Comment by samtho | Hacker News Reader

Comment by samtho | Hacker News Reader

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With regards to hiring, this is tricky because all candidates will try to put their best food forward and have a reasonable explanation for everything on their resume. In addition, low performers can look like high performers if their experience was painted by working at places with low expectations. I’ve hired very high performing people who later admitted to being PIPed many times throughout their career but these places were either greatly dysfunctional and/or just not a good fit for them.

Additionally, high/low performance has little to do with competence in the role in my experience and hiring someone truly unqualified is very rare. Some of the lowest performing people (in the long-term) were the sharpest during the interview and I still consider very bright people. Higher performers can run the gambit but a lot of companies miss out of great talent because the prospective employee fumbles over a closed book, live coding challenge.

Lower performers typically have something else going on in their life (relationship problems, housing or living situation stressors, financial stress, family stress, undiagnosed/under-addressed mental health problems, etc) and maybe during another time in their life could very well have been very high performing.

My point is, when dealing with people, it’s complicated.

A bigger population just hasn't been trained properly. We have no controls for that, so people get lucky with disparate learning being just enough for their first job, then that turns into experience towards the next job.

Then they find themselves among high performers and can't keep up, really through no fault of their own.

Some high performers are just natural and born with it, which is unfair to let that affect how anyone judges others' performance, but it still happens too (esp. if the high performer is doing the judgment).

What I generally see when people categorize their workers into high/low performance is from a bigger issue of poor stewardship over the industry and training its talent.

This means I don't actually have to improve, I can instead just spam job applications and get lucky just because technology is such a large industry.

> A bigger population just hasn't been trained properly. We have no controls for that, so people get lucky with disparate learning being just enough for their first job, then that turns into experience towards the next job.

I agree, but I am also hesitant to advocate for controls in the form of certification (degrees, licenses, etc) because it just adds a layer that provides a strong positive signal for a while until it’s just inundated by grifters yet again, so now we’re back to square one.

We see this take the form of degree mills and accelerated trade schools initially, which ends up creating more problems, more barriers, and ceases to benefit the companies looking to hire. Everything can and will be gamified, and I am also hesitant to tie people to former employers so heavily as that creates an unhealthy power imbalance.

Then how can we control for talent? I don’t know the answer to this question or if it’s even the right question to ask, but I’m fairly confident that we cannot solve this using 20th century nor modern hiring and screening processes.

If I hire a plumber to do work I don't care about his life experiences, he can either fulfill the obligation or not.

nowadays there's entirely too much of this externalizing responsibility and making excuses for people.

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