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Comment by tapeleg | Hacker News Reader

Career and social life should be completely and utterly separated. The content on your social media page should have no bearing on your ability to perform the job at hand.

Quite honestly, an employer that even looks at your social media profile to do a sort of casual "character check" on you, is not one that you should want to work for in the first place.

Especially true in the realm of IT, where there just simply aren't enough solid, responsible people to fill the need.

This article presents a nice thought, but on principle, I'm just gonna keep doing my thing outside of work (documenting what I want on social media), and crushing it AT work. My career should be growing based on job performance, not that one time I accidentally got too drunk at a bar.

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> an employer that even looks at your social media profile to do a sort of casual "character check" on you, is not one that you should want to work for in the first place.

Companies aren't going to ignore "free information available at your fingertips" about the candidates they hire.

For example a problem candidate may have easily accessible "red flags" on their social media such as racist stuff and drug use.

They could "save" themselves some costs and future problems by knowing that ahead of time.

When companies are trying to optimise their hiring process they aren't going to ignore free additional information about the candidates, they want every last piece they can get their hands on so they can (at least in their mind) make the optimal decision.

Nobody cares if your SQL is written by nazis as long as nobody knows they're nazis. Nobody cares if your sales guys are alcoholics as long as they bring in busines and don't embarrass the company. By intentionally filtering on irreverent criteria (like the politics and drug habits of back-end devs) you're needlessly shrinking the talent pool.

The time the average hire spends with the company is short enough that having to fire the occasional qualified employee early over "culture fit" really isn't a big deal.

> Nobody cares if your SQL is written by nazis as long as nobody knows they're nazis.

If they're posting nazi stuff on Facebook, everybody knows they're nazis.

That is why I quit LinkedIn

The issue is the false positive/false negative rate and a lack of data in general. Without any measure of how 'good' the info gained via social media is, the data is essentially useless. For large companies like Walmart, they can garner this data and see if it correlates at all. Google used to use GPA in their hiring decisions, but dropped it as it did not correlate to how good an employee is.

For example: drug use. Many people use drugs, but what is the difference between them? Is one type of drug a 'good' drug, like caffeine or nicotine? Burning Man attendees may be good employees and may micro-dose with LSD while at work. Does this make them a good hire? Again, the issue is that there just isn't enough data to properly correlate.

Yes but if you post pictures of yourself holding up signs at a KKK rally then a company hiring you is a PR liability for them if the could've checked and didn't.

Yes, but you've said nothing about the cost-profit ratio about a hypothetical horrible racist. Even discounting the cost of the negative PR, do they still make more for you than otherwise? Is horrible racism something that your company cares about other than the money? Maybe having them work for you is a better thing than them not working at all?

Social media can be very 'noisy' and should be one of a number of factors that are used in decisions.

"Companies aren't going to ignore "free information available at your fingertips" about the candidates they hire."

I do. I often interview candidates in my role as a software developer at my company. Finding them on social media would be trivial. But I don't look for them there. I don't care.

I don't even want to know their politics before giving my recommendation and I'm deeply suspicious of anybody who thinks they would want to know that information.

Second this. I make it a point not to look them up on social media. There have been a couple of occasions where I’ve checked their LinkedIn profile if I feel something’s amiss, but that’s quite rare.

What should happen and what does happen are two completely separate things in reality.

If performance actually mattered I'd venture to guess 95%+ of people would be fired immediately. Maybe I'm cynical about it in my advancing years, but kissing ass pays off exponentially more than producing good work (unless you own your own business).

In my experience for whatever reason a lot of software engineers consider normal functional communication with their peers and managers as ass kissing. Is it because of being introverted?

I'd say there's a large streak of being self absorbed and thinking their shit doesn't stink.

I'm likely just as guilty of this. More so in the past as I continually try to correct my behavior (not always successful but I'm trying!).

On the flip side, employees can use this to their benefit also. I almost joined a company where my boss was a wildly right-wing put-up-the-wall type. Perhaps he'd be a good boss. But i'm brown. Do I want to take that chance? If he supports someone who think me and my family are all rapists, i'd like to know that.

