Comment by zw123456 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zw123456 | Hacker News Reader

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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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