Noticing You're Confused
arr.am
arr.am
At Google people got "starter projects" I liked this idea to get an idea of what they could do, and its an opportunity to understand what they are good at. I gave the person an assignment that, given their experience, should have been well within their capabilities. They kept not delivering and kept up a steady patter of "knocking down the barriers" communications which, valid or not, got me wondering what was going on with this person. At the one month point I gave them a pretty clear deliverable and worked with them for a timeline for when it would be done. They were "almost" done at the agreed upon time two weeks later, so I asked them to present it one week from that date to the group. The presentation was an epic disaster in terms of not coming close to meeting the deliverable, not showing any development in understanding the problem, and generally being something a new hire could have come up with in less time.
At our 1:1 that week we talked about the deliverable, my expectations given the experience they claimed to have, and what we got. I got a lot of "I just need x, y, and z and then it will be done." kind of discussion. Delving into those needs became "waiting on p, q, and r to deliver this part." kinds of discussions.
At the end of our 1:1 that week I asked them if they were satisfied with their performance. They felt it was ok and would get better with time. I told them I didn't feel we could afford that time and that Friday would be their last day. I was bummed that we wasted nearly 2 months on this person. I don't think anyone in the organization was surprised to see them go.
He was kinda furious that he was demoted to doing lowly web development in his first week (in order to get to know our infrastructure, in a small startup) and I don't even remember if he did a good job finishing the actual task...
My reaction to this depends upon what you told him when you hired him.
If you hired him to do front end development, then, yeah, he's over the line.
If you tell someone that they're going to be working with the chief architect on figuring out the networking substructure and then throw him in with the web monkeys with no advance warning, they have a right to be concerned.
It also depends upon the size of the company. At a big company, I would give zero slack on this--this kind of shenanigan is indicative of a political battle and you need to hold your ground.
At a startup, I'm going to cut you slack if I see everybody is busy and you say "Look, we need you move this pile of crap. Sorry. Someone has to do it, and everyone else is busy. Interesting thing X is coming down the pipe, but right now you are two idle hands. Grab a shovel."
No, the position to be filled was supposed to be mostly Java, but it was expected and communicated everyone needs to work in the whole stack, with explicit mention of Python and Flask, just not with a heavy focus.
Also, as I said this was a task to get to know stuff, as this was kind of a dashboard thingy which would be using ~10 internal APIs. It was scoped to be a few days and explicitly mentioned that this is not the new permanent role.
And yes, we were <10 developers in the whole company.
After the slow motion train wreck that was his time with us finally departed for another station, I got talking to a guy in the local bar, who, while quite drunk, asked me "Say, you're not Edward from Company X are you?"
I told him I was, and then he promptly sprinted off to the bar, and came with a beer for me and said "I need to apologise and at least buy you this beer".
I asked him why, and it turns out it was his guilty conscience - he had been the supervisor who gave us the glowing reference for Trainwreck, and he had done it solely to get rid of Trainwreck. All the issues we'd had with him, they'd had, for longer, and in my country it's notoriously difficult to fire underperforming devs without risking penalties in an employment tribunal, how exactly do you quantify how much they are or aren't delivering?
So yeah, he lied to us to move Trainwreck out of his team. So these days I am very dubious about references from current employers/managers. And I don't quite think that the beer made up for it.
When I asked why they did this, to my surprise they said they had been scammed by people who did phone interviews well, and in the on site interviews were completely incapable of answering the same questions at all. They we sure they had been catfished by multiple recruits.
Some step before on site interviews, to save everyone effort and money overall, might help.
I think unpaid small utility projects are also unfair to prospective employees.
A better approach might be for the company to identify something they'd like done, which might be part of an employee's normal role. This could be work towards a bug in something (open source) they use, a small utility project, or even just a 'toy' project of somekind (E.G. fizz buzz but with some constraints, maybe language or being a module something else can use, etc).
There'd be a fixed size payment for either using up a maximum number of hours or completing the task (with documented work on what was done in both cases).
I'm curious as to how someone like that could even pass a phone interview. Even if they were cheating, they would have had to have been reading stuff verbatim to answer the interviewer's questions. How was this not at least picked up a little bit during the interview? How could someone with such a small amount of knowledge in the domain trick the interviewer enough that they raised no flags at all during the interview?
I once had an interview where I sent in a solution to a small program they asked me to write (had to do with golfing).
During the interview they sat me down in front of a computer and asked me to re-implement a part of it, which I did so gladly.
I realized later that my re-implementation wasn't the same as my original implementation, but they both worked. It was more 6 of one, half dozen of the other, sort of thing.
