The Marshmallow Test is simple. You can choose between having one marshmallow now, or wait for 15 minutes and you’ll receive two, as a reward for your patience.
Would you take the initial offer, or wait for the increased reward?
The Marshmallow Test is a well known University of Stanford research experiment. The subjects of this study were four year old kids. Even at a young age, we humans have a good grasp of ‘delayed gratification’. By resisting our initial impulses we can often receive a greater future reward.
Everyday life brings us marshmallow tests. Finish the chores, or scroll through the phone? Keep it healthy today, or one sugary snack won’t hurt? Head to the gym, or head for the sofa? It’s a constant tussle between long-term thinking, and short-term appeal.
In this post we’ll discuss why the concept of delayed gratification is vital for creating high performance software teams, and give three important strategies to avoid short-term thinking.
Delayed gratification, and hiring the best people
Hiring people is a pressured situation, especially in the competitive and fast-moving tech industry. These kind of thoughts can often crop up:
‘We’ve got so much to do, we have to hire more people’
‘We’ve got budget approved, if we don’t hire someone how, that money might not be available later on’
‘We’ve been telling everyone how short-staffed we are, if we don’t hire someone we’ll look indecisive’
‘They’re the best candidate we’ve seen, they can do the job, and it’s a very competitive market…’
As far as reasons for hiring go, these are not exactly “We’ve found someone we’re really excited about, and can’t wait for them to start”.
This kind of hiring ‘relativism’ is like someone convincing themselves to take the first marshmallow. ‘A minute ago I had zero marshmallows. Someone’s offering me one marshmallow, so really I’m already up on the deal’.
A hiring thought experiment - ‘What should Sam do?’
Imagine this scenario: Over at your main competitor, we meet Sam, the person responsible for the product line you compete against.
Sam is stressed out, overworked, has rapidly approaching deadlines, and on top of that, needs to hire someone fast (a familiar situation for many I’m sure).
After a lengthy hiring process, Sam has found a candidate who has the domain knowledge to contribute to the team immediately, but Sam also has significant doubts that this person can reach exceptional heights in this role over the long-term.
Sam’s boss is probably piling on the pressure. Sam will be getting more stressed. Clients and colleagues are waiting for the features Sam promised by the end of the quarter. Sam doesn’t want to ship features late, and disappoint so many people.
This is the test of nerves we’re talking about, the hiring marshmallow test if you like.
As the competition: would you rather Sam hires the person they've found, or goes back to the drawing board?
Of course you want Sam to buckle under the pressure, and hire for the short-term. In fact you want Sam to do this repeatedly.
- As the competition: would you rather Sam hires the person they’ve found, or goes back to the drawing board?
Of course you want Sam to buckle under the pressure, and hire for the short-term. In fact you want Sam to do this repeatedly.
If Sam rushes the next few hiring decisions, you’re now up against a team that’s not particularly cohesive, and struggles to deliver. You don’t mind that they launched some features on time this quarter, if they're going to be less of a threat in the long term.
Meanwhile you should take a long term view. Every time you hire, you only focus on the kind of people that can exceed, not just meet expectations. That can anticipate, not just react to customer needs; and address underlying causes, not just ‘fix issues’. In short, exceptional vs solid performers.
Once you’ve repeated this hiring trick a few times in a row (only hiring top performers), your team will be a wonderful combination of developer, design, and product management talent. You’ll be churning out features for fun, and inspiring each other to achieve more. In fact, you may even feel a bit sorry for Sam at this point.
How to succeed more often
In software development the difference between exceptional and adequate performance can easily be a factor three, five, ten, or more. It seems ludicrous to rush and compromise when the stakes are so high. For this reason, the one marshmallow now, or two later analogy doesn’t do the situation enough justice, but it’s a good analogy nonetheless.
It’s easier said than done to hire exceptional people, especially in stressful situations, so here are three strategies to help succeed when hiring.
1. ‘Draw a line in the sand’
It’s important to set high standards, and stick to them. If someone doesn’t meet the required standards, they shouldn’t be hired. This holds true even if they were by far the best person you’ve seen.
