Design Staff is a blog about product design, user research and hiring designers at startups.
HN commenters cite its hiring essay on the difficulty of finding someone with both design and JavaScript skills. One also wants to republish an essay in a product management resource.
The aggregation aspect of the thought experiment was just to frame things. I'm not a proponent of making decisions based on the aggregate. A TL;DR version of what I wrote might be "Learn to do it right before you do it well."
Developing enough empathy for consumers is definitely necessary, but also really difficult to do. Design thinking is the best approach to solving that problem I've encountered so far, but testing is still a huge component.
This reminds me of an awesome series of posts on how to run a 5-day design sprint that came out of Google Venture's design team: http://www.designstaff.org/articles/product-design-sprint-2012-10-02.html
It is.
We are in the process to build one of the best ressources on Product Management on the web right now and Ken's essay was a perfect fit. It's really hard to find good advice on hiring Product Managers so I've reached out to him re re-publishing his essay :)
Also make sure to check out what they are doing over at the Google Ventures Design Staff blog:
http://www.designstaff.org/
The problem the quoted blog post was having was trying to hire a unicorn (http://www.designstaff.org/articles/hiring-a-designer-2011-11-01.html) – they want expert Javascript skills and design skills. They don't tend to happen in the same person, and so command a high price.