How to hire low experience, high potential people
worktopia.substack.com
worktopia.substack.com
- Are they smart? (understands quickly + communicates effectively)
- Are they cool? (won't put poison in the keurig + pleasant to be around)
- Are they high energy? (initiative + action bias)
- Do they have the experience needed to be successful in the role?
Those are pretty strong priors for success. If you find someone with all the above, you've got an ~80% chance of a hit. No need to over-complicate.
In my experience, adding more boxes tends to index towards box-checkers who grew up wealthy. That's how you miss the hyper-smart/diligent state school kids who happened to spend their summers working instead of doing model UN.
- Y-axis is "drive"
- X-axis is "aptitude"
- low drive + low aptitude: never hire
- low drive + high aptitude: hire for targeted use cases where you need expertise
- high drive + low aptitude: hire, train, and foster aptitude growth
- high drive + high aptitude: hire on the spot
There's an indirect way of testing for this which is to test for curiosity and lack of ego. My experience has been that candidates with high curiosity tend to have low ego (they know what they don't know and are curious to learn). These candidates make great hires because you can teach them anything.
Wrote about this a little bit here (with a handy diagram): https://charliedigital.com/2020/01/15/effective-hiring-for-s...
If you ask relevant but technically hard and esoteric questions _without the expectation of an answer_ you can sometimes see it in the manner of the response. Do they probe the question? Do they explore the idea, even if they don't know the answer? Do they readily admit that they don't know?? Or do they become defensive? Do they fake their way through it? If they make a mistake and you point it out, how do they respond?
uh? tell me more
In a startup, lots of mistakes will be made. A team with the right vibe knows and acknowledges this, but focuses on fixing the problems rather than finger pointing.
In that sense, "vibe" is not inherent to the individual, but I like to think of it as "we're on the same wavelength" when it comes to key things. So it really means "does this person fit with this team and this mission?" -- "vibes" sums that up for me.
Unethical is one thing, neuroticism should not be a disqualifier from decent employment.
I assume you’re young: there are many reasons people might be perfectly good at a job but not want to socialize with those people, or any other people.
This whole thread makes me sad as an unemployed autistic person. HN folks are horrible hiring managers!
Edit: and now downvoted for showing you losers that your personal model of the world and the people in it might be lacking; fuck vc tech bros.
Not wanting to get Friday beers with the team shouldn't really be a factor.
Not being able to communicate smoothly and effectively with them in a work context absolutely is.
I suspect the poster you are responding to is focusing on the latter, and you on the former.
This is why all the talk of valuing neurodiversity is BS. The leaders want an autistic savant without the autistic part. Playing one is exhausting and can never be done perfectly.
The problem as I see it is that people tend to see communication issues as a character flaw. They don't think it's a handicap like poor vision or a broken leg, but must stem from laziness or worse.
I sometimes long for a set of different drugs that people could take that would impair their brain/body for a short time in a similar way to how people experience the world as someone with autism or adhd or whatever else. I am sure that would be a somewhat "bad" idea, but I think it could also be a help in some cases. I'm autistic myself and it took me years of learning about autism and watching my autistic child before I really grokked how much of an impairment it has been for me in my life. That I am an old man with a relatively decent life and financial position for an American is a miracle, honestly, based on what I know now. I definitely had my Swiss cheese holes line up (in a good way this time) for me to be able to sail through the cheese of life this easily so far! I am not sure I can maintain that luck now, though.
Depending on the team and project , those challenges balanced against the pluses may mean that it’s worth doing anyway , or equally they may mean that it is not. It can be exhausting for the other people involved also.
I agree that anyone treating it as a character flaw is problematic and unlikely to result in effective mitigations. There also aren’t always effective mitigations , this stuff is all pretty context dependent .
i think you're not helping your case by this comment itself being antisocial.
my use of "asocial" was specifically the very common connotation attached to it of being hostile or inconsiderate which are the exact words used when you google its definition
These two don't really match up, they are just driven for different things I suspect.
Edit: General von Hammerstein
I divide my officers into four classes as follows: the clever, the industrious, the lazy, and the stupid. Those who are clever and industrious I appoint to the General Staff. Use can under certain circumstances be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy qualifies for the highest leadership posts. He has the requisite and the mental clarity for difficult decisions. But whoever is stupid and industrious must be got rid of, for he is too dangerous.
- low drive + low aptitude: never hire
Hammerstein thinks some use can be made of these folks
- low drive + high aptitude: hire for targeted use cases where you need expertise
Hammerstein has this group as high leadership positions
- high drive + low aptitude: hire, train, and foster aptitude growth
These are the ones who Hammerstein avoids
- high drive + high aptitude: hire on the spot
These go to the "General Staff"
My experience has been that aptitude can be developed. In the context of "low experience" (generally junior engineers), the ones that succeed are the ones that put the work in to learn and get better.
But I can appreciate Hammerstein's perspective, especially if there isn't an added nuance of Carol Dweck's "fixed" vs "growth" mindset. A high drive, low aptitude individual -- seen through a fixed mindset lens -- is indeed dangerous!
In a military context it's plausible "don't hire" isn't an option.
The stupid and lazy can be put to work and will probably get something harmless done, they just can’t be trusted with anything challenging.
The stupid and industrious are an active danger wherever you put them in the hierarchy.
But you probably shouldn't give them passwords to the production servers.
Someone I learned much from way back called this "wattage". As in: "he's too low wattage".
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid...
This needs to be subdivided. There are plenty of people who've had a lot of opportunity for aptitude growth, but they didn't grow. And having high energy in those circumstances really messes up a lot of stuff (they're incompetent, but jump into and be involved in everything, and you have to politely tell them to get off your project).
Implication is that if you're high-slope, you'll eventually become high-intercept.
If you're a startup, you want to bias towards a mix of high slope, low intercept and positive slope, high intercept.
I think it's also worth pointing out that people can have negative slopes (due to social reasons, ego reasons), and that slope is not invariant over a person's career but often changes.
Ideally, you want to find people whose slope is positively-impacted by the environment of the company – a great hire is only a great hire if it's a great mutual-fit, in that way.
I think the industry really wants an objective, formulaic way of identifying these individuals, but the reality is that a lot of it does still come down to subjective factors since there's so much variability along so many different facets.
What I can say personally is that I've had pretty good success hiring, but I wouldn't claim that my "intuition" can be systematically applied by anyone to achieve the same success.
If it were necessary to rely on a shaft that had grown perfectly straight, within a hundred generations there would be no arrow. If it were necessary to rely on wood that had grown perfectly round, within a thousand generations there would be no cart wheel. If a naturally straight shaft or naturally round wood cannot be found within a hundred generations, how is it that in all generations carriages are used and birds shot? Because tools are used to straighten and bend. But even if one did not rely on tools and still got a naturally straight shaft or a piece of naturally round wood, a skillful craftsman would not value this. Why? Because it is not just one person that needs to ride and not just one arrow that needs to be shot.
Better that you can identify candidates with potential and have a system of knowledge transfer and training to make them productive.
[0] https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/11/14/han-fei-tzu-d-233-bce-lega...
You meet minimum requirements on both, and if you do your contribution better exceed your high maintainance demands.
But one way to try is to wholly hand off greenfield projects within your company. The whole idea of a "startup within a company" is fundamentally flawed, but you can attempt it anyway.
If you do choose to hire this person make sure to isolate them from other. I've seen a single low drive + high aptitude person single handly ruin teams. They are a cancer.
Yeah, but that's the point. Those who come from wealth bring connections. Connections are what make or break a business. A mediocre worker with rich parents is far more beneficial to the business than a standout worker that came from the slums.
the vast majority of rich people are not well-connected enough to drive any business your way. if you have a tech startup do you really care that you hired the son or daughter of a car dealership magnate from the other side of the country?
in the USA it's possible and in fact more common to become a very wealthy without becoming hugely influential.
they may be well-connected in their particular geographic region or within a certain business sector, but this would be a specific advantage which usually wouldn't benefit your business.
this may be different in some other countries, where nearly everyone wealthy is part of the same national elite group.
but generally, in America, you'd be better off hiring the better employee.
Of course! That's an incredible resource. Even if they don't specifically drive business your way, having the person's ear is something that can be leveraged to great effect. You don't exactly become a car dealership magnate without knowing a thing or two about business and they can teach your startup a lot. A magnate is more likely to chum with investors who might be interested in helping your business. The list goes on and on. Unfortunately, at least statistically, the poor parents will never be able to offer the same.
American individualism may be the American identity, but individualism doesn't get you far in business. America is not unique like you are trying to suggest.
This is an enormous stretch. I highly doubt the son of the owner of Henrysburg Chevrolet in Henrysburg, Georgia is going to bring anything to the table that a startup in San Francisco needs, purely due to his dad. You have no idea if dad knows anything about business. And if he does, you have no idea if dad taught any of it to kid. And if he did, you have no idea if any of it is relevant to developing biotech software. Nobody in the company is going to care about dad's connections to the dude that runs Henrysburg Laundromat. But sure, go hire his kid because of some vague pedigree reason.
And what is it that you think this hypothetical startup actually needs? The most motivated janitor money can buy?
> You have no idea if dad knows anything about business.
