Parrish: Bureaucratic hiring creates homogeneous teams with shared blind spots
Shane Parrish · #93 Matt Holland: Zero Day · Sep 29, 2020 · at 1:17:21
Shane Parrish (host) and Matthew Holland (CEO of Field Effect) discuss how institutional changes after the Edward Snowden leaks affected intelligence agency hiring cultures.
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“What happens is like post Snowden you end up hiring, I call it the storm trooper problem, which is like you end up basically hiring the same type of person, right? They're sort of like never had a problem in their life. They get straight A's. They do all the right things. They tie their shoelaces the right way and they come into the organization and they get promoted. And the process for promotion now is sort of like, here are the 10 things you need to do to get promoted. Because it's so sort of like laid out and so bureaucratic that you end up, you're 30 and all of a sudden you're in charge of solving a problem that nobody's ever solved before, but you're in a group of people who all see the problem the exact same way. So you all share the same blind spot.”
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