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Comment by ken | Hacker News Reader

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!"

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> 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."

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