But the thing is, during the rest of the interview I seriously got the impression they thought I was lying to them. I've often wondered if that difference in implementation was why.
But I'm of the opinion that technical people shouldn't really be too involved in the yes/no decision of the interview process. I've seen too many instances of people coming to conclusions that just didn't make sense. I once had feedback that they felt I would be anti-social because when asked about an open floor plan I told them as long as I had headphones it wouldn't be too much of an issue.
I remember one guy was convinced I was devops because I described a system I built and implemented that got deployed across datacenters around the world, and I explained how we did it. When it was done, he started asking me about unit tests, and I remember going to the whiteboard, pointing at a few of the circles and telling him "we had unit tests around this, and this, and this".
At the end I reiterated that I had a degree in CS & Math and had worked as a software developer for coming on 20 years. I did this because he kept making comments about devops. And yet, when it was done, the feedback is that they weren't looking for devops.
The worst part to me is that what I described was the system architecture and how we were able to do this successfully. I'm not even sure I spoke about deployment much at all.
I've had several wtf moments like this in my career, and it's caused me to be a lot more bullish on interviewers. Everyone who interviews seems to think they have some secret sauce that allows them some mythical insight into a person over an hour interview. And they're all wrong.
Business people are actually easier to deal with in my experience because they're willing to accept when there's a misunderstanding and you attempt to explain yourself more fully. Most technical people seem to judge you for it and ignore any attempt to follow up.
Anyway, this is long winded, but my point is that I agree with you 100%. I don't think most people who interview quite realize just how bad they are at it, nor how overly judgemental they are. I'm glad it worked out for the author of this article, but the indications he claimed to see (the lack of a linked in profile, for example) are not actually indications of anything. They got lucky, but they're going to take their sample of 1 and be overly judgemental with everyone in the future.
I like my job, and I'm visible enough to have had several poaching attempts (one or two I regret turning down, my would-be peers have all retired after a few years and 8-digits happier). Anyways, one studio tried to lure me away by having me interview for 'whatever my dream job was.'
This intrigued me. I wrote up a 2-page job description. Was quite clear I'd moved into Data Science and my Solution Architect days were a few years behind me. Passed the 10-person panel interview with flying colors. And the Data Science / Management tiers. Lunch interview no problem. Then... came the low-level C++ interviews. I did OK, but clearly was rusty.
And then the architecture interview. They laid out an identical topology to one I've given talks on having architected, and asked me where might be problems. I highlighted the number one concern (ensuring the data was logged with accurate ingress/egress timings so we could be measuring real funnel progress), and went down several esoteric paths that telemetry could be corrupted / unreliable / provide faulty analysis. At the end I could tell they weren't convinced. I circled back, and... "Well, this is based on a real thing we rolled out, and we were measuring the time-to-receipt on the first layer, not the delays in payload aggregation before relaying the buffer through the rest of the system, so latencies seemed low but throughput was unacceptable. We'd hoped you would have picked up on that."
It was the very first thing I pointed out. But they didn't hear me when I stated the obvious up front. I'll own that feedback: Make sure I'm heard and understood.
At any rate, someone else was hired for the job I defined. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Engineers/Managers have only ever worked for the same people for the last 5 or 10 years, and have no idea what engineers look like in the wild.
You'd need to be really sure about the nature of the role though, or else find a stand-in who is similarly skilled (and not).
Probably because there's a real slice of the job market that gets paid six figures to do nothing much more than browse the internet all day.
2 of the 5 tech jobs I've had have had this. I kid you not, I spent 6 months opening my PC, watching email, and doing whatever I wanted from home. My current job is like this as well but I actually get to help others, so it's not as bad. Believe me, I don't want it -- it gets very boring, very quickly, but legal agreements mean you can't really work on anything else.
And it's not hard to imagine someone trying to cover up a blunder of making a bad hire by giving them no work or busy work because the company is just awash in so much cash that it doesn't actually affect much to just let them leech compared to the reputation damage of admitting that mistake.
Every time someone cannot believe this is possible, I have no empathy for them. It has happened over and over and over and over again. If you don't believe this happens, you are being willfully ignorant! Don't be ignorant!
Sadly there just isn't a good solution for it. A more complex interview doesn't fix it.
Even in this scenario of blatant fraud, Arram stopped short of explicitly naming the individual. ZeroCater was saved a huge hiring mistake, but 'Sam' probably went on to another company that is clueless to his scam.
This is why I always ask why someone is looking for a new opportunity/why they left their previous position. If the answer doesn't add up, I press for more info. Maybe they're just embarrassed because they were fired? People get fired all the time for reasons that don't necessarily preclude them from being valuable to me. But if they still can't come up with an answer that makes sense, I start "noticing I'm confused".
