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Comment by laurent92 | Hacker News Reader

I’m a beginner in management. In 3 years, the only interns who excelled are those whom I told had barely passed the interview and were paid the least. The ones I respected for their initial talent didn’t fully understand their subject matter and, notably, couldn’t do post-deployment customer interviews to check, loop back and reflect on their work.

It deeply saddens me because it means saddistic managers obtain better results, and people perform better by being talked down. And that’s not a path I want to take and it’s hard to find the way to both congratulate people and get them to excel at their work (FYI we’re at 35h/week and we don’t do overtime here).

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After almost 2 decades in the industry, working at tens of companies in two continents, I can say without any hesitation that the best managers are never sadistic.

Within the context of a dysfunctional, fear-driven company, these sadistic techniques might squeeze better performance out of certain workers, but a force of creative, thoughtful, talented, self-motivated workers will work elsewhere. While I have worked in a few dysfunctional, fear-driven companies over the years, I did not see any of them grow or hold onto talent over time. The best companies I've worked at terminate abusive managers if they accidentally hire one. They take kindness and empathy very seriously.

Some academic once told me that the best phd students tended to get Bs in their honours year, because they didn’t think memorising a textbook was a good use of their time.

Is your interview process perhaps over-indexing academic performance or some similarly time wasting achievement?

Or maybe you were just bad at judging their talent or capacity for working hard?

why would you tell anyone that they barely passed an interview and why pay an intern according to interview performance? I think the issue here is not the interns

Maybe your interview wrong and hire wrong people?

Seems that you hire people who are good at bullshitting during the interview, not the ones who are actually good at their job (what is not easy btw, many people are bad at bullshitting and bad at their jobs).

Obviously most interns are green, but it seems you get the ones who are good at the interview phase and expect them to read your mind somehow and acquire the skills that.. you dont teach them. Do they know that they are supposed to do the things you want? Are they told how?

Also it is pretty funny that after 3 years of management you didnt notice that what all those failed interns have in common is... you.

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