A magnate that knows nothing about business? That doesn't make any sense. A magnate is literally characterized by their involvement in business. Perhaps you mean that mom could be the magnate instead of dad? There was nothing to suggest that she isn't the magnate. It was never specified.
> And if he does, you have no idea if dad taught any of it to kid.
And? You're not hiring the kid for his business acumen. You are hiring the kid for their mediocre capabilities in whatever work you need done and using them as a connection to get in touch with the magnate of the family.
A slightly better worker isn't significant like you make it out to be. In fact, even if you do find the 'magical rockstar', chances are they'll quickly move on to the next job anyway, and then you're back to dealing with mediocre. May as well design the company around mediocre from the start. Let's be real: Startups are generally not attractive places to work as compared to the alternatives the best of the best have in front of them. If the 'rockstar' really, truly, wants to live the startup life, they are going to start their own and eat your lunch in the process.
> And if he did, you have no idea if any of it is relevant to developing biotech software.
But the advice of a welfare parent is? There are no guarantees in life, but when playing the odds that is who you are choosing?
> Nobody in the company is going to care about dad's connections to the dude that runs Henrysburg Laundromat.
Except for the person who actually has to make the business a success, not just collect a paycheck and get a new job if the business fails. They don't get to sit around writing code all day. They have to actually get out there and meet people who will move things forward.
I get it, Field of Dreams is a fun concept... for a movie. But that's not how things work in the real world. Simply building it is not enough. Business is, at the end of the day, about people.
The tech world is filled with wealthy people not wanting to believe that their wealth was a determining factor in their success. Having the social and financial stability to found a company and get money to hire people is the kind of thing that takes a degree of wealth and tends to attract people with wealth and repel people without.
I don't think people consciously choose to hire the rich kid, but the pool of people to choose from will be filled with rich kids.
> if you have a tech startup do you really care that you hired the son or daughter of a car dealership magnate from the other side of the country
If their child was able to go to an expensive prestigious school across the country and then an expensive graduate school instead of needing to work, have a larger network of friends and colleagues from those experiences, and can pay for them to have better healthcare and a nicer apartment in San Francisco because you're not able to pay enough then yes. It's more likely you're going to pick them and they'll say yes to you.
Of course a bit of a chicken and egg with hiring the diverse team.
You can’t single-handedly solve the systemic problem of unequal access to opportunity.
Some candidates can't make it through an interview without being condescending to someone, making snide remarks, being arrogant, trying to start arguments about trivial things, or other negative behaviors. If they're doing this during the interview, you're only seeing the tip of the iceberg. It's going to be 100X worse when you have to deal with that person 5 days a week.
Other candidates behave well during interviews but have a history of causing social problems at other companies. It takes some work to uncover these (and, importantly, validate their veracity). Some of the most toxic people I ever worked with were very charming in interviews. They swung from company to company, leaving a trail of unhappy coworkers behind them. They could only get hired into new companies where nobody knew any of their past coworkers, because a simple reference check would reveal how difficult they were to work with.
Filtering this behavior out before someone joins the team is very important. Hiring a single socially toxic or subversive person into a team is like dropping a bomb on a healthy team dynamic. You may lose multiple good employees before you figure out what's going on and put together a case for firing the bad apple.
Asshole means different things to different people but if someone is power flexing, condescending, aggressive, uses process as a weapon, bullying etc. this is what I mean rather than say straight shooting and direct talk.
In the US, if someone only reveals that they're a tremendous asshole to months into the role, you just fire them two months into the role.
this may well be a feature of (social) economics and hence a necessary evil
Would love to hear any strategies others have found successful.
Are they someone that's going to disrupt your team's focus on product and execution. No? Cool.
You're choosing companion for 8h a day. Nothing wrong with checking culture fit (because that's basically what it is).
It is a super cool story to hear in what jobs somebody already has worked in and a good indicator. I worked as a dancing instructor assistant and learned so much about people. This job does not correlate with my current job as a Java/Kotlin/Android dev but was taken quite well by everyone the interviewed me 10 years back.
You just have very little time during a job interview and mistakes are costly.
> Are they smart? > Are they cool? ... Are the right questions that need to be answered, but not asked directly. The article talks especially about what to ask to get meaningful answers.
People's intuitions around hiring are extremely Bayesian, which is why we have all sorts of laws and regulations and HR departments that try to counteract various prejudicial priors.
A prior would tell you how much each of those attributes would change your viewpoint.
Having very strong priors actually means your decision won’t change unless you have very strong evidence on the contrary.
I'm a little grumpy about this "diamonds in the rough" shit. I'm more concerned about what's lurking in the diamond mines. If people can demonstrate that they can do the work, I don't much need to know if "they have a chip on their shoulders". More generally: I have zero faith in anyone's ability to learn much from psychological interviews.
Later
I want to add: I fully believe LLMs can reliably knock out the code for most programming challenges, but a good coding work sample is as much about what you choose to code as it is about the code itself.
If you're asking people to invert binaries trees or whatever, that's not a work-sample test, it's a coding quiz. Work-sample tests mirror the actual work you're doing; that's what makes them predictive. Writing a function to do X, Y, or Z is usually the easy part about building software; the hard part is deciding which X, which Y, and which Z, and how they fit together.
We didn't deliberately set out to design work samples where the decisions we're grading are things LLMs don't just do for you; we do a lot of systems programming work and those kinds of decisions just dominate systems programming.
Nobody at any point literally spoke to this person?
We've had a ton of issues at my corp of people having other people handle their interview questions, code, or having AI listen to the conversation and answer questions by text as if we prompted it. Then they show up online after being hired and they have webcam problems or never go on cam, talk as little as possible, basically never communicate to anyone really, miss a lot of meetings, etc.
We've had probably 5 instances of this last year we're absolutely super strict about things now. Our assumption is that they want to get in, potentially get any bonuses if there are any, get a few huge (for their call center) paychecks until they get caught. Do no or almost no work. And it's a call center you can sometimes hear tons of convos going on in the background so they're just doing this en masse.
This is happening ALL over since covid. I think some of them may have even filed unjust termination sort of things to the workforce commission but I may be wrong. Huge companies are dealing with this at a really rough scale.
Most of our work sample stuff is design/architecture based. I'm not worried about how LLMs impact it.
This is the sole way we've hired engineers at Fly.io since 2020 and we have never once brought someone on who turned out to be 3 raccoons in a trenchcoat. Raising the bar further on ourselves: we hire globally, at SF scale salary worldwide.
The rubric heavily draws from what questions the candidate asks, and which topics they choose to zoom in and spend time on. It's interesting; I warn candidates that studying for it ahead of time (for instance: for a long time our workdays were all based on a block storage problem) puts you at a disadvantage, by robbing you of good questions to ask. It's not a big disadvantage, but interview-style preparation isn't doing much to help you either.
I'm always reluctant to talk too much about the workday process, in particular because the more I describe it the less chill it sounds. In reality, it's you joining a Slack channel with an engineer from our team and just shooting the shit about something we're (in the simulation) planning to build.
A lot of what that challenge is evaluating is communication. We're an all-remote company with team members in virtually ever time zone; being able to work out in the open in the environment we've created is important.
I think our workdays are a pretty quirky feature of our process. You could instead do a scripted interview, where everybody gets precisely the same questions or prompts. The big thing we do with the workday that I think everyone should clone is: deliver the interview over Slack, and don't allow the person delivering the interview to grade it; instead, have someone else grade from the transcript. It was like a light went off (on?) for us when we figured out to stop having workday participants offer performance feedback about candidates.
(One thing you immediately get from it is a process to iterate on the quality of your staff delivering the workday/interview; you can immediately see which team members click with candidates and which don't, and then nudge people in the right direction. It is wild to me that people do free-form interviews without this kind of iteration system in place.)
Side note - I started down two paths of significant new learning early last year: Security & Elixir / BEAM. I love Security Cryptography Whatever and had no idea you crossed over into the Elixir world (fly.io). Cool!
Now everyone assumes that a runtime means it will take 30 seconds and 8GB of RAM to show a loading screen.
Do you really want a company full of fools and suckers?
Is there a website with a list of companies that don't participate in the leetcode/FAANG interview process? I feel like there is a need for one.
try searching the HN post history. (and report back if you find something :-)
That being said, it sounds like your interview technique works well for you.
Figured I’d give it a shot, they were very responsive, gave me the challenge and I spent more time than was suggested. They had a few core technologies I was not familiar with at all, but figured I could hack it…I could not.
Anyway, I really appreciated it. Walked away with nothing but positive feelings.
I have spent enough time applying/interviewing over the last decade that I am often in a dilemma when I get an offer that I don’t want bc the process is so fucky/I already have negative feelings. From HR setting expectations and then not meeting them, the laid-out interview process not lining up, remote/hybrid changing, inability to describe actual projects I would work on, not meeting people I would work under/with, made to feel like I lack intelligence by interviewers, etc.
I’m not a “rockstar” programmer and never have tons of offers, but I have turned down offers because of screwy interview processes/interviewers just to stay at the evil I know.
I did get a decent offer once, declined, and later learned I dodged a bullet. Another time I was impatient and took an offer against my better judgement, and it turned out poorly.
Utterly ridiculous.
