Isaac Correa · Madrid
My name is Isaac Correa, and I do not choose the people I work with by their grades or their titles. I look for two things, and neither of them appears on a CV. Here is what they are, and why I trust them more than the paper.
For a long time the marks and the title were a fair shortcut. They told you that someone could take in a fixed body of knowledge and reproduce it under pressure, and that used to be most of the job. Artificial intelligence now reproduces fixed knowledge better than any of us, and it does not get tired. The shortcut has not become useless, but it has lost most of what it used to measure.
What the work needs today is not intelligence in that sense. It is ingenuity: the ability to do a task that did not exist last year, with tools that did not exist last month. Nobody has a certificate for that yet, so I stopped asking for one.
The first thing I look for is someone who does not care what other people think of them. That includes me, the person sitting across the table. Not rudeness; independence. Someone who says what they see instead of what they guess I want to hear, and who will keep saying it after they have joined.
That person will tell me when I am wrong. A company where nobody tells the founder he is wrong still finds out, only later and from a client. I would rather hear it on a Tuesday from someone in the room.
The second thing is initiative shown where nobody asked for it. Somebody who built something small on their own. Somebody who had an idea, tried to make it exist, could not, and can tell you exactly where it stopped. That last one counts as much as the first. The person who tried and did not get there has learned more about making things than the person who never left the syllabus.
What they made does not have to be good. It has to be theirs, and they have to be able to talk about it for ten minutes without notes.
People with both signs are rare, and when I find one I have stopped pretending otherwise: they are worth four of anyone else. Not because they work four times as hard. Because they need to be told once, they notice what nobody assigned, and they keep the rest of the room honest without meaning to.
There is a line I use to explain the difference, and I mean it literally. Being resourceful makes you a better machine. Being hungry makes you a better human.
Resourceful is valuable: problems get solved, things get shipped. But a machine can be resourceful now, and it gets more resourceful every month. Hunger is the part that does not come from a manual. It is wanting the thing to exist badly enough to do the work nobody assigned. Every person I would want beside me on a hard week has the second, and the first followed on its own.
Isaac Correa, Madrid. ORCID 0009-0003-0657-4419.
Isaac Correa elsewhere: ORCID · GitHub · Crunchbase · LinkedIn · X · Medium · Hashnode · Substack · blog · Peerlist · Hellomatik · Kodalogic. The full list, with identifiers, is on the home page.
The cliff of innovation — the point where the hard part stops being building and becomes integrating.
A product is aimed at one person, or at nobody — the sentence that sold nothing, and the one that did.
The tool exists before it is built — what two months of screens turned out to be worth.
Copy until you find creativity where there is none — how I think about innovation.
How I work on a product — the order I trust, and two months screen by screen.
The questions people ask, answered — short answers, each with a source.