Hacker News Reader

Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

I don't think you can. Job performance is something that gets figured out on the fly.

Unless you're working in a crazy standardized operation thats a moving target.

e.g. We've got a ton of manager & they all sorta do their own thing...they gravitate towards their strong suit essentially. You can't really test for that in advance.

Some people excel at leading 30 man teams on stable jobs. Others excel at being parachuted into technical shitshows and sorting it out. Very different personal attributes.

It's a crap shoot as tracker1 says and will continue to be one

View on HN

This whole article is predicated on the idea that you can quantitatively measure the performance of a software engineer. That seems completely unfounded.

I don't think that true—what the article is saying is that different hiring activities are more or less useful in predicting the future success of a hire. And the more measures you employee intelligently, the more predictive the process becomes.

Why isn't it? Any job where enough information can be known to know that someone should be fired or promoted is a job that can be quantitatively measured to some degree.

So you need to design you assessment process to reflect the real world scenarios the hire will encounter. It's surprising to me to hear so many developers push back on this notion that you can't design a predictive hiring process. If you were hiring a dentist, wouldn't a great way to assess them be having them fill a cavity? Or asking a chef to make you your restaurant's signature recipe? It seems very logical and the key here is that the work sample is reflective of what they'll encounter on the job.

The problem with the examples you mentioned that their skills are fully transferable. 30-50% of my knowledge is non-transferable because of a)Company domain knowledge b)In a technology the next company won't use.

It would be a better comparison to a bridge engineer to build a bridge in a different country. The laws of physics are the same but regulations are not. Building any non-trivial software is more comparable to this.

If you hiring for Wordpress (or any other) sweatshops that's a different thing. But then you hiring factory workers.

If you know what kind of company/situation you're in, you can certainly select for candidates that are more likely to thrive in that environment.

As you mentioned, people gravitate toward their strong suits. So by asking behavioral questions, you can learn how they approached situations in the past and whether their strengths/weaknesses are the right mix for your needs.

If your company knows what situation it is in, and if that situation persists for more than a year, your company is already better than many. The company I just left had an endless parade of new missions, new "values", new career ladder descriptions, and the median tenure of managers in engineering was about 6 months. The idea that you can either rate the performance of your staff or predictively hire engineers who will succeed under these conditions is a joke.

Yep, if your company is having leadership/strategy problems you're not going to go far.

But as a hiring manager in that situation, you can select for team members who excel at dealing with ambiguity, internal locus of control, vision, etc. Additionally, you would look for people who value learning vs. psychological safety, etc.

You're in a known situation, and that situation is constant change and churn

That's true.... that might not be a company you want to work for. If there's not clear strategic direction and things constantly shift, it's very hard to hire anybody effectively into the org.

>If you know what kind of company/situation you're in

That's my point. You don't unless you're in a very simplistic business.

I really don't think you can define/bottle this easily - even with high quality interviewing.

Nor do I think you should. To use a very cliched phrase the hottest hires are the ones that think outside the box AND are killing it. Without some flexibility in terms of filtering and criteria you might miss out on that

If you hire all the exact same kind of people, what happens when you were wrong about the sort you need? A little diversity is good. We don’t need everyone to be an expert on everything, we just need a few experts for everything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com