Comment by rifung | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rifung | Hacker News Reader

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> Ultimately the job was customer support some mild technical skills / ability to learn / take good notes / ask good questions / the ability to formulate a theory, test it, and so on.

> They couldn't find any of the fancy CS degree folks

Fascinating.. I wonder if their creating a high barrier of entry actually backfired and caused them to hire less competent people?

My hypothesis: people with CS degrees are fairly high in demand, and on average are qualified to get much "better" jobs than customer support. This being the case, if you require a CS degree, you end up with predominantly the people who were unable to get a better job elsewhere, who are less capable whether it be due to motivation, intelligence, or something else.

Note this completely assumes that software engineering jobs have better compensation/benefits than customer support and I acknowledge I don't know your previous employer's specific case. I also don't want to knock any customer support people, so I hope you will excuse my liberal use of the word "better": I only mean better in terms of compensation and I understand there are more important things than money.

> Fascinating.. I wonder if their creating a high barrier of entry actually backfired and caused them to hire less competent people?

Depends on the exact question; degrees trigger Berkson's Paradox [0]. If you do a survey of company workers doing [task X] then there will be a negative correlation between formal qualifications and competence. That is because all the the uncertified individuals doing the task will have gotten in by being very, very good at it but the statistical outcome is that the certification becomes a negative competence signal.

Such as this anecdote, in fact.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox could be considered a variant of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox

I'm pretty sure I've observed this exact phenomenon. The tricky part is hiring unconventional candidates requires an unconventional process, which requires figuring it out, getting everyone on board, and being able to defend it to upper management. Requesting the standard resume and doing the standard interview allows everyone to throw up their hands and say "we did everything we could".

>I wonder if their creating a high barrier of entry actually backfired and caused them to hire less competent people?

A property manager told me once that if you are having problems finding good tenants that you should lower prices. Perhaps counterintuitive, no? He claimed that it opens you up to a much larger pool of people that allows you to discover better tenants.

Interesting. I've heard the opposite. Charge more money assuming that higher income individuals tend to have more to lose when it comes to apartment damage or getting evicted.

I still think money isn't the only factor.

A poor family can make better tenants because they need the place to function and need a stable home. A rich college student with rich parents will sue you to death over anything if they choose to break the lease or a dispute arises.

It's about location.

Anybody who's heard or increased the rent like that must be in a rather prime location, definitely not in the country side for sure (little jobs and little tenants there).

That solves the slightly different problem of having too many bad tenants.

My hypothesis would be that the type of person that gets a CS degree does not tend to be the type of person that likes dealing with customer support issues or that is even necessarily good at it.

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