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Comment by rokobobo | Hacker News Reader

I would encourage you to be a bit more open-minded when judging people with technical issues. Debugging WiFi or microphone might seem intuitive to you, but there’s a good amount of people out there that are experts at coding or data science, who haven’t had to deal with any of the scrappiness. Of course, if you’re hiring for a startup and that level of scrappiness is part of the job, by all means, continue to extract signal.

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>> there’s a good amount of people out there that are experts at coding or data science, who haven’t had to deal with any of the scrappiness. Of course, if you’re hiring for a startup and that level of scrappiness is part of the job, by all means, continue to extract signal.

I guess in my mind scrappiness (or just resourcefulness, which maybe the same thing) is a requirement for any job I'd hire for. In this day and age of WFH, your internet connectivity is clutch to your ability to do work and whether it's intuitive to you or not, you have to figure it out (same as in the physical space, whether you like commuting or not, you have to figure out some way to reliably show up at the office.)

Even if you're not technical where troubleshooting wifi is up your alley, you could solve the problem with:

1. Money. Go buy the most expensive insane router and see what it does for you.

2. People. Ask your friends whether they have good wifi and how they got there. Pay someone to help you.

3. Brute force. Can't fix the wifi? Run a big dumb cable down your hallway into your office.

4. Get creative. Can you work out of a co-working space? Can you drop by your friend to use their basement?

At the end of the day, you need connectivity to do your job and if you can't figure that out you're gonna struggle at the job as well. So open mindedness is one thing but realism matters too. You just can't be successful in a WFH setup if your job requires meetings and your wifi can't handle it.

I think you could work on your empathy for the candidate. Sometimes the internet drops out for a minute and then comes back. Maybe that happens once a week. Is it worth going to a co-working space (during a pandemic) so there isn't a temporary issue during a Zoom interview? It's a fairly extreme position to take.

Yes look if they have one quick connectivity hick-up or things genuinely go badly in a one-off way, there's ways to handle that (eg reschedule.)

But if people have consistently shitty wifi and they don't bother to mitigate that even for an interview, that's a different story. A professional understands that success takes some prep - and if you have one hour to convey to someone that you're qualified for a job you want, but you don't line up basic things like good connectivity -- it's the same as not bothering to find a clean shirt to wear to a real interview.

Can't agree with you more. If a candidate is taking responsibility for their internet, what chances do I have of them pushing a feature across a finish line? If it's "not their fault" that they're having an internet connection, is it going to be "not their fault" that they couldn't get an approval on a PR, or "not their fault" that they didn't speed to another team to work out an issue before a deadline?

I have a good office setup with generally pretty decent Internet. I have also had more than one day in the past 18 months when my Internet connectivity was absolutely up and down and my cell phone reception from my house is basically good enough for voice only. So I can fail back to that but really can't handle video over a cell connection.

So... 4 solutions which each amount to "have gobs of money to drop on maybe fixing an issue"?

I'd hate to see your advice on dress codes. "Just wear Armani, and don't show up unless you've got those tailored"

>> So... 4 solutions which each amount to "have gobs of money to drop on maybe fixing an issue"?

I don't understand this attitude. If you're "working from the office," you need to make sure you can get to work. Which means moving within walking distance, moving where you can use public transit, or having a car. You can say all of those translate to "have gobs of money" but at the end of the day you need to make sure you're available to do work if you get the job.

In work from home scenario, your connectivity is a basic requirement for your "getting to the office." You are literally unable to do many jobs without it, so yes you need to get it fixed same as you'd have to figure out how to get to the office.

>> I'd hate to see your advice on dress codes.

My advice on dress code is to dress appropriately for the interview and not have your outfit be a distraction to the interview. Which is the same as my advice for having your wifi work.

Office work, for all its many pitfalls, has the value that the company is providing space, infrastructure, and furniture (in both physical and metaphorical senses), which puts all employees on an even keel.

One of the benefits of space, in the sense of a shared common space is that those who are present in it are present in it. Mediated conversations across space don't do that.

You talk of signal. The overarching signal I'm picking up is a distinct lack of empathy.

Amen.

If your car breaks down, do you already know enough about cars to know where to start? If you get into legal trouble, do you already know a lot of law and procedure to know what to do?

The only reason you have this attitude is because you’re “into computers” so when something goes wrong computer related, you already know where to start. Most people are not into computers. Not even programmers.

The reason why you think it’s so easy to “just be resourceful” is because you have a huge head start and you already know things like what a router even is and what it does.

I can guarantee you that someone can grill you about a subject that you don’t know (being into computers has an an opportunity cost so that means you’re clueless at some other subject) and make a joke of you.

> Debugging WiFi

Honestly, debugging WiFi issues is a nightmare I don't expect anyone to be guaranteed in doing a good job (except someone specialized in Wireless Access Points with specialized equipment).

I have seen more then a view cases where ISP provided Routers sometimes arbitrary caused havoc and in some countries you can't just switch out the Router and the issues might not be limited to WiFi but look like WiFi issues and if you are unlucky they are a temp. problem with your ISP and...

The best choice is to not use WiFi if you need to do Video Conferences, but sadly this is not always the case. (E.g. in my case I only have WiFi due to reasons I can't really change and while it works completely fine I would be very worried if I ever had to do a Conference around 1-3AM in the night, because my ISP tend to has issues (short for max. 10min) around that time from time to time, and all other ISPs I can buy go through that same ISP and have the same issue... Well it's in the middle of the night so luckily not a problem for me.)

If they're interviewing for a remote position, then their ability to use the equipment that allows them to communicate is part of the interview. There might be intermittent problems (internet outage, power outage, etc.) but if they are just entirely unable to manage videoconferencing during an interview then it doesn't bode well for them using it day-to-day.

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