They asked me the same question and I paused for a moment and replied "excuse me, but this question makes me feel uncomfortable; I'm here for an interview not for a date!".
They realized they overdid it and asked me actual questions.
Eventually decided I was the right candidate for them, but until they decided to reply back, I already had found job elsewhere.
Why do they ask such type of questions anyway?!
They are incompetent at doing their jobs.
Oh God. A job interview isn't a therapy session. Why would people ever feel this type of questioning is appropriate for a job interview? How would someone who's dealt with intense trauma during some of those "chapters" respond? Especially given the power imbalance in a job interview, and the pressure you feel to give an answer.
I'd like to believe that I would be willing to politely decline to answer questions like this, thank the interviewer and tell them there just seems to be a mismatch, and walk out of the door. But I don't know if I'd be able to, due to the stress of a job interview.
God damn that sounds exhausting. How about let's skip to the current chapter, titled I'm Good At Computers And I Want A Job.
Why? Because that’s what I was when I started and now I’m paying it forward.
It’s been a very successful model and continues to be.
I changed careers at age 40+, learned to code, now years later enjoying it. It just took someone who thought I could grow.
Interestingly I was hired along side some capable, albeit green, college grads. The difference in terms of understanding how a business works, speaking to customers, asking questions / follow through to get down to the problem we're solving was enormous. They could code circles around me, but they also just wanted to be told exactly what to code and had no interest beyond exactly that.
Can I throw you against a codebase and be productive quickly? Do you already have experience with this obscure library? I want to build now a website using React + Function Calling + Puppeteer, IDK what else to do to impress people.
Same happening with my gf, who is a graphic designer + UI/UX. She has some experience but only as freelancer, she's never been hired by anyone because it seems never enough.
I teached her HTML + CSS and she's been able to do this by herself (https://sofialenti.com/) so IDK what more a designer can learn. The only thing that's left IMO is to learn JS and be able to code some awesome stuff, but at that point she would be almost an unicorn.
It seems the market is just too saturated, despite the frequent news about we need millions of people who can do X! It seems like a way to get cheap and disposable labor.
seems a good bet to stay clear of industrialized work environments if one doesn't want to be cheap and disposable labor.
All you can do is lobby for tighter restrictions, however of course Microsoft is lobbying at the same time with a larger bankroll than you.
When I've been at big companies, it's all about experience and grey hair, and people become more motivated by money and low risk. I find many times, the quality of the average person at a big company is lower than the average startup fresh grad.
I wouldn't blame it on the people but on the environment. I have worked at both big companies and startups. In a lot of big companies it's actually quite hard to make a difference. There are lots of people who can say "No", raise concerns, ask for plans, but not many people who say "Yes". So after a while people learn that it's not worth the effort.
Big corp introduces a constant uphill battle and people get minted to avoid conflict (Why do you want to spend money on a subject that is not on your bosses boss roadmap? Does this new service obey our IT-compliance-rules? I know a virus scanner on Linux is a bad idea, but compliance demands it. I do not care about your threat model, have you installed one already? Can you spend 30,000 Currency Units, but have it billed in November, accepted in December, and paid out in January next year? Answer me until end-of-business!).
People want to have an impact on their environment and conflict is the wrong way to start with.
I don't think I'd be comfortable sharing this much personal information with a stranger on a job interview.
Additionally, it sounds more like a psychological evaluation, than evaluation of a person's potential at a job. I understand that maybe that's exactly the writer's intention, but I'd personally be wary of companies which ask questions like this.
Then lie and tell a good story.
I will say that my general opinion is that people being interviewed should be accurate with the truth but can be flexible on the facts.
They'll review your story with your references; better hope your mom has a good sense of humor...
Ultimately if you're talking about who you work well with, how you deal with frustration, adversity and etc, that's sorta what you're talking about.
I am not a big fan of some of the questions, but ultimately when we think of how humans work together, well or not, it's often a social thing.
For roles that require discontinuous improvement to company process or culture, it's necessary to get a glimpse into how someone thinks, and the elements that went into building their worldview. You need to know how they will react under pressure to an extent that I think is largely irrelevant for a lot of engineering roles.
In other words, the difference between a psychological evaluation of an individual and that individual's potential to do this sort of work becomes very muddy and indistinct. You want to have a picture of their psychology, because the problems you're hiring them for are often psychological in nature.
This is not a popular opinion among engineering types; we like things arrayed in black and white, passing tests and failing tests. But that's naive.
Fucking nobody I know gives too much of their real personality at work, let alone when interviewing.
But “haha aren’t all engineers only friends with other nerds and barely live in the real word” so what do I know?
i don't believe that. are you claiming that they are all faking it?
i would not want to work in a place where people fake their personality just to fit in.
my experience from working on FOSS projects suggests that the stereotypical behavior we see in some engineers is in fact real. not as exaggerated as people claim, but the signs are there.
more importantly however is that among engineers i feel there is less expectation to conform to some kind of normalized behavior or personality. at best, certain aspects of someones personality don't get an opportunity to show. say for example how someone cares for their family or animals, or volunteers in non-tech areas.
an alternative interpretation of your statement would be that people do not show all of their personality at work, but only those aspects that are relevant for the work. and that is just what is needed. showing someones full personality at work is not what is expected here.
a more negative side of this is that in some places certain aspects of a personality are being actively suppressed. say, calling out problems that hurt the company, or trying to be helpful to others (and possibly hurting your own performance because of it)
You may choose to share some of the deeper reasoning as to why you act one way or another, with certain people under certain circumstances. But it is a choice and not a requirement.
"I tend to be very protective of my team" should be sufficient, especially in an an interview setting
You know that statistically some number of the people you work and collaborate productively with, and get along with. They would, if given the option, never interact with you again for the rest of their lives. You know this, right?
I am a boring robot engineer because it’s easy to do. The “how was your weekend” conversations are about tech hobbies because I’m not sharing the occasions I got drunk, took mushrooms and hung out in a pool full of naked people for most of a day.
i don't know that because i don't care. what i care about is that we can get along at work. at that point that is all that matters. chances are that the longer we work together the more we get to know each other and the more we learn to respect each other and the more likely we may enjoy interacting outside of work.
i think this goes back to the difference between europeans and americans: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39006092
well, actually it is europeans and the rest of the world, because everywhere i have been to, north america, asia and africa, people are friendlier than in europe.
but it can't possibly be true that the whole world except europe is faking being nice. it doesn't make sense. i rather think that people honestly believe that being nice is the right way how to interact with others, and that has absolutely nothing to do with being fake. it is the very thing that allows us to get along. whether i want to hang out with you after work is not a question of getting along or of our personality but one of having common interests or beliefs. and if someone doesn't want to hang out with me ever again, then it's not only because we really do not have any common interests or beliefs but also because that person is likely rather closed minded. (to be clear, not wanting to hang out is not a sign of being closed minded. they may simply have other priorities. not wanting to interact ever again for the rest of their lives however does look quite closed minded to me)
people didn't join linus torvalds to develop the kernel because of his friendly personality or richard stallman for that matter.
for sure, a friendly personality does make that easier, and a hostile one will put of some people for whom the personality does matter more, likely due to their own past experiences.
i slowly show more and more of my personality
not right for everyone but i prefer being me even if it costs $$$
I also worry that this stuff can be gamed. If an applicant gains an advantage by telling a story about how he "cared for his dying aunt while finishing a degree and thereby learned what's really important in life," then you're just encouraging a confessional (and potentionally dishonest) style of approaching an interview.
So my perspective is that anyone who tells you a "cared for his dying aunt..." story is full of shit and definitely is playing you.
However, for sake of argument, given that your story is true, shouldn't it also be evidence that those _not_ talking about "caring for dying aunt" is lying too? I mean, you told a story that didn't involve caring for a dying aunt, and that was a lie. We actually don't have evidence (either within your story, or in general I suppose?) that anyone would make up a story about a dying aunt to an interviewer...?
Not my fault that my life experiences aren't made for a casual conversation starter. Which is why I say this line of questioning isn't going to produce good outcomes.
And of course we don't have evidence that people make up dying aunt stories necessarily. But if anyone tells me this is the kind of experience that made them realize what's important is at the very least embellishing the truth.
When I was caring for my dying father, I learned how to function on autopilot, perpetually sleep deprived, in an emotional fog. I was also writing my master thesis and struggling to pay rent with shitty student jobs. Did it make me "realize what is truly important", hell no, but it did make me be ok with cutting corners, doing the bare minimum at work/school and striving for mediocrity because I didn't have physical or mental capacity for anything else. This isn't exactly the kind of thing employers want to hear, so I'd never bring this story up unless specifically asked. And then I'll tell you how it taught me about "what is truly important in life" which is disingenuous
Doubtful indeed. They're more likely to just open themselves up to unconscious bias and prefer to hire candidates with similar backgrounds to them. 'Ohh this person started tinkering with technology in grade 8 in the basement like I did'. While passing up qualified candidates with backgrounds different than theirs.
Why is that the alternative? All of the above sounds awful to me. Are you looking for an employer or signing up for a cult?
That might be true but if it’s important then it should be conducted by a trained psychologist, not some random hiring manager.