Now that most people have been taught to use their real identity on social media how can you meaningfully separate these things? The lines are even more blurred if you're applying for some social/RH position. Even for a coder you might want to google a bit to look for contributions to open source projects or mailing list posts since that can be a very good way to see how the person actually works and communicates.

While I believe that the big data giants like FB and Google ought to be better regulated I also think that you have to make the users aware of their responsibility. Don't put anything publicly online that you wouldn't be comfortable seeing in the front page of a newspaper. And do the same thing when posting pictures and videos of your friends and family. If you don't value your own privacy Facebook won't do it for you.

I'm pretty much retired but I was an engineer and then a manager and then a CEO/VP engineering for ~20 years. If you think I'm not going to google you before I offered you a job you are mistaken. Of course I'm going to do that.

Think of it this way. One of the questions we asked ourselves about every hire is "would they pass the grocery store test?" Which is: if we saw that person in the store would we go chat with them, because we thought that would be fun, or would we cringe and try and hide from them. It's a good test, work is not just cut and dried, there is a social aspect of work even if it is just you'd say hi outside of work.

Your social media gives me a glimpse into the rest of your life and you'd better believe that is interesting info to a prospective employer.

What makes you think it gives an accurate or actionable glimpse?

Man, so much of what seems defensive pushback, I don't get it.

Here's the deal. I ran a small company for almost 2 decades in the valley. Everyone worked with everyone else very closely. One bad apple can screw up the whole company, make everyone miserable. So I used every chunk of info I could get to make sure that a potential hire was gonna be a fit. That's just being prudent.

If you are posting on mailing lists about how you screwed your boss out of a pile of work by outsourcing it to some dude in India, yeah, not a great fit. If you are posting on facebook how you partied all week on your companies' dime while they thought you were working, yeah, not so much. Etc.

If you are in to Harley-Davidson motorcycles (which I hate), well, not gonna hold that against you, though I'll let you ride my r1200gs (every Harley guy who has taken me up on that walks away looking at that GS like that's the bike he should have gotten).

I'm somewhat surprised that people question a hiring manager looking around. If you were building a team that had to work together are you seriously telling me you wouldn't look? I'd like to hear that from anyone who has successfully built multiple teams and then have them explain why they wouldn't look.

I am a manager. I wouldn't look because I understand that online representations of a person paint an incomplete at best and extremely inaccurate at worst picture of the person, especially as it pertains to their ability to work, and that there isn't any solid empirical data supporting assertions like the ones you're making.

Do you actually believe most of what you read on the internet? It's just amazing to me that anyone actually takes these things as seriously as you do.

You manage what? I'd like to know because this just seems like a young person who wants to do well but hasn't been around the block.

I don't like your grocery store test at all. Before I give reasons, can you elaborate on what things make you "cringe"?

Edit: Surprised at the support for grocery store test. If I was hiring and doing the grocery store test, then I would reject everyone who has posted in support of this test as they make me "cringe".

it doesn't really matter. would you like to work for someone who cringes when he sees you? it's not a good career choice.

Is it not obvious? It's a visual opinion that is open to interpretation as much as any company that can consider you a fit for their culture. It's not a universal cringe per se, but likely falls into 'outside of social norms' cringe.

I really doubt the "grocery store test" is based at all on appearances, but if, after knowing you, would they want to go up and talk to you if they saw you outside of work, or would they try and hide, and hope you don't notice them.

This guy/gal gets it. That's exactly what I was trying to say and apparently failed at saying.

I don't think I have ever once in my life seen someone in the grocery store that I want to have a fun chat with. Excluding potential dates haha.

I think I failed to communicate.

Let's try a different version and call it the "no assholes rule".

If I hired someone who was a top 1% engineer but was a complete asshole to work with, that's someone who would fail the asshole test. It's extremely unlikely I'd have hired that person, we built a team of people who were both good at what they did and friendly with each other.

The grocery store test I apparently completely screwed up in getting across what I meant. Someone who failed the asshole test would fail the grocery store test. What the grocery store test is trying to get across is how you would react when you saw a co-worker outside of work. Do you like them enough that you'd go say hi, maybe chat a little before moving on with your shopping? Or do you dislike them enough that you'd try and avoid them?

If applied in the right way, it makes you think about the person in a broader sense than just their coding skills. If you like how they code and you would like to chat with them outside of work, that's a pretty strong indicator, in my experience, that you'll bond as a team.

