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One of the things she's best at is judging people. She's one of those rare individuals with x-ray vision for character. She can see through any kind of faker almost immediately. Her nickname within YC was the Social Radar, and this special power of hers was critical in making YC what it is

A manager at a past job also had a similar "x-ray vision".

During interviews, she would always sit in with another interviewer and never ask any questions of the candidates. She would just observe.

Over 5 years of working with her, every single person she said we should hire turned out great. Every person she said was no good, turned out to not be great.

This was particularly fascinating to watch when she was the lone dissenter either way. e.g. there were times where 7 out of 8 interviewers said "pass", she said "hire" and she was always right.

The first time I read pg's essay about Jessica, it immediately reminded me of my old manager.

It also reminds me of a story from, I believe, Malcolm Gladwell's Blink about the tennis coach who knew before a tennis player served if they would double fault.

Some people have either a natural gift or their brains have picked up a set of weights for their internal neural network that make them fantastic at this kind of thing.

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I am extremely skeptical of someone who claims this ability in themselves or others. What this tells me is that someone is misjudging a lot of circumstances very confidently. You just can't understand people on a snap judgment, there are too many outliers.

Imagine if we applied this kind of thinking in courts. We would convict a lot of innocent people. We wouldn't feel that we need to wait for all the facts and evidence to come in, because our radar for people is so good. We don't do it that way, because it's nonsense.

> snap judgment

What this manager did isn't practically different from what all interviewers do, except the particular manager wasn't the specific target of the usual manipulations[0] candidates will do to seem better. The manager is likely to have a better understanding of how the candidate bullshits (or if they do) when they're not the target of the bullshit.

[0] Used as a descriptor; e.g. "manipulating" someone to decide they should see a doctor for their toe infection isn't bad.

> except the particular manager wasn't the specific target of the usual manipulations[0] candidates will do to seem better.

There's merit to this argument.

Consider people who get scammed or catfished -- it's obvious to an outside observer. You're less likely to fool yourself when you have no skin in the game.

Yeah, this always seems like a truism. If you give people opportunities, they will tend to succeed. If you deny people opportunities, they won’t. So anybody in the position of giving or denying opportunities to people will tend to be “right” most of the time.

Good point. So when we try and evaluate a person's "social radar", we should probably limit ourselves to cases where they are the minority dissenter and the person they dislike is given the opportunity, since it gives us the most controlled scenario in which we can evaluate their hypothesis.

There are people that can do this, that are "social radars." It's rare, but I've seen one and it's mindblowing to observe. 100% hit rate.

(that doesn't mean we should do it in courts to convict people)

And I'm saying a 100% hit rate is not possible. Your ability to determine an accurate numerical hit rate is also very difficult to impossible.

If we treat this kind of thing as an oracle rather than admit that it's a flawed heuristic, even a good heuristic being ultimately flawed, I think that's pretty dangerous. One has to be extremely humble at the task of evaluating people, because it's difficult and error-prone.

Well, it isn't possible because humans are not deterministic, but I imagine the manager in question could possibly have a high 'hit rate'.

You bring up a good point in that false negatives could never be tracked.

E.g. if the manager in this story said "no" and that person wasn't hired, how would you know she was correct?

I will say that there was a non-zero number of "she said 'no', person was hired anyway and it turned out to not be good". As sister/cousin threads have pointed out: this might be a self fulfilling prophecy.

I feel like anyone who fits the categorization (so called INFP/F types[0]) are unlikely to the ones to tell you.

That's why people who claim to have this ability almost never do. Its not in the nature of someone who can to really talk about it this way.

I'd also argue that courts are definitely not the place to have this. There's good reasons why this is likely to fail in a stressful setting (convicting someone of a crime or reviewing evidence) vs a situation of neutrality. Once you start mixing in other factors I imagine this gets blurry real fast. Its all very context dependent.

To tack on further, courts by structure also have a burden of proof aspect to limit / remove the human element as much as possible (in theory anyway) and that is very important.

[0]: https://www.simplypsychology.org/infp-personality.html

100% right. My wife is an INFP and in 16 years of being together, she has not been wrong about someone once, even when I vehemently disagreed with her at the time. But she would never say she's good at reading people to a stranger lol.