This reminds me of a blind date I went on in Korea. We somehow ended up kidding around about how some women really take astrology way too seriously only for her to demand my blood type later on in the evening.
I never knew this, turns out in Korea your blood type is very important as it determines your personality traits.
https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/
default-oriented programming might well resolve some of the conflicts involving object-orientation and its discontents. (e.g. defaults could be a better model for "inheritance" that works in more complex relationship graphs.)
People like thinking what they do is the most difficult and important part of any process, but most non-technical people can pretty easily look at technical work and see that they don't have the knowledge to do it-- the complexity and success/failure is very visible. Since other disciplines' obstacles and processes aren't so easily labelled and quantified, many engineers perennially fail to realize that their perceiving less difficulty and complexity in many other fields is because they lack the perception or experience to identify it.
Or perhaps we realize that company "culture" or "fit" are often used to discriminate.
In an ideal world, anyone could do anything they wanted without impediment. But to quote Mr Lightyear, we're not on that planet. In this world, if I'm hiring you for a role where you're responsible for safeguarding the wellbeing of others (teacher, manager, doctor, whatever), then of course it's going to put downward pressure on my ability to hire you if you have a super fucked up background that makes you snap at people, attack them without provocation, jump at shadows, have traumatic flashbacks mid-sentence, whatever. I'm sorry, but that's just how it is. There are other jobs that are better suited for people in those situations.
Regarding "culture fit":
While we should try very hard to avoid promoting monocultures when hiring (for a whole lot of different reasons, particularly because diversity is crucial for organizational resilience and adaptability), the truth is that it remains a very subjective determination. It depends on your criteria for what constitutes a monoculture. You could say that we live in a monoculture with regard to our expectations for treating everyone in the workplace with a baseline amount of respect. But not everyone agrees where that baseline should be drawn. If you come into an interview and it's immediately clear to me that you're the kind of employee who's going to be disrespectful of your coworkers, and I reject your application accordingly -- well, I'm promoting a sort of company monoculture in that sense.
Then you can walk back from that into varying shades of grey regarding different individual's varying ways of signaling respect, or deemphasis of candor in certain situations, unwillingness to openly address issues, etc, and it gets very messy very quickly. Where is the line between avoiding hiring rude people and discriminating against people from backgrounds or cultures that have patterns of communication that others may perceive as rude? And so on. It requires great care.
This is the sort of ambiguity I'm talking about. To think that this ambiguity doesn't exist, or believe that we can simply wish it out of existence -- that's why I reached for the word "naive" in my original post. I think a lot of engineers are fortunate to work in positions where they don't need to wrestle with this sort of ambiguity in their day-to-day.
Perhaps your view of us "naive" technical folk is itself naive.
But your larger point is fair: it's a very tricky and problematic area.
I do think that it can help to see how people's worldview was shaped rather than just trying to get a one-shot sense of someone's worldview based on your static impression of them at this moment in time, though.
It's analogous to asking someone to describe their prior technical work experience rather than just explaining what they know in this precise moment, and akin to someone showing their work when completing a math problem. It makes it easier to tell whether someone actually knows what they purport to know, or believes what they purport to believe, if they can show how that experience was derived.
I feel this is especially true in the case mentioned in the original article, where you as the employer are essentially taking a minor leap of faith in hiring someone. You can't rely as much on their prior work experience as a "web of trust" evidence point that they know how to conduct themselves. You need to reach for other data points.
I hate personal interview questions with passion, because I had an unusual upbringing, and I don't want to make it my entire personality. So with questions that personal you are either going to be forcing me to lie (and yes, I have had to make up a version of my life story that's not traumatizing to the listener) or you are coming out of that interview with an opinion about me that has very little to do with how I operate professionally.
You can absolutely get a read on one's potential to do a job xyz without asking personal questions.
That's not really the core issue. Those are possible things they could use to manipulate me. I won't be giving them ammo for free. I wouldn't share those things easily on a first date, why would i share them with potential employer?
Especially as a "unconventional" hire, because finding job is hard in such state, so they will have me metaphorically by the balls.
My perspective might be warped by working in post soviet country.
When I've interviewed developers and other technical people when I was in that business, I wanted to gauge if they'd be pleasant to work with, and vaguely "who they are," but that's about it. In a dev interview, I'd be suspicious of someone digging into what made me tick, if for no reason other than their lacking boundaries. But even in ambiguous green field coding projects, not having the most creative dev team could maybe result in longer design times, or overly prescriptive solutions, at worst, if they're technically competent.
Edit: (That said, in one technical role I was in, a technically competent new hire (that I didn't interview) tried to bring a machete into work on their second day for reasons we never found out, despite our working in the secure block of a government building with metal detectors, man traps, etc. But I think that's probably a bit of an outlier. ;-)
However, if I was applying for a job at a creative studio doing deep creative work on amorphous topics with comparatively ambiguous definitions of success, like making a movie, designing a large brand/visual identity from the ground up, or similar, I might not even accept a job if they weren't digging into what makes everybody on that team tick. The difference between mediocrity and excellence at that stage is almost entirely based on the creative capability of the team as an entity. Someone that doesn't jibe with it will be a drag on everyone at best, or unintentionally dousing the creative flames with an unhelpful attitude and momentum-killing diversions at worst.
It might make sense from employer perspective, but why i should put myself at risk? It is similar to prisoners dilemma.
I also have to say that the shittiest, most toxic and manipulative job I've ever had didn't have a particularly robust hiring practice. It was my first white collar tech job so I was already used to shitty manipulative employers in lower-level support jobs and didn't catch it. They were perfectly content to figure out how to exploit people after they were hired.
There are many people who also keep strict buffer between their personal life and work - basically complete different, but not fake(!), personality.
The problem is that not all pressure is considered acceptable. Others have mentioned examples of things that cause great pressure and trauma and can indicate a person is very resilient and able to recover and excel, but which would never be acceptable to bring up in an interview. While it isn't specifically the same thing as discriminating on a protected status, I see it as equally harmful form of discrimination (and a failing of law to discriminate between these groups).
This, however, seems to be a popular opinion. And one that I particularly hate.
You are abstracting the issue so far that you are misrepresenting the primary criticisms people are having. You are not a trained psychologist, and trying to get a psychological profile of someone to try to reverse engineer how good of an employee they are going to be is naive and, frankly, nauseating.
Yeah, you would have to claw this out of me with a hammer. There's absolutely no way I would be comfortable sharing that level of intimacy with a stranger.
Some folks had a lot of adversity in their lives and are OK with talking about how they delt with it. Some people pay others to listen to this and call it therapy.
There are other ways to ask these sorts of questions: did you ever have a job that you dont want to go back to but would not give up the experience of? (Do you know how shitty a job can be, were you an amazon driver or a pickle shoveler)
When they dont have that much experience you want to know that they can be mentored.
> Some folks had a lot of adversity in their lives and are OK with talking about how they delt with it. Some people pay others to listen to this and call it therapy.
Sure. But is "willing to talk about dealing with trauma" really a valid filter to sort potential employees by?
What certain roles are needed to plunge into reliving the time they were raped or assaulted? When they were a war refugee? And while reliving being assaulted to navigate a professional space??
- HR professionals deal with a ton of shit, including assaults.
- First responders, obviously.
- Message board moderators?
- Customer service of any kind. (The Karen memes are irritating, and really, really mean, but I swear I recognize every one those interactions from my years in those kinds of jobs.)
- I was trauma-dumped plenty of times during my teaching career, as well as been loudly - even potentially violently - blamed (by students) for all of the problems they're having in class (or maybe even life, lol).
Maintaining professional aplomb in emotionally volatile situations is a critical part of jobs which deal primarily with people, rather than things - and is more relevant to engineering sorts of roles than many engineers realize.
Look, I'm not defending those particular questions - and far less the particular people asking them. I'm offering an alternate point of view about why they're being asked. It'd be great to see posters on this forum suggest some better ways to evaluate the traits at which they're aimed.
Again: I'm not defending the practice. It's a really gross metric, and a really gross (in the other sense) method. I just haven't seen this thread demonstrate much understanding of what's actually going on.
You're 100% correct about crisis intervention training. I had a few sessions - of dubious worth - while I was a teacher. I worked in a group home for troubled kids for a bit, and that one included learning physical restraints - which I did end up needing. My best mentor, however, was a grizzled old waitress who took a drag on a Camel (cigarette), shrugged, and said "you just gotta let them have their say". She was a wizard at de-escalation.
because we can just ask them how they dealt with with emotionally-difficult work situations in the past.
is there any work where that is not the case?
was hoping for something insightful...
we are truly in the worst timeline.
It's not about being insecure, it's that they are likely to lack the experience and knowledge about if those questions are normal.
If you get those questions when you're going around on your first job interviews, and didn't get coaching on what should and shouldn't be asked/answered, you wouldn't know they were weird.
For example, before I was an engineer, I was scraping by on odd jobs after the 2008 crash. Around that time I applied for a job at Red Robin (basically a fast food restaurant for those who don't know).
One of the questions was a huge list of various types of people - a priest, a school teacher, a police officer, etc. There were like 50 of them. I had to rank them by how "moral" I considered them to be. Aside from that, there were a bunch of other pseudo-psychological questions that tried to gauge my personality.
