Hiring for conscientiousness (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Hiring for conscientiousness (2019)

holloway.com

31 pointsrognjen46 comments

I've always been conscientious and it really backfired. When something breaks at 2am they call me to fix. They never call the recently hired slick-talking guru who experiments with the latest cool technology but can't actually deliver anything and who will leave before the end of the year anyway.

If more people read this article maybe they'll stop optimizing for slick-talking gurus only, and people like us will have more options!

are you bragging about how you let your employer call you at 2am to fix things?

Don't feel bad. Conscientious people earn more because people like them more. Just remember to negotiate well, because conscientious people often feel bad about negotiating hard. You shouldn't feel bad about asking for solid compensation for your work. Especially if you're getting up at 2am.

I don’t think agreeableness (the inability to negotiate for yourself to have more than others) correlates to conscientiousness.

Conscientiousness is very plastic across the lifespan. Hiring like this just doesn't work. It leads to the same issues - there simply aren't enough people who fit the criteria, so creative bullshitting becomes prevalent to meet the demand. You need a blend of people, including people high in openness (creativity), otherwise your organization becomes a stagnant bureaucracy.

> “I divide my officers into four classes; the clever, the lazy, the industrious, and the stupid. Each officer possesses at least two of these qualities. Those who are clever and industrious are fitted for the highest staff appointments. Use can be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy however is for the very highest command; he has the temperament and nerves to deal with all situations. But whoever is stupid and industrious is a menace and must be removed immediately!”

I find the above amusingly accurate in a lot of cases backed up by anecdotal evidence. Aside form contradicting the thesis in the submission it has the huge advantage of not requiring to pay for and to read a whole book and I think it will provide just as useful for practical application, meaning not very.

As for the Big Five personality traits - I guess it's better than nothing but I find it funny how close its application is to teenager magazine tests from years ago "the 10 traits of the perfect boyfriend".

haha, yes. See also Dr Ben Hardy's book "Personality Isn't Permanent".

For other readers not familiar with <<Big Five personality traits>>:

Personally, I am most interested about <<openness to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious)>>!

well put!

I'm surprised they are using "conscientiousness" exclusively in the sense of being careful and nothing about knowing right from wrong. There are so many jobs in the tech industry that a truly conscientious person should steer clear of.

If you plan on hiring from the world's precious pool of conscientious people, please make damn sure that the job warrants that quality. Take a hard look at your employer's effect on the world before hiring a conscientious person who will find those sore spots eventually, at great personal cost.

Conscientiousness means you do your duty, knowing right from wrong is called "conscience".

Agree they are not the same thing, but often can be related. If you get lazy or slack off on things like testing, handling edges cases, properly documenting. Your conscience will bother you when you are not being conscientious.

From the Oxford English dictionary:

> conscientious | ˌkɒnʃɪˈɛnʃəs | adjective

> 1 wishing to do one's work or duty well and thoroughly: a conscientious man, he took his duties very seriously.

> 2 relating to a person's conscience: the individual is denied even the opportunity to break the law on conscientious grounds.

It means you follow the laws and do what you are supposed to do, but it isn't conscience in the other senses. A soldier carrying out orders is conscientious, but his conscience might not be clean. This works for both of those definitions.

No it doesn’t. It violates definition 2.

Generally, when people talk about conscientiousness in this sense (certainly the article), they're talking about the psychological construct (i.e. a named pattern of correlations that emerges from self report questionnaire analysis) rather than the dictionary definition.

Sure, but the two are not neatly separated.

I can read, thanks. In fact, we all can. Why are you continuing to argue? The definition is right there in black and white, I'm willing to bet that no one here is interested in semantic arguments for their own sake nor for the sake of your ego so please don't continue.

Wow, arguing with the Oxford English dictionary…

But in the context of the article we are talking about the definition found in psychology, and not the definition found in some lexicon. In psychology conscientiousness is only about the organized and responsible part.

If that is so, then that should have been your response. As it is, this is found in the article:

> Yasseen worked hard and he cared about his work. In Arabic, we would say Yasseen had Dhameer—“a conscience.”

That's a clue as to why conscientiouness is also listed in that dictionary defintion as a derivative - one precedes the other.

> Bringing a conscience to your work means working conscientiously—as Dr. George Simon put it, “Conscientiousness is mindfulness guided by conscience.”

