Best Way to Screen Future Employees? Play Sports.
startuphoodlum.com
startuphoodlum.com
Save yourself some time and read something else.
the coder who tries his hardest on every second in sports, is, more likely than not, going to be the better colleague because he/she will do whatever it takes to win.
Part of any sport is knowing when to push as hard as you can. In BJJ, it means using your strength when you have leverage, and not trying to force something when you don't have leverage. I think that has transfer to other areas.
Maybe this is purely a semantic argument, but I hate when people say that as you advance you work less hard. You work just as hard, you just work in different ways.
Knowing when and how to conserve energy is an important part of the game as well.
my theories are based on observation, and working/playing with hundreds of teammates and employees over the years and how ive seen on-the-field play translate to in-company behavior.
No. Your theories are based on the well-known principle that we tend to fairly rapidly imprint on a certain type of candidate as being "good" and then confirm our bias at every opportunity. These people are usually like ourselves in some key way. Because of this your initial biases tend to become fixed in stone no matter how much subsequent experience you get.
In this case your advice is particularly obviously wrong. For example you entirely discount people like me, who grew up in a family that doesn't play sports and who has a mild coordination problem on top of that, would have no chance at such an "interview". However my actual on the job performance has been extremely good.
But you would never consider hiring me so you'll never see that. Nor would I want to work with someone like you because your desire to have people "110% committed" probably blinds you to learning how to properly manage software developers. (I'd be willing to take money on a bet that you're prone to "death march" projects.)
There is one good thing about your strategy. You're selecting for a strong culture which improves the odds of a good cultural fit. But you will only accidentally select people on the basis of actual competence.
I obviously interpreted the article very differently than you did. I don't see the fact that you've never played sports before as a disadvantage in such a hypothetical screening process at all. You say that you have a mild coordination problem, but again I don't see that as a disadvantage. The definition of "sport" is very loosely applied these days. Even poker is considered by many people a "sport" these days (at least in North America). So replace ultimate frisbee with poker and your coordination argument is no longer meaningful. I've played sports with many people who have physical disabilities ranging from muscular dystrophy, cerebral palsy, to blindness or deafness and in every case I've seen it's very easy to separate those who are willing to put in effort, willing to try something new, willing to take risks, and show sportsmanship from those who aren't.
I believe what the author is advocating is the use of a sport (I'll call it a competitive game to be more accurate) to screen for the ability to persevere in the face of adversity, show drive, and most importantly show willingness to learn in an unfamiliar, unexpected situation. I could easily make an argument for why each of those traits are desirable to have in an employee.
> But you would never consider hiring me so you'll never see that
I think the author would choose not to hire you, not based on your lack of coordination or inexperience in sports, but would do so based on your stubbornness and unwilliginess to participate in something new. I equate this to the same attitude that I occasionally see in programmers who dismiss new technologies without even giving them a fair chance.
That said I can see how it would be possible to misinterpret the author's use of the word "sport" for a physically competitive game - and if that's the case then what I said above doesn't apply. Nonetheless, in my opinion even if the author had strictly meant a "sport" in terms of a physically competitive game there are some valid points that can be taken from the article.
As for your opinions of me, you're projecting from rather limited data. Let me give you some more data points. 3 of my last 5 jobs were at small to medium startups. (I was only at the 4th for a few months before getting an offer from Google, which is the 5th.) Of those one sold for about $80 million, one sold for over $400 million, and one is getting by reasonably well. (Admittedly it won't sell for anything like the valuations of the others.) Now it is impossible to say what the contribution of any one person is to a gelled team, so there is no reasonable way of quantifying my individual contribution. But the two that sold sold for around $4 million/employee, and the founders of all three would be happy to write me a glowing recommendation any time I asked saying that they thought I was a key part of their teams.
Furthermore if I was unwilling to participate in something new, then I wouldn't have jumped at a job at Google, working with a whole mess of technologies that I've never worked with before.
I submit that a process for hiring developers that won't even consider people like me is somewhat flawed.
What I am saying is that IF a prospective employee does play a sport, it is a HUGE value add to watch/play with them to be able to see and judge their personality in that context.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Act...
It certainly doesn't sound like the sort of place I would want to work, but it might not be as bad of an idea as I initially thought; if you have an office full of people who play sports, I imagine that organization could translate to other kinds of teamwork.
On the other hand, you are shutting out a whole lot of really good Engineers. (not to say there aren't good engineers who play sports, there certainly are, but there are a lot more good Engineers who don't.)
i'd also mention that i play ultimate with a bunch of engineers on a weekly basis so they are out there...