All for a job paying $8/hr at a fucking fast food restaurant.
That's kind of ignoring OP's point: people that are desperate for income will put up with abuse to get work. Of course they don't want to work there and the working conditions are often stink.
You definitely dodged a bullet, btw! That job was my first lesson in corporate hell
Or they are more stupid. Stupid people tend to psychoanalyze and stereotype other people more often.
"Let me tell you about the years of physical/emotional/sexual abuse I've suffered though." That's just not going to happen - and if it did happen the interviewer is probably not going to come away with "What a brave person to overcome all of that!" but "What a damaged person, I don't need them around".
Well done, you've weeded out people who've already suffered enough.
But as it relates to actual work? No.
Usually the answer to a single resume gap is something personal and none of my business as an interviewer, it's not my place to pry if you were raising children, caring for dying relatives or battling severe depression
It'd be a pretty easy win.
I once interviewed at a medium sized, name brand Silicon Valley darling everyone on HN has heard of, where an interviewer outright asked me if I was married and if I had kids! Like, holy shit, just read your interview training manual! The very first sentence is probably "Do not ask any questions where the answer would even imply information about things that would get us in trouble discrimination-wise." Yet this person overtly asked! Here I was in the stairwell walking down to the second floor and she hits me up with one of the few totally forbidden questions! I thought about saying "What would HR think of that question?" but the asker was the HR manager! Totally bonkers.
An interesting strategy?
This case is strictly worse because the questions are explicitly being asked to evaluate eligibility for hiring.
Are you a virgin?
I could definitely see arguments for asking these sorts of questions in how they could be job related but not worth the legal risk
I haven't had (nor ever likely will) have the luxury of working somewhere where potential/smarts is too relevant past a relatively low threshold
Are you suggesting that this is bad? What do you hope to gain by seeking out obnoxious people with traumatic backstories and broken families with yuck problems? Misery loves company?
Obviously performance is also a critical factor but your comment gave me the impression that you don't see any value (or even harm) in targeting charming people without yucky problems. They do indeed sound like "perfect" colleagues to me!
Screening for people with life stories that you/anyone deems acceptable is extremely problematic, because realistically you will never have access to deeply personal information about 90% of your coworkers. As in, you should not be forcing Janet from accounting to disclose to you that she was abused by her stepfather, because if she is a well-adjusted adult it would have absolutely no bearing on your interactions with her at a workplace
All else being equal, a person who enjoyed an idyllic childhood is typically going to be a more well-adjusted adult than someone who experienced the most depraved, violent, extreme child abuse imaginable.
I don't even have any interest in discussing the finer points with someone who completely denies the long-term effects of adverse childhood experiences.
We are talking about specifically work-related scenarios, that usually have pretty straightforward boundaries and surface-level interactions. "All else being equal, a person who enjoyed an idyllic childhood is typically going to be a more well-adjusted adult" - not necessarily in this specific context, people that didn't experience trauma are not immune to being awkward, immature, neurotic, anxious and various other things that makes working with them difficult.
That is not to say that people who have experienced childhood abuse can't have issues with basic human functioning. The point is, neither are necessarily are better or worse to work with just based on their trauma or lack of thereof.
It is irrelevant that people with normal childhoods are statistically more likely to be well-adjusted in most aspects of their lives, because we are only considering workplace interactions.
If not a jerk, then grossly lacking in sensitivity, empathy and tact.
The reality, the beauty of human relationships is that they are between people with all these issues and dimensions, all the nuance and detail that make up human beings. In the wild, there's no laboratory people - no clean, perfect specimens in simple environments.
My rule is, I don't know what someone else has been through and is going through. Never, ever judge. If absolutely necessary (e.g., I need to decide to partner with them or not), make my best guess but don't judge.
imo, people often take what people say literally or default to a first-instinct interpretation, rather than trying to understand what the speaker is attempting to convey. I try to interpret what people say charitably (a few of my friends think much too charitably), but I really believe that the vast majority of people seldom intent any malice in their comments.
In the example, it might have been intended in an empathetic way - "Damn, sorry, I didn't realize you were still hurting. I would have extended a shoulder to you if I realized". Or a pragmatic way - "I think the situation isn't as bad as you think, want to talk about it?" It could have been bluntly honest (personally, I typically appreciate honesty over politeness) or a totally aloof statement made on reflex. It could also just have been someone being a jerk, but I suppose the point of my rambling is that there's a myriad of ways to interpret a comment, and it's largely based on both the speaker's experiences and how they communicate.
I find that the person I'm talking to, if I treat them as if they are a*holes, act as if that was their intent the whole time. If I treat them as if they in good faith, they act that way.
It's hard to resist the flow of conversation, to not go along with the way it's framed. I think that's why people act how you treat them; I think that's why people even confess falsely to crimes - the interrogator talks to the suspect as if they did it. Other sophsticated communicators also use that intentionally.
Empathy comes from being able to put yourself in other people's shoes. Reading fiction has been shown to increase empathy. If so then these guys need to do more reading.
Not things I'd be inclined to talk about when those things are ripe for opening myself up to discrimination.
Would you choose to leave and walk out of an interview if you objected to something? how would you feel? Would you feel like you were walking away from an opportunity maybe? What if your situation was less than ideal?
I think you would find that many people don't feel the same independence or freedom that you and I seem to. Especially if they're not already comfortable financially.
Between the need to have a job to survive, and the need to appease some self-important middle manager who took it upon them to perform a psych eval, with zero credentials, while controlling the future of the candidates, and their ability to put food on the table.
Kindly, make your self as visible as possible so that I know to avoid you.
You can change the subject or answer very surface-level and be labeled "unengaged" or "socially inept"
You can answer truthfully and be judged for traumadumping
You can make up a fake origin story that fits the interviewer's criteria and be disingenuous
I've learned that the majority of people just don't want to hear anything negative or anything that makes them feel sad. If I want to have social, casual friends, I have to wall off parts of my life story.
Thankfully, I have a couple of close friends and family who know the reality and that is enough for me.
what's not replaceable is deep friendships with people that do care and are open to listen.
Would you consider an accurate answer to that to be a traumadump? How quickly do you think people can make up happy childhood stories when put on the spot like this?
It is a completely inappropriate question in a job interview.
How would you handle this?
Plus “looking for grit” really means “looking for someone to work long hours (typically without good odds of realizing fair equity)”… super unethical to even attempt to be selecting for people with trauatic and toxic Pasts.
If they wanted to select candidates for learning quickly, being adaptive, whatever… just test for that.
Maybe it's a combination of both
I apologize to the author in advance if this assumption is off base, but the biopic at the beginning reads like the kind of life no one from my neighborhood had.
What I will say to the author is: be a lot more careful with the power over people’s lives afforded by your current privileged status, whether you earned it or not.
I didn't read this as a bias against significant prior challenges, in childhood or after. I certainly had such challenges and I've always thought most people have. Since the author's stated goal is identifying high potential, early career candidates in the absence of prior success or obvious metrics, it seems essential to look for resilience.
To me, understanding how a person has contextualized and integrated prior challenges into who they are today is a key personality trait. So much of attitude is "the stories we tell ourselves to explain what happened to us." In my case, I've always felt my childhood had "some pretty rough patches" but in total "it wasn't too terrible." Yet, the few people I've shared the details with are usually aghast at how institutionally abusive it was. I don't deny the severity of it but it's pretty revealing about my personality that I don't now feel emotionally wounded by what happened. Perhaps it was just my coping mechanism but I've always felt "that's just shit that happened to me, it doesn't define me."
Just what the hell do you think emotional and physical abuse is? An overly strict parent? Perhaps you'd like to hear about what me and my siblings went through. It wasn't 'a challenge', it was a fucking deliberate attempt to destroy us as people and it succeeded. You want details? [Edit: don't ask for details]
The most famous example that I can think of is Henry Kissinger, who fled Nazi Germany with his family, at age 15, to escape persecution as a Jew. He claimed, to his dying day, that he was not heavily impacted by the experience. Maybe he wasn't. But I wonder if any of the genocides laid at his feet were in part caused by his refusal to accept any impact his teenage experiences might have had on him.
Demanding that people tell an interesting/engaging story about why they have C/PTSD, just to get a job, totally tracks for the late-stage-capitalism narrative though.
I want to hold it as far from my heart as corporately possible. I don't want to think about it after work, I don't want to work on it after work. I don't want it to know my secrets nor do I need to know its.
I want to be able to say peace bro and walk away whenever I want with no thought of a sad feeling. Which unfortunately does happen but it's always coworkers or cool tech.
This person is out of touch in such a bad way. Why would you put someone through such a cringeworthy exercise?
"If he hasn't struggled, then what does he really know about anything at all?"
This, and the general level of mysticism throughout (really? "Spike potential" WTF), causes me to dismiss the whole article.
Personally, I'm really glad I didn't "get up and walk out of the interview" when they asked me to talk about my youth, it ended up being one of my favorite internships and helped position me towards a career in big tech :)
[1] https://www.shopify.com/partners/blog/interview-candidate
None of that sounds like the actual stories about childhood. It's totally appropriate to discuss past work experiences, aspirations and passions as a "Life Story".