That's enough of this for me.

Conscientious has more than one definition. Yes, that is one of them. I'm referring to the other definition which does involve right and wrong: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/conscientious

That is also the same. See the clarified example:

"She's a conscientious judge, who does not let personal prejudices influence her decisions."

Basically she does her duty as a judge instead of letting her personal feelings influence her judgements. Conscientious people do things by the book.

It’s not anywhere near that simple.

A judge not letting one’s feelings influence their decisions can also be a matter of conscience, because they believe that justice should be equal for all.

Conscientious people do generally go by the ‘book’ or convention, but it matters to them whether the ‘book’ is ethical or not.

That doesn’t mean they have a sense of universal ethics. You could certainly have a conscientious concentration camp commandant who believed that fascism was the most ethical system and that everything else was less honest, but the point is that conscience is part of the equation.

Morality is not a solved problem. People who claim to always know right from wrong are sanctimonious, not conscientious.

Unless you are working for a charity or in a field like healthcare with direct patient care, buying into the vision of a company that you yourself do not actually own is one of the stupidest and most naive things you can do.

The more you treat it like an exchange of your time and skills for money, the better you will be. Otherwise, people will ruthlessly exploit you and then leave you out to dry at the whenever is good for them.

Ask yourself, how likely is the startup owner to conscientiously think about your needs if for example you end up with a sick family member and need to take extended time off to take care of them? Will they try their best to “go above and beyond” and support you in this trying time financially? Will they care that you have been conscientious, or will they be thinking how much money they are wasting on you and looking to get rid of you as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

That's one calculus for sure. But most of us choose a career in a field we find congenial. Consider, if you actually like what you're doing and the impact it has on the world, you will likely excel past all those 'in it just for the money'.

I'd guess that many fields are managed and run by those who fit the former category. I prefer to be one of those.

I think the cynicism is because organizations hire both kinds of people, but for different roles.

Management is hired to be mercenary, while employees are hired to be conscientious.

> Look for evidence of side-projects or things that go above and beyond. This is always a good sign. Of course, be understanding of people’s personal situations—not everyone has a personal and professional life that allows them the luxury of side projects. That said, I believe most conscientious people will have evidence of these types of projects, even if they are doing them as part of their day job.

I have side projects, but they are not public. I could talk about them if required in an interview, but then I guess the author would then not consider me to be enough "conscientious".

I agree. In 2022, it is amazing that people are still using (public) "side projects" as a very strong signal for good job candidates.

Taken to the absurd: <<Does this candidate from Google "Jeff Dean" have any public side projects? No. Pffth. Skip that CV... After all, we only hire the best here!>>

That also means most people with heavy emotional labour duties (pregnancy, family care, illness, health issues, etc.) are excluded, almost by definition.

Thank you for this. I have spent the last few years bringing up my kids, and now dread the application process in getting back to work, lots of interesting little projects that are not online and yes health issues have been in my way.

How do I present myself as worthy in this landscape?

> How do I present myself as worthy in this landscape?

I do interviews at my company. What I do consider is:

- can we (you and me) talk about a problem in technical terms and come up with a solution in a decent time (e.g., 30 min.)? If so, I want you in my team (so I vote "hire", but others decide)

- your past experience (professional or not). Similar as above: walk me through your most interesting projects/products

If you are good enough that you can mock the previous 2 points (talk BS and the like) without actually knowing what you are talking about and you even convince me of the contrary... well, you are hired as well (that's like the Chinese Room problem, right?)

Was anybody else completely turned off by the pop-up that screams "Keep Reading..."? Ugh. I quit after that.

Also, please don't confuse conscientiousness with bed-side manner. They are plenty of people have excellent "bed-side manner" (all industries), but are not conscientiousness. Think of a school librarian who is loved by the children, but cannot manage the day-to-day work of library operations. The two may be correlated, but certainly not 100% as this author implies.

To me, testing a software developer for conscientiousness, I could think of two different, but equally valuable ways:

(1) A ridiculously complex set of _written_ requirements to code a function. Literally, show the man page for class C-function "atoi()", then ask them to re-impl in any language. There are /so/ many corner cases. Oh yeah, then testing too. There are harder versions of this function, like "strtol()". Another good one: Ask someone to write a function that can add/subject date periods using multiple holiday calendars. Almost none of them will program it where weekends may be days other than Sat/Sun (looking at you Middle East zone). Example: Subtract six business days using these holiday calendars and these weekend days.

