Sam Hicks & His Merry Cocoa Blog

His advice on hiring: find people who want to work for you because they are passionate about the work they are going to do instead of the paycheck, find out what motivates your employees and try to tailor their job to what it is that they like to do (you know, not just for the money.) He continues: ask your employees how much money they want. If they are not worth this amount of money, don't hire them (or if they work for you, fire them.) If they are worth what they are asking for, it's a good idea to pay them that amount so they continue contributing. Make sure they are cool with the amount that they are given so that they can focus on their work as opposed to having to worry about paying their bills (you know: pay them enough money so they can live and be happy with their salary.) I cannot believe the revolutionary possibilities here. To summarize: hire people who are in it for more than the money. Pay people the money they ask for if they are worth it. Do not pay the money that your employees or prospective employees want if they are not delivering that type of value. Make it such that your employees are happy enough with their salary that they don't leave to take a job that pays more. Did I get all that? Is their any other advice I'm missing? Here's my follow-up question if you don't mind entertaining one? Am I on "candid camera?" Did I just waste five-ten minutes of my life while someone wrote something that mostly any third grader could probably tell you? Hiring employees who are interested in more than a paycheck and giving employees what they think they deserve or else canning them? This is absolutely revolutionary stuff. This is the stuff that can get a guy a major following on LinkedIn and other business-related websites. Let me go ahead and extend the remarks a bit more so that maybe LinkedIn can hire me. How about: give your employees the vacation time you feel they deserve. It's bad to disallow employees from accruing some vacation time. They may decide to go work for someone who offers vacation time. Further, it may be a good idea to let your employees get away from work every once in awhile with their families and loved ones. This generally creates more satisfied employees and ones who are less likely to leave you because they may be enticed to go work for someone else who offers them vacation time because they enjoy taking a vacation from time to time? Why did I just take the time to attack this article and quite possibly the stupidest thing I've ever read? Because this passes as "advice" these days from entrepreneurs who are roughly my age. I'm not sure anyone at LinkedIn actually read this. I think they just paid the author based on him writing an article and he had a college freshman write it for him. I think we should all stop and lament the state of affairs of what goes for "business advice" these days. That and the fact that I'm procrastinating is the reason that I felt compelled to point out how incredibly stupid LinkedIn is for including this article on their site with a somewhat misleading title to boot. Is this the example of a successful entrepreneur giving advice to the rest of us? God help us. Let's return to print and editors so that someone may actually read an article before it is posted to their site.

Amazing work to everyone who has been involved with the app that we are currently launching. I can't believe that we brought it to market in about four months. We've got a whole bunch of people waiting for it. The great thing about putting this kind of quality into a first version is it can only get better from here. We've got people's attention. Several Division 1 Basketball programs have already signed up and a few professional teams are sniffing around and will surely make the plunge when the capable sales staff has a chance to demo it live and they can download it straight from the Apple AppStore. Let me tell you what: it is hard getting software right. Really hard. Once you do though, it can be used and re-used, re-purposed, refactored with unlimited economies of scale. Doing it right is worth a fortune in the long-run. We did it right. Of course, I pretty much have had no social life in four months but it still feels great.

Andrew Wiles, sitting at his desk in Princeton.

The hardest challenge I know of in software has nothing to do with the ones and zero. It has everything to do with trying to get the right people to work with you and for you. If you know enough people, you can eventually find great candidates. People with a lot of experience, a great educational background and the desire to really bring it all to the table. Candidate A studied computer science at Dartmouth, has a strong background in computational geometry and five solid years at a well-respected organization. How do you talk that person out of going to a more established organization and joining a young firm? I wish it was just a matter of greed. That makes life easier; simply offer more than your competitors and get the hire. The problem is, of course, that the better candidates know that money will follow success. They don't need a huge upfront contract. What they're secretly doing is scouting for the next Silicon Graphics, the next Facebook, the next...whatever it is they are looking for. Proving to them that you are building a great business and with their help, you have a chance to be a blowout success at what it is they are passionate about is harder than any technical task I've encountered.

Here's a screenshot of the app I've been working on lately. Obviously, it's still a work-in-progress (look at those buttons, ugh.) It will allow a coach to storyboard basketball plays. I think it's going to turn out great. We'll know in about six weeks.

Simulating the physics of water has always been tricky, and game engines sometimes still have to use dodgy mechanics to make it feel real. But the above demonstration of this new fluid simulation technique proves that slowly but surely we're getting there.

Sam Hicks