Moreover the “Tell me a little about yourself” suggested interview opener is open-eded enough that the candidate can decide what they want to discuss and highlight. Majority of people do not answer that question with "my first memory was when father left when I was 3 years old..."
You're probably still going to get a lot of irrelevant dreamy passion bullshit with that question though when in reality 95% of candidates are just looking for exchanging skills for income and you as an employer need to accept that that's how the world works.
I guess the question tests a person's ability to craft positive, attractive narratives about themselves. Maybe we're returning to a time when being outwardly happy is treated as a universal social obligation, like in the 1950s and 1960s. My parents' generation rebelled against the oppressive conformity of the post-WW2 era, and the tendency to value acceptance and emotional transparency continued through my generation (Gen X), but it could easily swing back the other way. Especially since all the stubborn problems in this country (resistance to awareness of racism, resistance to awareness of historic injustice, resistance to action on global warming, etc.) are seen as stemming from the unearned unhappiness of privileged people, I can see cheerfulness becoming obligatory, and lack of cheerfulness being openly stigmatized, instead of just passively and subconsciously discriminated against.
Edit: The rise of social media influencers as role models would obviously be a huge factor in this, and in the increasing pressure on people who struggle with something (whether it's a societal issue like racism or poverty, or a mental illness) to live up to the "positive representation" of the influencers who earn the power to define the public's expectations by presenting themselves in a charismatic, consumable way.
Not to mention the minefield of discrimination avenues present here, conscious ones and otherwise. Hell, even a positive feel-good story about a happy life could lead to a negative reaction depending on who's hearing it, these sort of things are inherently perilous to talk about in professional settings.
edit: Sidenote, i take real pride in knowing the little bit i contribute to our hiring process is nothing like this. Just help me understand if you know the tech i think you'll need to know. There's no gotcha questions, no arbitrary count questions you have to answer correctly to pass, etc.
But maybe this is a cultural thing, and works differently in other cultures (didn’t check where the author is from).
In almost all situations, it meant “are you of the same socioeconomic background as the interviewer?”, so it ended up being incredibly racist and also ensured that teams had very little technical diversity.
It did optimize for fun nights out with cliques within the teams (and epic political infighting) though.
It also sounds like an HR nightmare in some states here in the US.
You could likely get a similar interview outcome with less interviewer bias by filtering resumes based on school/major/GPA + (alternate activity) + a battery of behavioral/tech questions. It's desirable by many employers to have a recipe to identify candidates who are less desirable on paper, but equivalent in role.
He asked "So what extra curricular hobbies did you have in high school?" And I'll never forget that it was such a weird gross question to ask someone. What are you doing, judging whether I was in wrestling or theater? Judging if I didn't do any at all because I had to work after school? Judging if I took night classes and worked during the day? Judging if I'm not at christian school after class?
Are you just being chatty and friendly? Weird question. I couldn't even remember. I DID play hockey and wrestle but I was so shocked by the question I didn't even think of those IIRC. Not sure what I said. Maybe I did say those and I'm misremembering because I'm not sure what else I would've said other than "no hobbies."
I get asked about it all the time in interviews.
I just respond “I’m under NDA”.
I also get asked about GitHub profiles. I have a pseudonym on GitHub, and maintain a few projects. I dont divulge that information either.
“I’m under NDA” or “I only work in proprietary code with many trade secrets involved so I can’t”
I’ve probably been screened out of plenty of processes just for that, but I don’t care. I’ve been doing pretty good for myself without making my life an open book.
thank you for a great laugh
To the lawyers!
Is some random interviewer going to be able to make deep psychological assessment of future performance based on the response? Even actual psychologists don’t do that well at predicting an individual’s future course.
Tell me everything about your life, what did you like in elementary school? High school? Tell me all...
This reminds me of LinkedIn pablum more than anything else.
You can also hire that really "smart" person from a large co to a startup and watch them be extremely successful in a low-friction environment for crossing the finish line.
Also, sometimes these people who don't follow through to take things to completion might "just" have something like ADHD. Struggling with finishing tasks is a very common ADHD symptom, and a good manager will help someone use the other "good" skills to compensate for such an issue. (Personally I believe the reason for this is perfectionism.)
This is possible and even likely depending on how you hire.
But I think the OP might be assuming you can onboard whomever you've hired and instead referring to the relative incentives in each environment. For example, big companies tend to plan quarter to quarter, while small companies typically have a pile of things they need done urgently and are incentivized to help folks move as fast as possible (company runway may only be 1 year). That sets up a dynamic where large companies make you spend time derisking new project proposals and getting buy-in, in a way that small companies don't (this is where the agility comes from). Bigco also may have higher standards for getting something off the ground and a lower tolerance for code that is likely to be thrown away, whereas at startups you often write a pile of not-so-great code just to prove the thing works + understand your customer, with the knowledge that you'll have to throw it away when it's time to grow and scale.
One more annoying wrinkle: big companies sometimes have investments that mean you can't use the best tool for the best job. At Google you have to use borg and a very annoying deep stack of stuff to expose a service to the public -- you can't just buy a domain and spin up your website on a $10/mo server with nginx. You can't use React. You can't use PyTorch and just fork the hottest new model that came out -- you'll have to translate it into Tensorflow or JAX first. You also have to build using tools that assume and can handle scale, but sacrifice agility and developer ergonomics for that.
Oh one more thing: people at big companies are so obsessed with level. If you have good ideas and want to try them out but you're underleveled, you're going to have an impossible time geting buy-in from leadership to let you lead or even try the thing. At small companies if you have an idea that's good for the company, it's obvious to your leadership and they're just like go do it, you're in charge of this project, show me what can happen in a week. And you can make stuff happen. Low friction. Big companies might also have an entire team of PMs trying to decide what to prioritize (all the while playing political games since it affects their standing in the company), who also have to sync with eng and design, and then some pushback between the two happen. At small companies the number of people to get on board is just smaller and it makes things go faster.
I've worked a lot of places where there's that special someone who gets to cowboy everything because they're "really good" and of course they look really good, because the rules or structure don't apply to them and they can move faster than anyone else by design. It's a never ending cycle.
Meanwhile everyone else or people who come later have to deal with everything the special someone did / didn't think of and so on.
I don't disagree with the premise, but there's consequences and a sort of inescapable feedback loop sometimes too.
I hate that this is such a common thought process. This is something that makes sense for soldiers in the military. But outside of this context (being a low-information cog in a gigantic machine), it's terrible. If you can't convince domain experts that the plan is sound, then maybe it's a bad plan.
Honestly, disagree and commit goes against my...
> Theory for excellence.
Disagree and commit is like your mom saying she'll forgive but won't forget. sounds good on the surface, but really slightly manipulative and rancorous.
In most teams, not everyone is on the same page:
- There are people with varying levels of experience, some may not currently have enough background to fully understand all the aspects that a plan addresses.
- Many/most people have the tendency to let their various biases creep into team-level decision-making. For instance, if someone had a bad experience on a previous team using technology X, they are less likely to support using X today independent of X's suitability for the current situation. And people tend to have a massive bias towards their own ideas rather than others' - so when two competing ideas are presented, one's own ideas are often preferred to others' ideas.
- Especially in larger organizations, there may be political motivations for pursuing one plan over another plan - both for management and for workers. "Nobody got fired for buying IBM" and "resume-driven development" and "launches get promo more than landings" are a few examples that come to mind that I've seen.
Unless you're on a golden A-team of contributors who are all incredible and on the same wavelength (this does happen sometimes! if so, cherish it!), you're going to have a mix of people with a mix of motivations+biases+experiences, incapable of reaching consensus around the "true" best plan in a reasonable amount of time.
Making decisions in a reasonable amount of time is CRUCIAL to team performance. Obviously, sometimes you make a bad decision quickly when you might have arrived at a good decision with more deliberation+debate+waiting for consensus. But in my experience, the benefit of avoiding these "bad" decisions from time to time is dramatically outweighed by a team's ability to decide very on things very quickly and commit to a plan (and therefore execute).
Famously, section 5.11 of the CIA's Simple Sabotage Field Manual [1] describes some pretty timeless ways to ruin an organization's productivity - all kinds of behavior that are kind of indistinguishable from the behavior I've seen arise from "disagreeing and not committing" in organizations.
[1] https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...
Honestly, it seems like "disagree & commit" facilitates these bad behaviors. An "individual's opportunity to make faulty decisions" is a lot easier when that individual has the power to say, "shut up and do what I say" without repercussion.
A lot of these techniques are feigned incompetence. A manager can abuse D&C to facilitate a lot of these activities, for example by requiring a worker to use a tool that needs to be maintained.
And D&C doesn't prevent things like, starting fires around munitions or putting sawdust in fuel. That's a security issue. And C&D can be used to justify bypassing security procedures. For example, a manager telling a guard not to log their entry into a secured building.
The only real weakness with "disagree and commit" is if you have a deeply unreasonable leader, and then "disagree and commit" is the least of your problems.
If the group is saying X is the right way to go and you’ve already given your reason why you think Y, you should disagree and commit. If you sit there complaining for weeks that they should be doing Y without any new information, you’re just being a shitty teammate and dragging everyone down.