You're probably on to something. I frequently get impressions like, good Lord, can't you tell this person is schmoozing? Or that they're trying to hide their agitation? Same with people prone to black and white thinking. And it comes after just a minute or two. And it's often right. (Though I constantly doubt myself and possible confirmation bias.) I wouldn't say it's preternatural but better than most people, apparently. I almost never vocalize these impressions. Because the reasons why are inexplicable, and few have any reason to trust my gut instinct over any other person's.

Why is Myers Briggs being referenced when it has zero substance to back it up? I thought it was common knowledge that pop psychology stuff was garbage, at least amongst this website’s readers.

That "common knowledge" is wrong. Myers briggs is not great for scientific studies since it splits people into 16 buckets instead of sliding scales (like the Big 5, which is used in research). But MB is an incredible mental toolkit to have.

Why would something with no evidence behind it be an incredible mental toolkit?

See the whole criticism section.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...

MB is astrology for nerds.

Astrology has a one in twelve chance of accuracy since the only variable is birthday.

With the four discrete variables in MBTI, I can type people with 90% accuracy after a conversation.

The buckets themselves are also false, so no.

Isn’t this often just the Barnum effect, especially when ground truth is established by asking people if you are right? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnum_effect

Not quite zero substance, the four dimensions are reasonable close to some of the five leading components of personality.

The problem is that each letter comes from splitting a normal distribution in half right at the middle where maximum likelihood is. So most people won't be very strongly attached to most of their letters.

>INFP

Hasn't Myers Briggs been debunked as a load of pseudoscience shit?

> I am extremely skeptical of someone who claims this ability in themselves or others.

Have you never heard of someone being a good judge of character?

> Have you never heard of someone being a good judge of character?

I’ve heard of people claiming to be a good judge of character, or claiming other people are, usually without evidence and as an excuse for actions which involve disregarding objective indicia of character as it relates to the decision at hand, and very often as an excuse specifically for making decisions that seem to amount to disregarding objective criteria to favor their own and/or a generally-socially-favored race, ethnicity, subculture, etc.

I like to use nominative determinism to figure out who to hire, myself.

Dragonwriter, now that's a good name, you'd have a shot for sure.

I've heard of many kinds of things. You've never heard of someone being wrong?

Agreed, this sound like astrology for the Stanford set. Baffling.

Meh. You're underestimating how simple people are and how easy it is to read intonation and general presence of a person. Combined with questions that apply pressure it is very easy to read a person because the very basics of a human being are inherently simple.

"I felt the gut-feeling that the guy sucked, so I didn't give him a job, told my connections he sucks, and lo and behold he didn't succeed, so I was right."

There's another variant of this that occurs after hiring. You don't trust them to take on a big project, so you give it to somebody else. At review time, you dock them for not having any big projects. Clearly a bottom performer.

You just can't understand people on a snap judgment, there are too many outliers.

Not so long ago, I would have certainly agreed with you until I met this one girl.

So we started dating and, a couple months in, sometimes, as a joke, I use to say to her: "the first time I saw you, blablabla beautiful blablabla a star in the sky blablabla". I did that not only once but many many times. And every time, every time, she would have the exact same answer. She would say: "the first time I saw you, I thought 'oh bof'" (meaning she thought I was mediocre). So you know, I thought she only plays hard to get, like women do. That didnt bother me. Time passes and I kept going with my "the first time I saw you .."s. Kind of know she liked it anyway. And she kept on having the same answer.

At one point I thought something was strange. She kept on having those exact same words again and again. 'Oh bof'. Again and again. I could sense she was actually trying to tell me something entirely else.

Until I realised what she was saying. When I did realised what she was saying, I was shocked.

The first time I saw her... what I really thought was... 'Oh bof'. This is literally word for word what I thought the first time I saw her. I thought in my head: 'Oh bof'. But not only the words matched perfectly, the ton as well.

I pass on the details but let me tell you that girl knew exactly my state of mind even when I was in the next room.

Thats the time I learnt some people can tell exactly what you think just by looking at you. This is frightening. They can because they started observing people at a very young age. They love to observe people. Exactly like it is said in that pg's post: they observe.