[1]: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01639625.2016.11...
If the person was a fraud, how did he get through the technical and management interviews? Surely talking to someone for 5 mins would help you figure out if they were technically competent. So apparently the interview process had zero decision value. Why bother interviewing candidates then? They should just check references and get on with it. Or fix your interview process.
For what is worth I also don't have a LinkedIn for the same reason any more..
(Technically a couple niche discussion sites might count, this being one of them, but the closest thing I've got to an actual social media account is a Reddit account I mostly used in respect to one sub-forum on that site where content creators I liked had a sort of news aggregator for their content).
There are many things people evaluate during the interview process. One of them is technical competence. Another is integrity.
From the story, it doesn't appear OP's interview process is broken.
There are diminishing marginal returns on better screening. Most people are pretty honest, and of those people who aren't honest, most of those people will mess up their deception; this means that a pretty basic level of screening brings a lot of value while only letting through a few bad apples.
One could intensify the screening to avoid more bad apples, but that costs money and increases the false positive rate. At some point, it's better to just hire people and fire them when it doesn't work out.
I’m not saying it’s a good idea to do what “Sam” did, but you can’t say that their interview process was broken based solely on the fact that the process identified him as a good candidate after he inflated his resume and did some simple LinkedIn manipulation to try to push himself to the top of the resume stack. Their interview process may in fact have identified and vetted the best man for the job, he was just one that happened to be insecure enough about his work experience to exaggerate it.
That is, if this story is even real.
(Or, somebody did try to snow me to that extreme but failed to get to the point where we even cared about checking references. I don't mean this as any sort of triumphalism, but just by its nature, it's easier to BS your way through a a management interview than a technical interview. I'd say that's less about one necessarily being "harder" and certainly not about one being "better", but that there's a much larger set of distinct things we may talk about in a tech interview. If you really don't know anything technical, you have much greater odds of getting something asked that rats you out.)
I do get confused reading this story, at least I wish it continue on for a bit afterward (how was his reaction, other people's reaction. Did you end up hiring someone?)
That's not really what it is. Let's rephrase it as "the demand for engineering managers that pass your completely subjective interview process which is completely unrelated to the job".
I have no idea what the salary was these people were offering but often companies seem to moan about there being "no talent" or a "skills shortage" when they're actually just offering unrealistically low salaries/total comp for a highly-skilled and in-demand job so either don't get much interest, or only get applications from chancers and charlatans trying their luck
Jobs had no real engineering experience to bring to the table.
He had a small amount of education from Reed College, but it was
in a completely unrelated major, and he had dropped out early.
But he had a way with words, seemed to have a passion for technology,
and probably lied about having worked at Hewlett-Packard.
"I figured, this guy's gotta be cheap, man. He really doesn't
have much skills at all," Alcorn remembers. "So I figured I'd hire him."One's mischievous and one's deception.
Think of it this way. Out of the 1000 people who will outright lie about having worked some place, 999 of them are sociopaths or grifters who will do serious harm to your company if you hire them. The last one is Steve Jobs. We only hear about the last one, usually, but if you're hiring someone and you know that they've lied about their experience, don't take that chance.
As a human, you can only bring a few things to the table: inherited wealth, demand for your talents, and credibility. The first is a gamble, the second is impossible to control given the market, your credibility is the only thing you can really guide.
Be honest, be trustworthy. It takes forever to build, but in the end, it's how people make judgment calls about everything else.
Steve Jobs isn't a particularly good employee, anyway. He's a good CEO.
If I was the CEO (author of the blog) I would ask myself why I put so many artificial barriers. Why does it matter that he got a similar position for the job if he was going to be good at it anyways?
I'm getting mad at all of those artificial gatekeepers that like to also play victim because "there are not enough talents out there".
Yes that guy lied on his resume and therefore should not be hired (and he should be shamed). But this CEO should also realize that his artificial gate-keeping is the reason why people feel the need to lie.
Let's say that this hire didn't lie on his resume, he would still successfully pass the interview but he would never get to that point anyways.
Beyond that, the back-channel check where he "wasn't a culture fit" becomes a lot more alarming once you learn that he went through that level of effort to lie to get the position. I had a boss like that at a previous job. He always had an answer, confident, well liked by the higher ups in the company. But a menacing sociopath to all of his reports. Calling employees on weekends, micro-managing, belittling. It took the entire team quitting for the company to realize its mistake.
And that was just some mid-level manager, not a VP of Engineering whose behaviour may impact the entire company.
