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Comment by jimbokun | Hacker News Reader

Peter Thiel refused to hire someone who liked to play "hoops":

"PayPal once rejected a candidate who aced all the engineering tests because for fun, the guy said that he liked to play hoops. That single sentence lost him the job. "

http://blakemasters.com/post/21437840885/peter-thiels-cs183-...

You seem to assume everyone agrees that making hiring decisions on factors with zero relevance to doing the work doesn't make sense. Sadly that's not the case.

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Reading through that, is this kind of thing really popular in startup culture? I have only worked at medium-large companies, and this sort of thing would have been completely nutso.

> PayPal was a place where the younger engineers could and would sometimes wrestle with each other on the floor to solve disputes! If you didn’t get the odd mix of nerdiness + alpha maleness, you just stuck out.

By hoops do you mean basketball?

I can imagine Thiel being perturbed by that verbiage.

I don't understand. Please enlighten me?

Ah so using the term hoops disqualified him.

I can't say I disagree with the decision.

He wasn't hiring for an NBA franchise, so what the hell does someone's free time hobbies have to do with the hiring decision?

Basketball in someone's free time isn't the issue. Using the term hoops vs basketball is. This can show major cultural differences. Perhap the gap was too wide for Peter.

I feel like there is a presidential golf joke in there somewhere.

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