I'm not sure how I failed so badly at explaining that, whatever. The point is that building a team is not just about individual skills, it's also about how the team gets along. A soccer player recently was trying to make the same point when he said "you can buy any player you want, you can't buy a team".

tl;dr: building a team is not just about skill, it's also about chemistry.

You mention you judge a candidates social media prior to offering the job. Does that mean you have at least done an in person interview with them? I ask because it’s really hard to determine a person by their social media. Maybe unless for an older generation where their real life aligns with their social media presence. But for many younger generations, they couldn’t be more different.

Regardless, a social media profile displays the things that you value - or at least that you claim to value. Social media tends to be a highlight reel for many younger people, so having insight into what they view as "highlights" gives you insight into what they value and how they want to be perceived. If you see someone with wildly differing values on social media from the ones that they portrayed in an interview or application, then that should definitely be a red flag when reviewing their application.

Resume screen first. Phone screen next. In person screen next though I may well have done the google search before the in person thing if I'm paying to fly them out.

And it's worth stating that for me, social media is any sort of web foot print I can find with google (or these days duckduckgo).

We did the same thing with prospective customers. You google them and see if you find a bunch of people complaining about them. Yes? Work less hard on that sale. No, everyone loves them? Work more hard on that sale.

I never talk to strangers in the grocery store. Do you?

> Career and social life should be completely and utterly separated. The content on your social media page should have no bearing on your ability to perform the job at hand.

Yeah, but since the person hiring you hasn't worked with you yet, they're using a variety of imperfect indicators of how you'll perform.

I assume most people have some embarrassing and/or drug-related stuff on their social media. To me, it would indicate a lack of maturity if I (a stranger) could still see those. Could that be dead wrong? Absolutely! But as someone who hires people, I'm trying to find ways to filter candidates who often seem almost completely the same.

There's also the issue of whether your social media indicates a cultural mismatch. If someone is raging about immigrants on Twitter and our team has immigrants on it, I'm not going to hire that person.

Yet github will not let you turn off star ratings, commit history and the fancy commit graph (which I consider social features). I know it's not an indicator of how good a dev you are, but "sometimes" recruiters are clueless about this fact.

Agreed. Luckily my employer's policy is to not look at it, and never take it into account.

Although additionally, if saying 'fuck' on twitter excludes me from your selection, I probably don't want to be there anyway.

As an anecdote, I did quite thorough background checks on candidates before I hired them, more thorough than what they expected or suspected. I get occasional texts from two former employees thanking me for the great role I gave them and the great work environment. They were happy to have the job that I had to offer, and no I had no shortage of candidates for it.

I think it's OK to the check Facebook profiles and look for stupidly shared information around drugs or something like this.

I wouldn't want to hire a specialist who is publicly promoting drug usage.

On the other hand if you Google me you find something related to me liking ganja. Which imo helps future bosses to filter me if they aren't OK with that.

Meanwhile, SV enterpreneurs take daily microdoses of LSD.

How would you know if a potential employer does google-fu on you?

Take out an ad on your own name.

"Ask Onychomys the secret to getting hot singles in your area to date you!"

You know employers perform credit checks to perform the same 'character check' on you, if you have bad credit the chance of you getting a job offer goes down dramatically. Career growth is rarely based on job performance.

> Career growth is rarely based on job performance.

I hear what you’re saying about credit checks. But I think the sentence I quoted is a little too extreme. Performance usually plays a significant role. It’s just not the only factor.

Otherwise, (for example,) why is the careless, checked out teenager at a fast food joint not promoted to manager?

> Otherwise, (for example,) why is the careless, checked out teenager at a fast food joint not promoted to manager?

Because managers are increasingly hired from the outside, increasingly with college degrees, and a diligent, hard-working teenager wouldn't have been promoted either?

I'm with you on the broader point, things like credit checks and social media lookups are mostly disqualifiers for hiring, while performance is still a big part of career growth after being hired. But it seems a bit odd to use entry-level service work as the example, since performance often is meaningless there once you're not getting fired.

This is a American only thing isn't it? Anyone knows of this in Europe?

Oh yes, America only, at least as far as I am aware of. I should have specified that.

I think or some finance jobs they will.

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