Interviews are horrible. They round-down to being useless at actually determining whether someone will be good at a job. I think we all mostly agree with this, at least to a degree.
To be clear on why I bring this up: this cuts both ways. If someone does poorly during an interview, this is a poor signal as to whether they'll actually perform poorly at the job. But, similarly: if someone does exceedingly well during an interview, this is also a poor signal as to whether they'll actually perform well at the job. It works both ways, you see?
I love the quote from Andy Grove at the bottom of the article. We all know interviews suck, from both perspectives. Its easy to just jump to a conclusion there: Well, lets kill the interview, they're pointless, why do we do them? Its a signal. Its not a very useful signal, but it isn't useless.
There are two signals that are, generally, characteristic of a much higher signal-to-noise ratio: references and work history.
This isn't bullshit gatekeeping. This is prioritizing the signals that have the highest probability of accurately predicting how well a new hire will do. He wouldn't have gotten an interview had he told the truth. That's probably because, at this point, there's very little information at the hiring manager's disposal to conclude that the hire would be a successful one. Even at the end of the interviews, he probably wouldn't have gotten hired.
It is gatekeeping. But its not bullshit.
> Not only had he lied about his experience, he’d set up fake identities complete with LinkedIn profiles with hundreds of connections, then gotten people who were complicit in his lie to pretend to be those people on the phone.
> I sat down and tried to trace the source of my confusion. Sam didn’t have a LinkedIn profile, and when I asked him why he said he turned it off because he got too much recruiter spam, which was entirely believable. He said he’d turn it back on and send me the link, but hadn’t followed up. It wasn’t much, but it was certainly a bit odd given how reliable he seemed in general.
Why would someone who'd spent months, perhaps even years cultivating a network of fake LinkedIn profiles and confederates, not have a linkedin profile himself when not having one would immediately arouse suspicion? It's not like it's at all difficult to doctor your work links. Even his wife supposedly had a profile, faking as a VP at the company in question.
Something doesn't add up here.
Plus, other people who know him in real life might notice that his profile information is bogus and call him on it. (Why does your LinkedIn profile say you were a director?)
I remember when I said I worked at company X on Linkedin, the next day I was getting barraged with emails and notifications to connect with coworkers (which 1-2 months into the job, didn't really feel like doing) and I'm pretty sure they got those recommendations about me as well.
[1] https://arr.am
>I took a photo that may now be one of the most reproduced images in history.
>I took a photo that may technically be one of the most reproduced images in history.
>In my nine years at ZeroCater I probably interviewed around three thousand people.
That would be roughly 1.30 people per working day or 6-7 people per week.
A few people have mentioned a slashdot story, I've never seen it but would love to if anyone who read it could link to it. It shouldn't be too hard to believe that there could be more than one elaborate case of resume fraud.
- either the candidate was competent:
then why did he need to lie to get the job? maybe you're over-filtering based on resume and years of experience. The variable your looking for is competence. Years of experience, is just a proxy. if the proxy is drying up your supply, maybe it's not an effective one.
moreover, people are not born managers. why not give new talent a chance.
- the candidate was not competent:
The interview process is therefore broken and is not measuring competence. Maybe you're overvaluing confidence or the speed of answering. Maybe the questions are not Technical enough? I don't know. But notice that valuing anything that is irrelevant would lead to a lower expected value of candidate's competence.
Using ineffective tools while searching for something rare is unsurprisingly hard.
As a side comment, I'm kinda taken aback by the fact that interview results like "culture fit" are shared this way. I would've expected a higher standard of privacy. Is this commonly accepted?
Another point, I've noticed that the hiring process involved a lot of "friend / wife of a friend". Wouldn't this if left unchecked cause some ethnic/age-based bias ( not necessarily in a legal sense)?
That is interviewer: Tell me what your next step is in solving this problem me: <radio silence>
The problem is two things, I, as an engineer, barely ever talk to people as I am solving whatever it is I am doing, so the interview is a completely artificial environment that I am not equipped for (although, as I interview more I get back into the groove and by the third or fourth interview I am able to anticipate the questions and produce a mechanical answer that satisfies the interviewer)
The second part of the problem is obvious, the interviewer has no clue why I cannot answer the question, so can only assume it's a lack of skills on my part.
Interviews are an artificial environment, there's no way an interviewer can actually tell from the interview whether the person in front of them is a good engineer or not.
When I have got a few interviews under my belt, I am fluent, and able to demonstrate my theory knowledge clearly. Have my skills changed? Not really, my interview skills for sure, but my engineering skills?
