Comment by amorphid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by amorphid | Hacker News Reader

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The way I think of it is that we haven't yet figured out concrete ways to assess whether someone can or can't be an effective developer on a team. So if you want me to hire you, and I can't directly measure your skills (because I'm a suboptimal interviewer?), then I need data points that increase my confidence that you are more likely to work out.

This is a 100% contrived, but here's an example...

- I run a dev team largely using Microsoft tech

- You are a Java developer

- I had a Java developer try out the Microsoft stuff, and quit because they decided they didn't wanna go all in on C#

- If you're work experience in largely in Java, but I see you spending a lot of time writing C# in your personal time, or somehow demonstrating a passion for you, I'm more likely to think you'll be a fit.

Maybe asking people to demonstrate a passion for tech is related to feeling defensive about that tech. Plenty of back-end-y developers trash talk CSS and JavaScript. Someone who works on front-end stuff all day long might not like that trend, so they filter for people excited about JavaScript, and I can't say I'd blame them for that.

I agree wholeheartedly with your first paragraph! As an industry, we still don't have the first clue how to hire. It's not just you.

Where I differ is with your (admittedly contrived) example. I've interviewed dozens (hundreds?) of people over the years, and I can't say I've seen any correlation between passion and professionalism/competence/longevity.

I think "Hiring for passion" is the new "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". It's the CYA response. We have no clue if a hire is going to work out, but if they spend their weekends writing C# for fun, and they don't work out at our company, we can at least tell our bosses "They came across as so passionate during the interview -- we couldn't have known they would turn out to be a bad hire!"

> Where I differ is with your (admittedly contrived) example. I've interviewed dozens (hundreds?) of people over the years, and I can't say I've seen any correlation between passion and professionalism/competence/longevity.

Makes sense. I think I was trying to say we come up with seemingly arbitrary reasons to hire & reject people. Before getting into software, I had expected the opposite. As far as I can tell, hiring would be more effective if we asked candidates to roll a d20 to make a charisma check w/ a difficulty modified by how we're feeling that day.

Great point. The word "science" appears in the name of the field that I studied, yet I haven't seen any evidence that our current hiring processes in this field are better than random (i.e., the null hypothesis).

If I made a software company who openly declared that their hiring process was purely random, would it work as a company? Would it be legal? For that matter, is a standard tech interview legally valid[1]? What if there is no known valid method?

[1]: https://www.hiresuccess.com/blog/facts-about-validation

I'm imagining an overly academic interview question that goes something like this...

"It's been determined that our CS interviews are both random and unscientific, and we'd like to reverse that trend. To give us more control of the outcome, and to help us be more science-y, how would you design a random number generator which can be made deterministic by giving it a seed value? We need one for our hiring process."

> but I see you spending a lot of time writing C# in your personal time, or somehow demonstrating a passion for you, I'm more likely to think you'll be a fit.

Do you ever worry that you’re overlooking talented people who have a life outside of programming?

It wasn't a great example, and I don't manage a team, or work at a Microsoft shop. I think I was trying to say it's easier to avoid making bad hiring decisions than it is to work on making good hiring decisions. It's probably also hard to practice hiring decisions at all, which doesn't help in reducing the learning curve.

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