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Comment by gnfargbl | Hacker News Reader

Test 3 is really unfair. People get very different starts in life, and asking about formative experiences is massively biased towards those people who got off the blocks quickly and easily. The interviewer should be thinking about who you are now, not who you once were: your past shouldn't entirely dictate your future.

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I think he is correct in this. I am someone who know one expected to be a high paid engineer at a top computer company, working in California. I did not expect it myself.

But my Kansas roots, single mother, being poorer than all my school peers, working minimum wage jobs to pay rent and put myself through a junior college.... It's still who I am, at the core.

You're presupposing a whole lot of stuff here, but most of all the idea that these formative stories have to be good ones to indicate a good character.

Coming from a "slow start" background does inform a person's character, and it can go either way, but finding out about how it informs their character is what the article is trying to say.

Maybe reread that one, I think you are putting stuff in there that wasnt present in the article. I dont think the point is to measure how successful you were but to get a sense of the kind of person you are. In my experience with questions like this a rocky start is not held against you, tends to make you stand out in a good way if anything.

Caveat; yeah gut reasoning doesnt lead to unbiased hiring practices, no argument.

well, to be fair, the article didn't say how you should interpret early life experiences. You state that looking at early experiences are "biased towards those people who got off the blocks quickly and easily" but when I ready #3, my first thought (as a manager that interviews and hires frequently) was looking for people who had to solve problems when young, as opposed to people who got everything handed to them. Now that shows my biases which may be negative biases towards sons of wealthy parents who are talented and motivated, but the point is that your comment assumes a specific type of bias. I suspect that whether you're hiring or just meeting people socially, having a sense of how someone got to the point they're at tells you more about that person than just knowing where they're at now.

it's so vague it's useless. Bill Gates technically had "everything handed to him" before the age of 20, Larry Ellison otoh I would imagine had to struggle harder. But both are great at what they do, so what background do you look for?

Or you could be specifically looking for someone who over came a lot of adversity, not some one who achieved stereotypical markers of success due to parents with wealth and status.

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