The main point for the commit part is setting aside your ego to move the team forward. Most decisions are two way doors. If X doesn’t work out then try Y but don’t complain, work less hard, or sabotage because you didn’t get your way.
One big exception is if someone is making a decision that goes against company principles or morals.
unity in a team is more important than being right.
The "disagree and commit" scenarios I see in the real world are usually one of the following:
- Disagreements within a team. One "domain expert" disagrees with others about what should be done. The only way forward is to disagree and commit, or remove that person from the team (or company). So disagree and commit is the first choice.
- Disagreements about NIH. Someone wants to build a custom framework or new library instead of using one off the shelf. Building things from scratch is fun, adapting existing things to your need is less so. Given limited resources and time you have to disagree and commit to using something off the shelf.
- Disagreements about priorities. Someone thinks we need to rewrite the codebase or refactor everything or address a low-priority bug instead of working on important feature work for the business. There are cases where too much tech debt is bad, but often it's necessary to focus on what the business needs to keep moving forward. If someone can't disagree and commit to working on what the business needs, that's not going to work out.
Some people simply can't commit to a plan they don't agree with, which means you're either letting them hold everything hostage to their own plan or you're going a different way while they sulk about it. Neither situation is good for planning.
You have a team of smart people. They come up with 3 interesting proposals. You have the bandwidth to execute on only one of them. At some point, a decision has to be made (by you, by vote, whatever).
Two guys on your team are going to hate that decision.
Are you going to be OK with those two not contributing to the end goal (i.e. the "commit" part)? Are you going to be OK with them bringing it up in each team meeting and 1:1 over the next year?
Are you going to be OK with them not voicing their opinions (i.e. the "disagree" part)?
What's your alternative?
As pointed out in a submission a few days ago, the worst experiences tend to be teams that always blindly do what the boss tells them, and at the other end of the spectrum, teams that question every little detail - all the time. Disagree and commit addresses the latter. I've been in that team - it sucks. Never again.
In my experience, this includes high level writing skills all the way down to sentence structure, but not including the ability to write in a formal or "educated" register. Basically, it shouldn't take a lot of effort to read what they write, on a macro level (what is this about? what are the points being made, and how are they related?) and the micro level (what does this sentence say?)
This doesn't correlate nearly as directly with formal education as you would think. Some people with a degree and an impressive vocabulary write text that looks like a courtroom transcript of their train of thought, and some people with very little formal education write nicely structured text that is easy to read, even if their dialect of English isn't what you'd find in the New Yorker. It's less about formal education than it is about their ability to organize your thoughts and their ability to see their work from another person's perspective, which are important skills for many aspects of programming, including writing the code itself.
The downside of this criterion is that if you don't read someone's native language, you can't judge them by it, so if you're looking at multiple candidates for the same job, it's problematic to give one candidate credit if you can't judge all of the candidates. On the other hand, writing well in the language the company works in is almost always a valuable skill in its own right, so it's rare that you would want to completely disregard a weakness in this area. You just have to be aware that an excellent engineer might struggle a bit in a language that isn't native for them.
This doesn't just apply to software engineers!
People just starting out with their careers do not deserve to be subjected to such horribly intrusive and manipulative approaches from recruiters. They are freshers goddammit, you are not supposed to hire them for leadership positions from the get-go. Treat them accordingly and give them space to learn on the job; and if your firm is not capable of doing that yet, go back to hiring based on experience. I have seen way too many large companies of today try to save labor costs by hiring fresh grads and then offloading the responsibilities of C-level leadership onto them so that they don't have to pay large salaries to the experienced candidates instead.
I myself have been a victim of this pathetic practice - a large startup picked me right out of college and then made me lead the ENTIRE sales and customer experience wing of one of their divisions. With zero prior experience, zero training, just handed the reins from the get-go. This role involved hiring, training, deploying and managing literally a hundred sales executives (all of which had more ground experience than I ever did), chasing insane sales and customer acquisition targets, handling customer analytics for thousands of customers across diverse categories and segments _and_ planning and implementing outreach campaigns while desperately trying to learn the ropes at the same time. The job that I was handling was meant not just for someone more experienced, but for an _entire team_ of analysts, domain experts and mid-level managers. After a year of pushing myself and working literally 90 hours a week I gave up. This startup closed down that division the moment I left and lost ~60% of its overall valuation. From what I hear they have now fired everyone and are just looking for an exit chance. The whole thing was a F-ing nightmare that has scarred me from ever attempting to engage with startups in the future. I have joined a conventional consulting firm as an Associate currently and it's unbelievable how rudimentary things like employee training and mature, robust organization is making me feel.
To any recruiters reading this, please stop going after low-experience candidates if your organization is not specifically mature and equipped enough to holistically train them.
Note that this approach, when not supplemented by other questions, favors outlier great results over consistent good results. E.g.:
Distribution A: 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 1, 100, 2, 1, 3; MAX(A) = 100
Distribution B: 72, 73, 78, 79, 44, 75, 78, 79, 78, 79; MAX(B) = 79
If your codebase is C#, would you hire somebody with some Java and Swift, but no C#? If the answer is no, then feel free to scare people away who are not C# experts. But if the answer is yes, reword your job posting. Sure, be clear that you have a C# codebase, but be welcoming to other skill sets.
Just because you host your stuff on GCP doesn't mean that all applicants have to have experience on GCP. Unless it does. If you are trying to hire somebody who can jump in and solve a specific problem on day 1, then ok. But if you are hiring for potential, your new hire will be an expert in GCP two months after you hire them. You have a four month hiring process anyway. What's two more months?
Hard though it be to know people, there are ways.
First is to question them concerning right and wrong, to observe their ideas.
Second is to exhaust all their arguments, to see how they change.
Third is to consult with them about strategy, to see how perceptive they are.
Fourth is to announce that there is trouble, to see how brave they are.
Fifth is to get them drunk, to observe their nature.
Sixth is to present them with the prospect of gain, to see how modest they are.
Seventh is to give them a task to do within a specific time, to see how trustworthy they are.
This is a problem that is very easy to solve if you were allowed to use proxies for intelligence and grit. Just test for IQ and trait conscientiousness. [1]
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[1] IQ is a stronger prediction of on the job performance than anything else. https://www.steveloh.org/news/2020/5/27/best-predictor-of-jo...
More like /r/LinkedinLunatics than HackerNews material.
But in terms of how to assess them, a lot of the advice here boils down to "you'll know it when you see it."
So I think this advice is best for seasoned hiring managers. If you're just starting out, it's going to be hard to accurately detect some of the nuance and subjective elements.
(One followup question I find myself asking a lot is "you said 'we' did X, tell me more about who was part of that" -- great people sometimes give away too much of the credit)
Hire a lot of low experience people (right out of college) and work to identify and retain the exceptional ones.
It's much harder to keep the organization mildly functional so that such people want to stay. The number of highly capable, motivated people leaving orgs because "this place is a disaster" is astronomical.
Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night, and LICK the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife...
Corps with "sane people" running them and hiring is very rare. It's against the rules of the game. It assumes that the people being hired are honest and aren't gaming you. The reason corps have all these large walls and barb wire fencing is to prevent the 1/1000 people who may cause political turmoil, use Title IX to their advantage, steal business plans/tech, or otherwise act in ways harmful to the company. These cannot be predicted by "good behavior" because such people know the game and are acting that way.
Large corps that have obfuscated hiring methods do it because the fed has set up the rules in this way. Larger scope of hiring = higher chance of a destructive hire. If we want hiring to be sane then the rules have to not be punitive.
This is true, they are a lot of work to polish. Overall, this hiring advice seems to apply to larger companies, where people have the time to polish these 'diamonds'. I would not follow it if working in a startup.
I've naively hired 'diamonds in the rough' at smaller companies and startups before. While they were 'diamonds' and were very creative, often offering unique solutions to problems, they ultimately took so much effort and time to mentor that they were never able to reach their full potential. The lack of experience also meant things took longer than needed. In hindsight, my lack of time to mentor effectively was probably the issue.
At a smaller team, say sub 10 people, I'd be reluctant to hire a 'diamond in the rough' again for that stage.
makes all else moot
in hiring at best you can avoid the bad, but knowing good is always a toss up especially for high autonomy roles
i’ve seen good process for cookie cutter roles, but thinkers are idiosyncratic
outside of, “avoid dishonest people” there’s no general rule
and the dishonest people can look very honest
If they expressed an interest in going further, we would share with them a work product sample tailored to the position. This included hiring a manager of compliance and a project manager.
The work sample test had a rigid metric and gave us a go/no-go answer.
This approach was very successful.
I actually have some great example recordings of just such interviews as described in the article if anybody wants some actionable pointers:
The much more difficult issue is retaining people after you've trained them. I worked at a company early in my career that hired a LOT of young people. Most of them failed. A handful every year had rapid growth and would quickly be promoted.
But it was really common for folks to leave once they had acquired more skills. Basically they had become mid/high experience, high potential people in 2 years and someone else would almost always pay them more to go work for them.
Edit: why disagree? If you're ensuring cultural fit, that is discrimination. There are arguments to that discrimination being beneficial to the organization. The individuals may not see it that way.
