[Hiring] Product Manager

[shotaro.eth]

hmmm, If I get the issue right, the question is to prioritize expedience and end the application phase to select a Product manager. Is there urgency?

Is anyone familiar with the “Secretary Problem”? It relates to a hiring game in which a hypothetical company is hiring a secretary with a candidate pool of size N and a random interview order (random with respect to the skill/optimality of the hiree). In such a game where the job is either given at the end of the interview, or the candidate is turned away, turns out the optimal strategy is to reject the first 1/e or roughly 1/3 of candidates no matter the quality, and select the next best candidate. One can interpret this roughly the first 1/3 of candidates is sort of ‘sampling’ the candidate pool to find out the average skill level to determine hiring decisions.

Now the current Product Manager hiring game is different since applications are not turned away and all are simultaneously considered, however as same in the simple Secretary hiring game, as well as here, it is the case that the larger the candidate pools size N, the higher quality the final hiree.

Now at the same time, the trade off is fairness to applicants who need to make some life arrangements if their applicants are pending for many months.

Here’s Clement’s comment from another thread:

@clesaege

When a candidate is good enough, he can be accepted very quickly without deadlines while deadline would increase the waiting time. Deadlines are only appropriate when recruiting a large number of candidates (think public servants procedures) as due to the law of large numbers, we statistically end up with a more or less similar number of good candidates.
On individual positions it is the opposite. There isn’t enough applicants to have the randomness smoothed and we can sometimes find people in a few weeks while other times it takes a whole year.
At Kleros I never regretted taking more time to hire people. I think the DAO should do the same, as those are hard to fill positions and it’s better to take time than to fill them with suboptimal candidates.

So in any case, the trade-offs seem to be, the longer applicants are accepted, the higher quality hiree that results, but waiting exceptionally long can be unfair to applicants who need to make life arrangements. However, is Clement the only one with experience hiring for a DAO? Does anyone else have this kind of experience?

From this thread, it looks like @paulaberman brings a strong candidacy, but the application is bundled. Has Sofía Cossar been posting and active in the thread?

From the other thread:

@Mads

applicants will only agree to be hired if they can have their team along

@clesaege

I think we shouldn’t encourage this. This looks way more like outsourcing than having a DAO hire workers. This is likely to create some sorts of “clans” within POH and give way too much power to some “team leaders”. It also shows poor motivation for people only wanting to come with their team as it either mean “I’m only interested working there if I can work with my friends” or “I’m only interested working there if I can take some power from the DAO (recruiting) to myself”.

From my experience at Kleros, recruiting is the hardest and important thing for a project. Finding good people can take time (from a few weeks to a year) and it’s better to wait compared to sub-optimal hires.
Currently we didn’t have much applications answering the offers. Instead of lowering the standards, I think giving more publicity to it would have a better impact.

Hmmmm, then should HIP13 be further developed to resolve the hiring process in more detail ? Or explicitly allow the hiring of a ‘bundled’ application? Could candidates be ranked with quadratic voting including negative voting so any controversial applicants are less likely to win, such as this demo except negative voting enabled. As these are the first DAO hires, maybe its best like has been suggested to be very cautious since the hiree will steer the course of the DAO which would have especially large impact being the first DAO workers.