Chris Dragan's Corner

Noticed on Herb Sutter’s blog: quotes from Steve Jobs.

The interesting quote is: “In most businesses, the difference between average and good [employee] is at best 2 to 1. […] But in software, it’s at least 25 to 1. […] The secret of my success is that we have gone to exceptional lengths to hire the best people in the world.”

I guess the difference between people in the middle of that range (12) and the people closer to the end (1) can easily be spotted per my previous post. But how do you tell the difference between the best ones (25) and the middle ones (12)? Especially this: how do you tell whether a person has the potential to become a “25”? How did Steve do that?