How to hire programmers | Chris Lattner and Lex Fridman

as you mentioned modular is very new Mojo is very new it's a relatively small team yeah it's building up this gigantic stack this incredible stack that's going to perhaps Define the future of development of our AI overlords uh we just hope it will be useful as do all of us uh so what uh what have you learned from this process of building up a team maybe one question is how do you hire great programmers great people that operate in this compiler Hardware machine learning software interface design space yeah and maybe are a little bit fluid yeah what they can do so okay so language design too so building a company is just as interesting in different ways is building a language like different skill sets different things but super interesting and I've built a lot of teams in a lot of different places um if you zoom in from the big problem into recruiting well so here's our problem okay I'll I'll just I'll be very straightforward about this we started modular with a lot of conviction about we understand the problems we understand the customer pain points we need to work backwards from the suffering in the industry and if we solve those problems we think it'll be useful for people but the problem is is that the people we need to hire as you say are all these super specialized people that have jobs at Big Tech big Tech worlds right and you know we I don't think we have um product Market fit in the way that a normal startup does we don't have product Market fit challenges because right now everybody's using Ai and so many of them are suffering and they want help and so again we started with strong conviction now again you have to hire and recruit the best and the best all have jobs and so what we've done is we said okay well let's build an amazing culture start with that that's usually not something a company starts with usually you hire a bunch of people and then it people start fighting and it turns into gigantic mess and then you try to figure out how to improve your culture later my co-founder Tim in particular is super passionate about making sure that that's right and we've spent a lot of time early on to make sure that we can scale can you comment aside before we get to the second yeah what makes for a good culture um so I mean there's many different cultures and I have learned many things from several very unique almost famously unique cultures and some of them I learned what to do and some of them I learned what not to do yep okay and so um we want an inclusive culture uh I believe in like amazing people working together and so I've seen cultures where people you have amazing people and they're fighting each other I see amazing people and they're told what to do like Thou shalt line up and do what I say it doesn't matter if it's the right thing do it right and neither of these is the and I've seen people that have no Direction they're just kind of floating in different places and they want to be amazing they just don't know how and so a lot of it starts with have a Clear Vision right and so we have a clear vision of what we're doing and so I kind of grew up at Apple in my engineering life right and so a lot of the Apple DNA rubbed off on me my co-founder Tim also is like a strong product guy and so what we learned is you know I was taught at Apple that you don't work from building cool technology you don't work from like come up with a cool product and think about the features you'll have in the big check boxes and stuff like this because if you go talk to customers they don't actually care about your product they don't care about your technology what they care about is their problems right and if your product can help solve their problems well hey they might be interested in that right and so if you speak to them about their problems if you understand and you have compassion you understand what people are working with then you can work backwards to building an amazing product so divisions by defining the problem and then you can work backwards in solving technology got it and at Apple like it's I think pretty famously said that you know for every you know there's a hundred no's for every yes I would find that to say that there's a hundred not yet for every yes but famously if you go back to the iPhone for example right the iPhone one every I mean many people laughed at it because it didn't have 3G it didn't have copy and paste right and then a year later okay finally it has 3G but it still doesn't have copy and paste it's a joke nobody will ever use this product blah blah blah blah blah blah right well year three it had copy and paste and people stopped talking about it right and so and so being laser focused and having conviction and understanding what the core problems are and giving the team the space to be able to build the right Tech is really important um also I mean you come back to recruiting you have to pay well right so we have to pay industry leading salaries and have good benefits and things like this that's a big piece uh we're a remote first company and so we have to uh uh so remote first has a very strong set of pros and cons on the one hand you can hire people from wherever they are and you can attract amazing talent even if they live in strange places or unusual places on the other hand you have time zones on the other hand you have like everybody on the internet will fight if they don't understand each other and so we've had to learn how to like have a system where we actually fly people in and we get the whole company together periodically and then we get work groups together and we plan and execute together and there's like an intimacy to the in-person brainstorming I guess you lose but maybe you don't maybe if you get to know each other well and you trust each other maybe you can do that yeah well so when the pandemic first hit I mean I'm curious about your experience too the first thing I missed was having whiteboards yeah right those design discussions where like I can high high intensity work through things get things done work through the problem of the day understand where you're on figure out and solve the problem and move forward yeah um but we figured out ways to work around that now with you know all these uh screen sharing and other things like that that we do the thing I miss now is sitting down at a lunch table with the team yeah the spontaneous things like those the the coffee the coffee bar things and the and the bumping into each other and getting to know people outside of the transactional solve a problem over Zoom and I think there's there's just a lot of stuff that um I'm not an expert at this I don't know who is hopefully there's some people but there's stuff that somehow is missing on Zoom even with the Whiteboard if you look at that if you have a room with one person at the Whiteboard and there's like three other people at a table there's uh first of all there's a social aspect of that where you're just shooting the a little bit almost like yeah as people are just kind of coming in and yeah that but also while like it's a breakout discussion that happens for like seconds at a time maybe an inside joke or it's like this interesting Dynamic that happens that Zoom you're bonding yeah you're bonding you're bonding but through that bonding you get the excitement there's certain ideas are like complete and you'll see that in the faces of others that you won't see necessarily on zoom in like something it feels like that should be possible to do without being in person well I mean being in person is a very different thing yeah I don't it's worth it but you can't always do it and so again we're still learning and we're also learning as like Humanity with this new reality right but um but what we found is that getting people together whether it be a team or the whole company or whatever is worth the expense because people work together and are happier after that like it just it just like there's a massive period of time where you like go out and things start getting frayed pull people together and then you realize that we're all working together we see things the same way we work through the disagreement or the misunderstanding we're talking across each other and then you work much better together and so things like that I think are really quite important what about uh people that are kind of specialized in very different aspects of the stack working together what are some interesting challenges there yeah well so I mean I mean there's lots of interesting people as you can tell I'm you know hard to deal with too but you're one of the most lovable the uh uh so one of the so there's different philosophies in building teams uh for me and so some people say higher 10x programmers and that's the only thing that whatever that means right um what I believe in is building well-balanced teams teams that have people that are different in them like if you have all generals and no troops or all troops and no generals or you have all people that think in one way and not the other way what you get is you get a very biased and skewed and weird situation where people end up being unhappy and so what I like to do is I like to build teams of people where they're not all the same you know we do have teams and they're focused on like runtime or compiler GPU or Excel or whatever the specialty is but people bring a different take and have a different perspective and I look for people that complement each other and particularly if you look at leadership teams and things like this you don't want everybody thinking the same way you want people bringing different perspectives and experiences and so I think that's really important

Channel: Lex Clips

Views: 93,038

Keywords: ai, ai clips, ai podcast, ai podcast clips, artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence podcast, chris lattner, computer science, consciousness, deep learning, einstein, elon musk, engineering, friedman, joe rogan, lex ai, lex clips, lex fridman, lex fridman podcast, lex friedman, lex mit, lex podcast, machine learning, math, math podcast, mathematics, mit ai, philosophy, physics, physics podcast, science, tech, tech podcast, technology, turing

Id: 9UbV_Q18JAI

Length: 9min 45sec (585 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 04 2023