Not to be argumentative, but how did someone get hired if 7 out of 8 interviewers said "pass"? What's the point of having 7 interviewers if only one of them gets to decide?

Definitely agree with your point that some people have a gift for this kind of thing, so just genuinely curious how the 7 of 8 thing worked.

I've read before -- though right now I can't think of the source -- that if a group of interviewers are weakly against a candidate but one is strongly for them, you should trust the instincts of the person who's "strongly for." When hiring, I'd probably have that than a room of people who are weakly for a candidate on the basis that you'd rather have a person who's great at one thing than someone who's okay at everything.

Are there any books on this topic that anyone would recommend? As a manager, this is where I struggled the most - naturally i am someone who strives to be a consensus builder, but it's hard to know when to put your thumb on the scale vs not.

Read this and you will understand why consensus often doesn't make sense in hiring: https://erikbern.com/2020/01/13/how-to-hire-smarter-than-the....

You might take lots of peoples opinions into account but that doesn’t mean you should do so by majority vote. Some of those people may have been more confident than others. And it could make sense to allow for more variance in hiring (eg for hiring interns, or at an investment bank or big law firm where many new hires are sent out after a year so the cost of a bad hire isn’t so high)

The point isn't that only one person is the decider. When someone trusted has a very strong conviction about a hire, it may be worth rolling the dice.

She’s probably the most senior one. So she can override anyone but doesn’t always do it.

Or, 7/8 people were "weak no", they heard her argument, then changed their minds to "weak yes."

The whole point of a committee is to reach consensus. I've flipped my beliefs on many candidates before after hearing what other interviewers think. I think most of us understand that interviews aren't exactly the best way to judge a candidate - at least I think that way. So I'm pretty open to forming consensus when I'm "weak" and they are "strong" in opinion (especially if I respect their judgement).

At a company I worked at in the past we had a "champions" rule:

1. First, only select few interviewers with a great track-record could be a "champion".

2. If this interviewer was going against the rest of the interview panel, they could choose to be that interviewee's "champion". This means they are essentially saying "I have such a strong conviction that this person will do well that I'll put my professional reputation on the line for them." E.g. this person agreed to be that person's mentor when they started, and if things went south they would carry the burden of additional mentorship or finding the least problematic way to fire that person.

Depends on why they "pass" - it might be "They're solid, but not a good fit for my specific team". Assuming each interviewer is focused on their specific group and the skills they actually use and need day-to-day.

Different groups requiring different skillsets certainly isn't unusual.

This happened after the manager already demonstrated a track record of 100% for picking candidates that turned out to be good. This happened in situations were the "hire" count was the majority.

I do also agree with you that "only one person gets to decide" is a bad idea in general (and is usually a red flag for someone trying to be a dictator).

> During interviews, she would always sit in with another interviewer and never ask any questions of the candidates. She would just observe.

I'd honestly be a little unnerved by this as an interviewee. I've seen interview shadowing before for people first starting to interview (and in the past have both shadowed and been shadowed), but having someone watch me like that not to learn how to interview but to just focus on monitoring me would feel very different. I definitely have an above average amount of social anxiety though, and one of the biggest things that induces it for me is not getting feedback about whether I'm communicating clearly, so maybe this is specific to me and not generally how people would react,

I mean it is all fine. There are other more suitable candidates for them and other more suitable jobs for you. Else we would be totally fungible which I am sure employees wouldn't want (though employers may).

For another data point I'm not sure I would notice until later unless there were cues that one person wasn't simply taking the lead.

My guess is that this kind of people will add a few remarks here and there, look at the persons doing one question, look at you while you answers, look at the other person doing the question, smile, look at you while you answers, make a small nod, ... Not stare at you with the eyes open like a cartoon character.

I would hope someone would introduce the person as, "just observing."

My past few jobs required interviewer training, which involved observing interviews. So pretty much any interview I was involved in had an observer.

The YC interviews at the time were with 4 to 6 partners. So given 10 minutes an interview, it's natural that not everyone asks questions. Jessica almost never said a thing, but would be quite attentive. So it wouldn't be unnerving that there was someone that didn't get to ask questions in the interview.

