The business of being a geek is a strange thing. The space is jammed full of casual conflicts. Here are just a few examples:
- The person who knows the most about developing business solutions may very well know the least about business.
- The youngest person in the room is typically the one with the most [online] experience.
- The person with the strangest attire / weirdest t-shirts typically has the sharpest mind.
Okay, I have yet to find any real proof of that last one, but the list goes on. I don’t know of any other industry that even compares in terms of contradictions to the established norm. We’re looking at another one right now. It has to do with hiring.
We want people inside the machine who know how to have fun. We want them laid back, unstrung and chill. And if you’re asking yourself if I just used the word “chill,” I did. I’m bringing it back.
We aren’t trying to build the cool kid fraternity. We just know that dropping a nazi into an 11-man team (3 of whom are actually women) will stir some things up. Our environment is too tight.
But when it comes to handling crises (ideally by avoiding them in the first place,) a nazi is precisely the type of geek you want – a fun-hating, beeper-wearing, unflinching, do it by the book, process nazi. You want someone who’s serious enough to recognize an issue and mechanical enough to handle it immediately.
None of this performs as a rule, of course. We’re actually trying to sidestep the “one or the other” conflict again right now. So, if you know any serious LAMP devotees that can also operate in live social settings, let us know. We’re looking.
* It might be worth noting that while yesterday I noted my German heritage and today I’m claiming that nazis can be useful, the nazis I’m referring to in this post are of a different sort.