Comment by brandall10 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brandall10 | Hacker News Reader

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When we discuss these types of candidates, that is always the tone of the discussion.

It's good to discuss the pluses and minuses of an approach, we encourage this in our architecture section of the interview loop and during the initial screen when discussing line items in the resumes.

It's having a general negative attitude... bad mouthing past employers, being negative to a tech stack (and literally not couching it with any reasoning what-soever when we try to dig in), being negative to past arch decisions by co-workers without providing what are better solutions, things like that. Sometimes it's implied, sometimes it's more direct, but it there is a distinct lack of social intelligence that seems to happen more w/ older candidates that just suggests someone is burnt out. Wisdom should bring skill, not attitude.

Forest from the trees here. You pay someone to bring value to the team. That is not valuable to anyone. We're not running charities.

You’ll find a lack of social intelligence in the entire age range, but younger candidates seem to get more of a pass than older ones (or perhaps because the senior candidates have more rope to hang themselves with). Over negativity about past employers is indeed a warning sign (though some negativity is fine, like if you ask the question “what did you dislike about your past employer? “), but pessimism in small quantities shouldn’t be taken as an automatic negative. I would definitely be suspicious if all the opinions a senior candidate had were positive. If they can’t list the bad as well as good about some tech, they probably don’t really understand it.

"You’ll find a lack of social intelligence in the entire age range"

But this is specifically an issue more prevalent in older candidates, and is in large part the reason for a pass. We pass on younger candidates as well for this reason, but most prevalently for skill.

"If they can’t list the bad as well as good about some tech, they probably don’t really understand it."

I literally just said we consider this a positive and that we specifically dig in for this. It seems like you're willfully misinterpreting the message here, which is underscoring the point I'm actually making.

Seriously, don't be that person.

Really, what you are saying is 100% spot on, but seems to be misunderstood for some reason.

If presented with a difficult problem, there are people that go "nah, that can't be done, here's a long list of reasons why".

There are also people that go "That's going to be difficult, but maybe we can try A, B or C and I recall reading about this cool new tech that could perhaps help"

Be open to change and open to accepting that new things could be good and interesting.

I'm 43. Hiring engineers. Working with some 50+ engineers that are the absolute best I've ever worked with.

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