Comment by stormbrew | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stormbrew | Hacker News Reader

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There are a couple of things that make this kind of tricky imo, even as someone who generally wants to find passionate people when hiring. Over my career though, these things have led me away from using that as my primary motivator:

The first is that there are just a lot of people out there nowadays who can convincingly talk about programming for an hour and still somehow not be able to code their way out of a paper bag. Frankly, though, this is really rarely obviously self-taught people. It's usually people who have degrees but managed to kind of skirt around doing actual work during their degree, or who have advanced degrees and it's just been too long since they did much practical coding.

At the first job I had where I was involved in hiring we started with a talking interview and then did a small coding test (which was: write a program that outputs some text of a particular format, take as long as you like, come get us when you're done or if you have questions). Eventually, we had to flip the order around because we had so many people come in who seemed really promising and then literally couldn't write a loop in a language they chose.

The second is that just selecting for passion also selects for a bunch of unrelated traits like free time, wealth, etc. There are plenty of really brilliant coders out there for whom it's just a job. As with literally any job. Many of those people don't really have the luxury of having a history that's littered with working on things they were actually excited about.

In the end, the social forces that created bell labs and the general sense that coding is a thing people do because they're passionate about were/are probably temporary, and programming is likely to become more and more "just a job" for most practitioners. And there shouldn't really be anything wrong with that.

All that said, I do think people pass up programmers with potential a lot. Everyone wants someone who can hit the ground running, but in my experience a lot more mileage is gained in the long run by hiring people who grow into their role. I think to really find these people you often have to go deeper than just looking at their passion projects. A good coding session can tell you a lot about how they think and communicate. And that's where you find people with potential to reach beyond their history.

Let me give you one more example from my experience (after the labs), where I was on the other side of the table where I was the hiring manager, I was up against it on a project and needed a super star programmer. I interviewed a bunch of people and they all had awesome credentials and did great in the interview, except for this one guy. He stumbled and could not answer any of the questions. I was struggling to make a decision but was sure he was on the no go pile.

The next day he sent me and email, in it he had every single question I had asked him verbatim (I did not see him taking notes and I do not think he recorded it) and he had every single answer perfect and then some. He said in his email he got nervous in interviews but said he is good at researching things and said he could solve any problem if I gave him a chance.

I took a risk and hired him, he was fantastic and pull my irons out of the fire. He was one of my best hires ever. So, you never know.

I love this story. I wish it was easier to hire for that. I've had candidates that solidly passed my gut check but got vetoed on technical calls because of trivia. Our company has a format for interviews that has worked well for us but I'm positive we've lost out on potential because of where we set the bar. I go into every phone screen and interview with the intent to hire the person speaking with and I try to make that clear. I think this has done well for me and the candidates because we both have the same goal.

Yup, one reason why I am no longer a manager, I switched tracks to research many years back. I felt it had become untenable with so many other people they started inserting into the process it was no longer really my call who I hired.

Also, I sort of shortened the story above, but the other intangible thing I saw others maybe would not have picked up on is when I gave all the candidates a tour around our set up, we had these Symbolics computers to do some back end AI stuff (early days stuff) and we needed a Symbolics slayer. I just saw the look in his face when he saw those things, you could tell he was truly excited about working on them. They all said they wanted to work on them of course but just how he looked at them.... I just felt like that was going to make a difference.

In today's world it would not fly if I told HR that I was choosing this guy because he looked at the computer equipment they way a dude looks at a sexy lady.

> In today's world it would not fly if I told HR that I was choosing this guy because he looked at the computer equipment they way a dude looks at a sexy lady.

I'm pretty sure that you can imagine the sort of problem you might be setting up for the organization. If not, I'll spell it out: if you select candidates based on whether they are eye-fucking the hardware, you may just end up with a bunch of technosexuals on the payroll who aren't necessarily as good at their jobs as you hoped they would be.

I definitely really like it when people come back with more thoughts after an interview. Accounting for nervousness is always a difficult thing to do, but important. Definitely the stories in this whole thread about people who were told they weren't "confident enough" imply people not taking this into account.

On the other hand, I was once involved in hiring someone who we thought was nervous but it turned out the signs of nerves we were seeing were probably DTs. They didn't last very long for mostly unrelated reasons, though it's possible we could have done better by them as well. Still, it's sometimes hard to parse out what even looks like nerves in an interview because it's usually treated as such an adversarial process.

Mostly these days I try to focus on making it feel less adversarial when I interview, to try to get people over that nervousness and treat it more as a conversation. It's amazing how far you have to go to convince people you're not trying to trick them though, because of how many standard interview questions are (intentionally or not) trick questions.

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