First, lose the headphones. That didn’t affect our decision at all, but I could imagine it affecting it at other companies.

Second, you’re obviously intelligent and capable. You messed up on the unit test, but I’m attributing that to interview nerves – I’m reasonably certain you could handle the technical demands of the job. But that’s only the first hurdle.

The next is personality and fit with the company — and this is a sticky one. In an interview, I’ve got about an hour to decide if you’re the kind of person I want to spend the next three or more years with, in relatively close quarters. Can you argue a position strongly, but lose gracefully? You may be right about the technical merits of something, but the business reality means we have to do something else — can you live with that? On a good day, we go two steps forward and one step back — bad days it’s one step forwards and two steps back. Can you deal with that frustration? I received certain cues from you — interrupting, hitting the table during the coding test, etc. — that you might have been hard to work with. Is that true? I can’t tell in an hour. But saying “no” to a candidate who would have been terrific is a smaller risk than saying “yes” to a candidate who turns out to be a bad hire.

I hope you appreciate my honesty in writing this, rather than brushing you off with “not a good fit.” I did so because I think your question about your interview performance is sincere, and I’m hoping my answer helps.

If it’s not obvious from reading the e-mail, Rands has been a big influence on my management style.

@ 43:48

“We learned early on that much of the focus in infection prevention was on how you place the catheter. What we learned through our observations (and borrowing the processes from Toyota) was it was in maintaining the catheter. Once it was in, how do you take care of it? And what we initially discovered was, there weren’t reliable processes in place by which nurses and others took care of catheters. So now it’s very unambiguous, very clear to everybody where the catheter is in the person’s body, what the condition of the catheter is every day. There’s a specific person responsible each day for looking at that catheter site and making sure it’s intact. And any time there’s a question, that’s immediately kicked up to a higher-level person who can make a decision about whether the catheter needs to come out or not.

“So identifying a highly-reliable, unambiguous process in which everyone’s responsibility is made clear creates a much more likely defect-free process during the course of that catheter being in place.”

It’s not that Shannon tells us anything really new here. It’s that he talks about one aspect of what I’m trying to do at Dakim, and comes up with something better than a trunk of Strunks:

“A highly-reliable, unambiguous process in which everyone’s responsibility is made clear.” Damn right.