Hacker News Reader

Comment by BrandonMarc | Hacker News Reader

The articles I've found have all conveniently avoided answering the biggest question: why didn't the "adults" running the school figure this out sooner? ideally, before she was hired? That the students figured it out is proof it was certainly possible to figure out.

View on HN

IMHO, two reasons:

- Adults are not super humans and can make mistakes

- and 17 year olds are as capable as adults.

In engineering people frequently ask - why nobody thought about it - well because nobody did.

Part 2 of this investigation should be "whose job it was to check new principal's credentials and and how they profited from looking the other way"

Edit: was that person the only applicant? If not why did the process identify them as the most suitable candidate?

Part 2 of this investigation should be "whose job it was to check new principal's credentials and and how they profited from looking the other way"

That really shouldn't be taken as a given.

"Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence." Or by laziness, overwork, miscommunication, etc.

If you're doing root cause analysis of a system failure, you're not looking to blame an individual. If you find something malicious then, sure, deal with it. But assume good faith in all parties from the outset and you're more likely to succeed in fixing the problem.

That's no way to witch hunt.

True, the postmortem should not be focused on blaming any one person. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't ignore the presence of such crimes or prosecute them!

> If not why did the process identify them as the most suitable candidate?

Because hiring is entirely broken in many industries.

Yeah, but that's just an arbitrary subset of "nearly all processes are broken in most industries".

The key answer is in what you wrote: "whose job it was". People do jobs mostly to get paychecks, so like water flowing downhill, will avoid investing effort into anything they can avoid. The students OTOH, had a strong non-monetary motivation driving their efforts, so they obviously dug deeper and more thoroughly.

Also they said there were a group of students taking weeks to research this, compared with overworked people involved in the hiring process.

This article ( http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-06/principal-resigns-afte... ) has a quote from Superintendent Destry Brown: "He said the district, which does not typically ask for official transcripts until after a hiring decision has been made, will likely change its vetting process."

What an excuse.

He describes a very poor practice that they still failed to follow.

All it takes is just one person in the first spot in her listing of jobs on her resume to fail to properly vet her. Once you start having job experience, people don't look as hard at your resume. Nobody wants to do all the legwork verifying transcripts and calling up references, they just assume someone else down the line did the work. The resume looks impressive but she's not claiming a Harvard doctorate so it doesn't sound totally incredible. I laugh that they can't even find records of her getting a bachelor's. That's when you know someone at her first job was either very lazy to not even verify her or she got in because she knew someone and they didn't bother to check anything.

If you read between the lines, it seems odd to me that the district superintendent "encouraged" the investigation prior to publication. Sounds like a turf war.

So if this decision was made by the Board without staff assistance, I can see them being swayed heavily by a female candidate who had international experience. It's the ol' out-of-town expert bias.

To give the adults a little credit, the students may have had more time to work on the mystery. The adults on the hiring committee were simultaneously holding down jobs, maintaining homes, changing diapers, cooking for their families, etc.

The hiring committee probably had deadlines for researching the candidates and making final decisions, whereas the students didn't have the same sort of time constraints. (I don't mean to minimize the achievement of the students! But you asked for factors that could have allowed the adults to miss this one.)

The woman was probably fairly charismatic to pull this off. The hiring committee surely had several face-to-face meetings with her and was swayed by her charm. The students would have seen her 'fake principal' self rather than her 'job interview' self. They didn't get the full snow job, so they were perhaps freer to think more objectively.

Also, I'm sure there's a false sense of safety in numbers for the hiring committee: if one person (or every person) had vague doubts, they might think, "Oh well, everyone else seems to think she's okay."

The next question would be: Are the students going to investigate that question next?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com