> e.g. there were times where 7 out of 8 interviewers said "pass", she said "hire" and she was always right.

Just noting: that situation around that assessment can affect the outcome.

For example, hired person appreciates the opportunity/faith extended to them, or otherwise picks up on the need to rise to the occasion.

Or a manager or other staff sees/treats the person differently because of the circumstances (e.g., gives the hire more guidance because they think the hire will need it, wants the hire to succeed because a founder has blessed them, or just sees the person more favorably because they trust the opinion of someone else).

> For example, hired person appreciates the opportunity/faith extended to them, or otherwise picks up on the need to rise to the occasion.

I don't think it would make sense to tell a hired person "you barely got in here, everybody hated you except for one interviewer".

Many people can pick up on that situation, during or after.

Depends how you phrase it.

"Jessica is the reason we hired you - she says you'll be great here and when she says that she's always right" technically says "we weren't going to hire you", but also "we all believe in you".

I mean yes, but not everyone succeeds despite best efforts, and a good social radar might imply detecting whether they Will rise to the occasion or not

This sounds sorta like one of my observations about someone I worked with: she'd go into an enterprise prospect/relationship meeting, and come out with better insights than the other people from our team. And the insights rang true.

(And it was unfortunate that she wasn't listened to more, because a higher-ranking person would more often miss cues about customer thinking, or would come out of a meeting seeming to feel a gist biased more towards what they wanted it to be.)

For that skill/quality and others, I later tried to recruit her as a startup CEO.

Devil's Advocate: what are the counter examples for her x-ray vision for character?

Founders at Work starts with the assertion that a sprinter is never faster than out of the blocks.

As a one time sprinter, i read that, knew it totally false, and it invalidated my trust in reading further. So i wasted money buying that book.

If one publishes so carelessly, it’s sad.

Not necessary a counter example but with all the Reddit drama right now, I would like to know her opinion on Steve Huffman and if he is fulfilling expectations.

Looks like she has an interview with him on her podcast. :)

> It also reminds me of a story from, I believe, Malcolm Gladwell's Blink about the tennis coach who knew before a tennis player served if they would double fault.

I believe it was from watching the serve, but not seeing where the ball went. As someone who has played tennis for many years (but not remotely professionally), it always seemed to me that the coach could simply be reading the player's expression. When you're serving, you can typically tell based on how the contact felt, and the sound it made, whether your serve was going in. It wouldn't be surprising if that could be 'read' from your face.

I can take a wild guess about some traits she never selected.

Basically anyone who can do this kind of thing falls into INFP or INFJ in Myers-Briggs. They're just incredible at reading people. Based on the article I'd be shocked if Jessica wasn't an INFP.

Fascinating. I've never heard this about INFP/F types, though I am one. Can you describe more about your experiences or point me to some examples?

There's a lot of sources out there on this topic, but Psychology Junkie is way better than I would have expected from the name. Two articles that mention these traits:

INFJ: https://www.psychologyjunkie.com/understanding-infj-intuitio...

INFP: https://www.psychologyjunkie.com/the-infp/

Thanks, I appreciate the links.

I happen to be in a new leadership role and in the middle of a hiring decision.

https://www.16personalities.com/personality-types is a pretty good (and free) resource to get started in this field.

False. First, one person’s Myers-Briggs score can drift over time. Any of those letters can flip; being an “empath” is learnable. Second, people like Jessica and other evaluators do a lot (both reported and unreported) to set and move the goalposts that define success.

What this article and discussion shows is less of a “some people are magic” phenomenon and more of a “a lot of evaluators and leaders have huge blindspots” phenomenon. Most all panels bias towards false negatives; there’s a lot of support for having too narrow a perspective on any given candidate.

I've tested as INFP and INTJ. I'm not going to deny the Introvert theory part. The rest of it, I don't know how seriously to take it. I haven't studied the academic literature, and the occasional pop-psych writing about it bears some similarities to astrology writing (e.g., appeal to being special, being deep, having powers, navel-gazing, etc.).

If you're not sure about the tests, you can use this quick framework in this comment to help you find your letters.

