls out new shopping features and announces a partnership with Shopify. The partnership enables creators and merchants to easily feature their products across their YouTube channels and content.

👮‍♀️ SEC charges former Coinbase product manager with insider trading. In fact, SEC charges ten companies in total, and here’s an interesting thread about how none of them are defendants in the case, and none of them will get their day in court.

📊 This week is a big financial earnings week for FAANG+. It’s important because it’s the first major earnings period after many of the CEOs have warned of turbulent times ahead.

Days to watch:

Tuesday: Google, Microsoft
Wednesday: Meta (also Shopify, Etsy for commerce trends)
Thursday: Amazon, Apple

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Tuesday!