Once (with support from a former boss), I went several months without hiring a single developer (even though we very much needed a whole team). To cut a very long story short, it was like a prolonged marshmallow test nightmare. The delayed gratification came around 6 months after the team had started (i.e. a total wait of roughly one year).
By this point, and pretty much every month from then on, we were launching features and products that exceeded everyone’s expectations. This group of exceptional developers raised the bar of what clients thought was possible. It was a great feeling, and the inspiration for setting up my own digital agency a couple of years later.
2. Potential > Experience
The one exception I would recommend to the ‘line in the sand’ is hiring for future potential. Yes, a less experienced candidate could slow you down at first, but they have the raw talent to be a future star. Experience is important, but it’s not always the best indicator of future performance. Focus on technical knowledge or experience can often overshadow important factors such as soft skills. If you’re hiring for ‘experience’, make sure you’re hiring for people with ‘experience’ and exceptional talent.
3. Try harder
It’s hard to find very talented people (it’s our full-time job at Intaview.me). If you're not planning on using outside help, you might think you don’t have time to dedicate to recruitment. But let’s flip the switch a second. Can you really afford not to dedicate significant effort to hiring, and if so, what’s more important?
It's important not only to dedicate effort to hiring, but also to try harder than your competitors.
When it comes to sourcing candidates, we’ve done all sorts of things to try harder. We've put together relocation packages including accommodation, sorted out work visas, driven several hours to recruit graduates at lesser trodden universities, set up internship programmes, opened up offices in new countries, and so on.
It doesn’t have to be that extreme, you may find something as simple as flexibility on remote work, or part-time hours could bring you more candidates.
Pretty much everything you do during the hiring process is an opportunity to try harder. For a start your job ad can make life easier for candidates, and answer their FAQs (a lot of job ads are bland and generic). You can respond promptly to people, your interview process and team should be well structured (sufficient to make a good decision, but not excessive); and you should have an onboarding plan for this person (everything from equipment to training).
All these things can all make a big difference in a way that a ping pong table, or a bit of extra money can’t make up for (although don’t get me wrong, those are great too!).
If all that effort sounds like a drag to you, that’s because sometimes it is. But to me, the real drag would be the daily, weekly, monthly (read indefinite) grind of managing a team that needs a huge amount of input, and never delivers exceptional performance.
Conclusion
The tech industry is fast-paced and competitive, this can often lead to a sense of urgency when hiring. That said, rushing and compromising hiring decisions in software can be a costly mistake that you pay for in the long term.
The marshmallow test is a reminder of how important ‘delayed gratification’ is for hiring. You’re making an investment on behalf of your company, not a short-term decision to appease yourself, your colleagues or clients for the next few weeks.
Finding the right people is difficult and time consuming, but it’s important not to compromise. You can ‘draw a line in the land’, ‘try harder’, and even value ‘potential over experience’ to increase your chances of creating a team that can not only deliver, but also exceed expectations. That’s got to be worth a few marshmallows!
By David Fallon
Founder of Intaview.me
Further Reading
1) Attention in delay of gratification
Mischel, W., & Ebbesen, E. B. (1970). Attention in delay of gratification. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 16(2), 329–337
2) Stanford Marshmallow Experiment (Wikipedia)
3) 'Draw a line in the Sand'
Hansson, D.H. and Fried, J. (2010) ReWork: Change the Way You Work Forever (pp 43-45).
Appendix:
The original marshmallow experiment was a little more complex than kids being offered a marshmallow now, or two in fifteen minutes. There was some trust building preamble so that the children knew the adults would actually come back with the treats (kids aren’t daft you know!).
Some of the results have been called into question over the years. The original experiment linked choice in the marshmallow experiment to later outcomes in life, such as exam results. However as the children in question were all from the University of Stanford nursery, it wasn’t really a ‘random’ sample of society, and meant conclusions were stretched a bit too far.
All in all, this experiment still serves as a useful, and easy to understand analogy for delayed gratification, and making good decisions when under stress. This is why we used it to illustrate how important long-term thinking is when hiring.