Extraverted (E) vs Introverted (I)

“E” generally means gaining energy from other people, while “I” means people drain your batteries. This one is not always immediately obvious for people. In general "E"s talk more when with groups of people and "I"s think more. Even though I spend a lot of time at home with my wife, I'm an E - I get energy from social interactions.

Sensing (S) vs Intuiting (N)

This is about how you process new information. S people see what's actually in front of them - they think and talk more in specifics. In general, S types are better at detail oriented work.

N types intuit things, so they sometimes aren't great at focusing at what's in front of them, but are great at coming up with ideas and next steps based on what they see.

Feeling (F) vs Thinking (T)

Everyone feels and everyone thinks. A good way to judge this is people's reactions to situations. Feelers react with empathy first, thinkers react with problem solving first.

Very basic example: Your friend comes in with their arm bleeding. Is your very first reaction?

"Oh no! What happened?" - Feeler

"You should go to the hospital!" or "Let me get something to wrap that", etc etc.

In general feelers are more likely to feel empathy for someone, even if they they think they are dead wrong or disagree with them.

Judging (J) vs Perceiving (P)

This is about how you make decisions. And it has nothing to do with the dictionary definitions of judging and perceiving.

Some defining traits of Js:

Achieving the goal is more important than the process.

You are comfortable making decisions with limited information.

For Ps:

Being true to your moral system is more important than achieving the goal.

You prefer to collect more information before making decisions.

The side effect of these two things means Js tend to have steadier lives with more commitment, while Ps tend to have a broader range of experiences and a bigger variety of life experiences.

---

Lastly, the temperaments:

ExxJ - Organizes people

IxxJ - Keeps systems running, also good at absorbing and teaching information.

ExxP - Collectors of experiences, achievements, pleasures, etc.

IxxP - Being true to your convictions

---

Now, people who study function stacks are going to shit on this comment, saying the letters don't mean anything, its all about functions like Extraverted Thinking, etc. But I find these letter rules make a great shortcut for 97% of people.

> Sensing (S) vs Intuiting (N). This is about how you process new information. S people see what's actually in front of them - they think and talk more in specifics. In general, S types are better at detail oriented work.

What about someone who is strong intuitive, but starting the next moment they're very detail-oriented, and also the person you'd most trust for meticulous coding that had to work?

> But I find these letter rules make a great shortcut for 97% of people.

Do we want to try to hire people who have qualities that would spanning these headshrinker buckets? If so, maybe we're dealing a lot with that missing "3%", so trying to pigeon-hole people would frequently be counterproductive?

It's like being right or left handed. And you wouldn't want to box against George Foreman even if he uses his off hand.

Intuitors just start with the big picture as their basic instinct, then fill in the details. Sensors start with detail and build up to the big picture.

Is that closer to the actual cognitive mechanics, or closer to a myth that's nevertheless useful for classifying people?

For example, in some empirical behavior research, person A seemed to have better snap decisions but poor at follow-though, and person B seemed to be asking about details... Has that nailed some key innate difference in how A and B actually think, or merely -- for purposes of, say, assigning military conscripts to jobs, or a huge corporate hiring machine that can't care beyond commodities -- at least it's a classification?

Maybe it's better than chance at predicting exhibited behavior (absent training), and we don't know that it reflects the actual cognitive mechanics?

Meyers Briggs is good conversation fodder, but otherwise it's on the same legitimacy plane as astrology.

Fascinating story!

Your x-ray vision manager: what (interview) questions or criteria did she use?

Not op, but

>she would always sit in with another interviewer and never ask any questions of the candidates. She would just observe.

Maybe the secret to being a good evaluator is to not do a distracting different task at the same time.

Chris Voss talks about this in his book "Never Split the Difference".

He advocates for teams of people handling a negotiation with the most experienced negotiator just observing.

The reason: it's incredibly difficult to be process, crafting and delivering responses in real time. If your primary goal is to observe the other side, that should be your sole focus. It's also incredibly valuable to have that observation hence why you should negotiate in teams (or at least pairs).

I learned this from Star Trek TOS where Khan congratulates Kirk on letting Spock question him while Kirk observes.

You are correct.

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