(2) This part is behavioural. Think of an absolutely ridiculous "obstacle course" that you _personally_ needed to complete in the last three months to get something trivial done. Use this as your template. Now create a "Choose Your Own Adventure" style story in your mind. Prompt the candidate with an issue, such as add 10GB of disk space to a network attached storage mount or open/whitelist a port on a firewall. Imagine how many things can go wrong. Every step of the way, challenge with new and absurd obstacles. Check how persistent they are to try different paths. Example: "I cannot log into the website to make the request. Help desk says it takes 3 days to get that access." Better candidates will quickly pivot to ask their teammates -- "Can you help me log into this website?" Etc.

Yes, it is impossible to get perfect on both tests, unless you are a robot or Singularity AI. I've met a few incredibly strong co-workers in one of those categories. If they were even average in the other category, they were a top 5% worker -- easily.

I experienced an interview like your #2 a few years ago, they gave a situation like "it is your first day and a customer has an issue, here is their phone number" and played through a tricky drawn out process of figuring out what was going on

I flubbed it because, I assume, I didn't ask teammates for advice/support, so I guess it worked, since that was a weakness I had

in retrospect I think it's a fair strategy for interviews

In different interviews, candidate might be asked the same literal question but be expected to produce very different responses. The interviwer will ususally provide no context for the situation or state what he is looking for.

Interviews are not a simulation of reality, so you don't have context like you would in a real situation. Like in dungeons and dragon, what moves are allowed? What are the rules of engagement?

The people you will select are often those that read non-verbal clues or guessed what you are looking for. Thats why there is so much culture bias in interviews.

That is a good point. I would be very upfront and provide a one pager before the interview explaining sample questions and what we are looking for.

Also, each time I interview a software engineer, I give a 30 second "speech" that is roughly: "For today's technical interview, we are not interested in what you do NOT know. We are interested in what you do know and how deeply you know it. Some interviewers are trying to trick you or show they are smart or show that you are wrong. That is not us. If we discuss a topic that you don't know about or have no experience, just tell us. No problem -- we will move to a different topic."

I haaaaate it when interviewers ask vague questions and then fault you for taking it in a direction they didn't want.

So many interviewers act as if they expect to hire someone who has already worked at their company for five years and knows the codewords of the local cult.

> Was anybody else completely turned off by the pop-up that screams "Keep Reading..."? Ugh. I quit after that.

Absolutely, and me too. It seemed to be a good article, but it had not convinced me that it was worth it to give up my anonymity and data to those people. No, quite the contrary. It pissed me off so much that I came to HN to whine about it, which is something nobody wants.

>Was anybody else completely turned off by the pop-up that screams "Keep Reading..."? Ugh. I quit after that.

> Also, please don't confuse conscientiousness with bed-side manner. They are plenty of people have excellent "bed-side manner" (all industries), but are not conscientiousness. Think of a school librarian who is loved by the children, but cannot manage the day-to-day work of library operations. The two may be correlated, but certainly not 100% as this author implies.

Well, you actually lost the best part of the article.

No paywall: https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://www.holloway.com/s/trh-hirin...

>> Was anybody else completely turned off by the pop-up that screams "Keep Reading..."? Ugh. I quit after that.

Me too, but because it wasn't clear how to get rid of it without "continue with Google" or the other options. I always stop reading when presented with that crap. This one was particularly annoying with how far it let me read before making me stop.

Folks there's good science on the topic of conscientiousness and work performance. Numerous meta-analyses. I'm not a fan of personality assessments for decision making in the workplace. But I encourage you to at least familiarize yourself with a bit of the existing research base before sharing opinions and anecdotes. You sound kinda silly.

Wow, I did not know conscientiousness meant honesty, creativity, resilience, engagement, and teamwork - an all-in-one package !

> I realized that most of them had a unique “theory of hiring”—some “secret ingredient”

I watched an interview with Jordan Peterson (yeah, I know...) a few years back, and he stated that the two big predictors for success in the workplace are intelligence and conscientiousness, so at the very least this isn't a secret ingredient.

I mean the man holds some very controversial views. But that doesn't mean you can just discount everything he says.

Find people you can squeeze harder without paying them more.

A cynical approach! How about: 'find people who care enough to do it right the first time'

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