Interviewers often try to counter this by searching for some obscure factoid within the technology and wondering why people being interviewed don't know it (curiously there's the other problem here where interviewers themselves have an erroneous understanding of the technology and this leads to false negatives).
If he hadn't lied about his specific experience would you have hired him?
Strange how never this occurs when executing or designing web technologies, particularly the DOM. Instead people jump immediately to the largest prepackaged solutions currently available without question, everything plus the kitchen sink, as normal as breathing. Invented here syndrome is the default without even the most subtle hint of consideration.
This is perhaps most clearly realized in that most developers have some irrational horrid fear of the DOM when they encounter it and yet simultaneously find the DOM to be some sort of savior to allowing Web Assembly to replace JavaScript. Never is the confusion or irrationality questioned in favor of something comforting.
I also find it strange how eagerly people are willing to impose bias in hiring and candidate selection to ensure the most important selection criteria is conformance opposed to performance. It really is as though the thought I notice I’m confused is something fearful to be protected from instead of confronted when developers are tasked with hiring.
Over time people build distrust toward recruiters, why: - they use cold calling, - as soon as you resign they call to find who are your references, not to offer you a job, but to find who is lead contact in previous company they can call and so they could someone just to get that 20+% fee... - in order for these to succeed they need to use social engineering techniques (they pretend they are friendly) - they post fake job ads to collect CV ... - have I mentioned huge fees for literally doing nothing .... and on and on and on ....
Who ever was wrote this article he should just zip it ....
"I figured, this guy's gotta be cheap, man. He really doesn't have much skills at all," Alcorn remembers. "So I figured I'd hire him.""
From https://arr.am:
Stuff That’s Happened to Me
I took a photo that may now be one of the most reproduced images in history.
I once came up with an idea with a friend that accidentally became a national TV ad featuring Nicki Minaj, Serena Williams, Usher, Kylie and Kendall Jenner.
I once crashed a fashion show, pretended to be a model, and walked on-stage as dozens of photographers snapped pictures of me.
I was paid in whiskey for a live harmonica performance at a jazz bar in Tokyo. I don’t play harmonica particularly well.
I DJ’d for Chamillionaire. I don’t know how to DJ.
I was yelled at for five minutes by the founder of Skye Vodka for taking his favorite table at a restaurant.
I’ve discovered and excavated dinosaur bones in the Montana badlands.
1. How many memes are there? Still, this is the most unlikely brag which is probably why it's first.
2. I've had great ideas that turned into things too (causality not confirmed). Friend could have been in advertising.
3. This is… unlikely as stated but there may have been an audience participation part that could be generously reworded this way (and some people say "crashed" to mean "went spontaneously" rather than "snuck in").
4. Easy to imagine a bored bartender on a dead night exchanging a shot for a moment of levity. #Anchorman
5. Could be an embellishment of "I added a song or skipped forward a track and there was someone famous in earshot."
6. I think the brag here is "I take desirable things from rich/famous people because I'm at their level" but it's much more likely just a maître d's mistake and the vodka guy was escalating to get his way. Also we don't know the result—who got the table?
7. Wouldn't surprise me if there are "experience archaeology" tours that contrive this kind of thing. #StartupIdea
†Which, to be fair, aren't we all?
Of course they mean something, so taking them in the equation - at least for trying to recognize why you have that gut feeling, and whether it's relevant or not - is pretty sensible.
Rationality isn't about being a cold calculating machine, it's about arriving at the best answers you can while using whatever actually works.
The rationalist community's "Rationality" is not about using cold calculation for everything. It's about not letting your human biases and motivated reasoning get in the way of finding the truth and being effective. (Whether or not the movement is successful is a bit of a debate, of course, but the core philosophy is sound).
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/z9hfbWhRrY2Pwwrgi/summary-of...
> System 1—the intuitive system—is the older of the two and allows us to make quick, automatic judgments using shortcuts (i.e. heuristics) that are usually good most of the time, all while requiring very little of your time and attention.
> System 2—the deliberative system—is the newer of the two and allows us to do things like abstract hypothetical thinking and make models that explain unexpected events. System 2 tends to do better when you have more resources and more time and worse when there are many factors to consider and you have limited time.
...
> The main thing to take away from this System 1 and 2 split is that both systems have strengths and weaknesses, and rationality is about finding the best path—using both systems at the right times—to epistemic and instrumental rationality.
> Being “too rational” usually means you are using your System 2 brain intentionally but poorly. For example, teenagers were criticized in an article for being “too rational” because they could reason themselves into things like drugs and speeding. But this isn’t a problem with being too rational; it’s a problem with being very bad at System 2 reasoning!