For a potential Microkid, the interview with Alsing was the crucial one, and "a successful interview with Alsing constituted a signing up." His opening question was always the same: "What do you want to do?" The content of the answer didn't matter. "Alsing didn't care if a recruit showed no special fondness for computers; and the fact that an engineer had one of his own and liked to play with it did not argue for him." What Alsing screened for was force of desire. A recruit who said "I'm looking at a lot of possibilities and I'm not sure what field I want to get into yet" got a polite, abbreviated interview. One who said "I want to build one" got probed: "That's what I want to hear. Now I want to find out if he means it." So Alsing would tell the group's story and watch for "some fire in his eyes — I say 'in his eyes,' because I don't know where it is; if it's there, it's there." Grades winnowed the pile first, as a proxy for capacity for long, hard work, but the final filter was wanting. The insight: for work that demands everything, stated interest and even credentials are weak predictors; the strong one is whether the person *wants the thing itself*, testably, when you push on it. Interview to provoke and observe that, not to inventory qualifications. --- *Source: [[The Soul of a New Machine]] (Tracy Kidder, Little, Brown 1981) — Ch 3 — Building a Team*