The conclusion I've reached is that it's almost impossible to predict how someone will perform in a new role. You're always rolling the dice. You need to be willing to hire with an open mind, and fire quickly if it's not working out.
It succeeded in its supposed mission.
So you tell me, should I be hiring you - the diamond in the rough unconventional middle manager at stripe. Or should I be hiring the absolutely conventional genius who built a billion dollar business.
Please, explain to me, what is it about being conventional that disqualifies someone?
Its just not a good deal for an employer.
IMO: It's important to hire all levels of experience. If you hire too many noobs, you get too many mistakes of inexperience. If you only hire experienced employees, you get too many people who are stuck in their ways.
In other words interns. Wouldn't have guessed.
So basically, how to hire best for cheap.
This paragraph starts bad and somehow gets worse until a spectacular crescendo of unapologetically shamefully exploitative nonsense.
That it's posted in an article about techniques for interviewing 19-21 year olds makes it so much more insidious. The article in its entirity reads like a sociopath's guide to bullying teenagers.
Conversely, some of the worst software engineers I’ve ever hired were extraordinarily adept at projecting a high level of confidence without appearing to be overconfident.
We're still in the introduction, and already flirting with ageism. Much of HR is about actively avoiding lawsuits, not going out of your way to invite them.
> I really like questions with maximalist qualifiers like "tell me about your best X.” If it's not good, you know that their best isn't good enough.
I really like interviewers who have a nuanced and humble understanding of the world.
> Go back to their childhood! I learn a lot about their grit and commitment to excellence from their basketball obsession or maybe their experience caring for a dying parent.
Unless the candidate had a pretty enviable childhood, or they're already well-coached in milking a carefully-crafted origin story for college application and such... then I suspect it's very likely that this line of questioning is either going to get you a halfhearted "masking" response (which might not be gritty enough for a particular interviewer), or activate a lot of associations that have little to do with the job, and quite possibly could be traumatic. An interviewer shouldn't be a downer, nor be stumbling into psychological manipulation.
> This is one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in the past – I found someone young, hungry, and wildly talented. However, they were also deeply insecure about their choices and prone to bouts of indecision and paralysis that crippled them.
This can happen. But there's also an obligation to mentor, especially young people. Also, not all the rough spots are necessarily in an individual (it's not unusual for something in the org to be the cause of problems).
> If you’re worried about negativity in the interview, know that it will only get worse over time.
I'm wondering how accurate these confident universal assertions by the writer are. (For example, maybe they're coming out negative because an interviewer just dredged up some painful childhood experiences, see above. Or the cultist impression they're getting from their interviewer is souring them on a company that they were excited to join.)
I have a few 'wise truths' of my own, so I shouldn't be too quick to judge. Reading this has reminded me that sometimes we need to explain when we say suspiciously tidy universals like that.
> Point out things that could be better about your company that could be in scope for their role — great people are excited by the challenge, not by everything being perfect.
This is related to something I like to do in interviews, which is to set a cultural tone of honesty, and to be honest about the situation and about helping find a mutual match.
The writer seems to be using similar appearances tactically, to elicit more information about the interviewee, to evaluate them against interviewer's beliefs about right and wrong response.
> High EQ + Persuasion. People who have a clear-headed view of a situation, and the soft skills/influence chops to bend the environment to their will, are especially valuable. It’s an underrated skill. What to look for: “Game recognize game” – it’s all intuition. It’s the feeling that you’re engaged and enjoying the conversation with the person, but you can see the gears moving in their heads as they read the room.
Of course the writer can't be expected to read the room of the entire Web, to know what "game recognize game" isn't going to go over well as a workplace culture with everyone.
As a person who scores high on "intuitive", people sometimes exercise what the writer is talking about in a way that I personally find to be a turn-off. I try to get them to meet me in a genuine and honest mode, and most do. Not for us to riff together on some corporate game mode, when we're both aware that we both know what we're doing (there are moments, but that's not the top mode to select for). Nor do I want them to try to manipulate/persuade me when they think that we both don't know what the other is doing (sigh, not a good sign).
> What to ask: You know it when you see it.
Out of context, this line at the end of the article isn't entirely bad advice for an experienced and thoughtful person.
You can have your run book. Your check points. Your procedure and tools. Still, you're going to hit, surprise, a 1000/1 loss rate in the long run.
At least from my point of view and past experience with hiring, young, inexperienced, but looking like a good fit.
It's ok to hire people with low experience, and use them like such a resource while they acquire hands-on experience (and that is not 2 months).
The real issue with this, is companies trying to cover experienced roles, with low experience people, from day one.
People without experience, won't be able to do some things, in the same way than experienced people.
And those more motivated, will make serious harm to projects.
And those non-technical roles with decision power, listening to them (low experience) like if they were experienced, and pretending that they know the future problems of what they are doing/talking, will increase the effect.
If you don't have money to invest in the strongest, or to hire experienced people... could you then put your money on an asset with dubious results and with a high probability of causing serious issues?
It's ok, then play with your few money, the careers of the rest of the team, and your startup future, in the casino. You're of course free of doing it.
IMHO The same way that you don't execute a random binary coming from a hacking forum, or a suspicious email, in the laptop of your bank accounts... you don't try to cover roles requiring experience and results, with low experience people.
You do not deploy a random app, with random unsupervised code, into production, right?
You hire low experience people, if:
1) You are willing to waste time of other (more expensive) persons into teach them a lot of important things
2) You have experienced people willing to do that
3) You have procedures and projects, to isolate their harm and what they do
4) You have procedures, to evaluate the evolution of those persons, during the months/years that you will be wasting the time of experienced people into teaching them those caveats that they don't know, or that will appear by first time in their face 11 months/years latter
5) You're not going to promote them before they are ready, for example if one experienced person from the same team, leaves the company. See point 4. You promote them when they are ready. Not by other reasons.
Signed: a past victim of companies trying to lowcost the teams with low experience people
I mean, I'm just starting a job-search and the top HackerNews story's about how prospective employers ought to be looking for applications like mine! I'd love to talk to such prospective employers; I wonder how to make that connection?
When hiring effective management, you should go with the sociopath:
- whose objectives align with your own
- who can effectively mask discomfort
- who can light up a room or light a fire under someone's ass
- who doesn't try to one-up you (assuming you're hiring for a subordinate / equal position)
When hiring technical talent, I think the following are important:
- Zeal for whatever they're doing : This means you don't get to employ a cookie cutter employee. Look at the technical things they do that don't qualify for a resume.
- Ability to ingest information : This person you're hiring should be comfortable with a broad intake of information from various sources. This means someone you're hiring for a technical role should be able to tell you about (for example) the last Sci-Fi series he read and how it made him apply a certain idea from it to another domain. Doesn't have to be too hardcore. This weeds out people that only picked a certain discipline for the money and have no real interest in it.
- The things they've made : Don't constrain them to the exact thing you're hiring for. Allow the candidate to veer.
- The things they decided to drop : This tells you what they thought wasn't worth the effort, or what they managed to sidestep, and how. This tells you how well-developed their discernment for choosing / dropping parts of a technical problem is. This also tells you how lazy the candidate is. Laziness is better than over-engineering something (unless, of course, you can explain why you over-engineered it (assuming the candidate ideally understands said thing is over-engineered))
- "If you were in management, what would you do differently?" - Vox Populi. Attitude towards those above him. You don't want a one-upper in a tight-knit, integral team. Likewise, you don't want an abrasive independent in a role that requires a lot of permission from management. Temperament must be matched to the existing team and sometimes this can be the deciding factor, an employee great at everything else but unable to work with the organization's modus operandi might require a different management style, or concessions that your organization might not be able to provide.
Auxiliary characteristics for technical talent
- Actual impostor syndrome : most people don't have impostor syndrome. They have the opposite, where they deep down know they're incompetent, but their ego can't take it, so they believe they need to calm down because they already know everything. When you find someone with actual impostor syndrome, you'll be surprised at the stark contrast between their accomplishments and what they claim to know. They'll be able to design complex systems but when scrutinized, will double-guess quite often. This can also be a great test for broad / "associative" thinking. Obviously, this is very different from someone that's lying on their resume and you'd need to weed out the liars in the interview. It's fairly easy once you've met someone that's the real deal.
- Contrarianism/Skepticism : A healthy amount of skepticism is (IMO) necessary to keep the fires of technical work burning. Too much might mean your team would not be able to work well this candidate. More often than not, those with too much of this quality don't apply to jobs and prefer to do their own thing. - Work Experience : Not having any shouldn't be a deal breaker for junior positions. If they have worked in a technical position somewhere else, they should be able to explain what they did, what their contribution was and how this affected (if it did at all) the way they approach / engage in technical work.
Obviously, giving these out before the interview would make detecting good hires much more difficult. It's also important to not linger on a question. Never making a question feel mandatory is also a great way to keep the interview honest. If you're hiring for management, make sure someone in a management position higher than the one the interview is for is alwyas present in the meeting. If you're hiring for a technical position, make sure a senior technical person is always present and has significant input, ideally the same person / group should invigilate through the (likely) multiple interviews. The interview should feel like a conversation and not an exam. Ten minutes of honest conversation that lays down the candidate's technical expectations is much more valuable than five rounds of leetcode. Nevertheless, it's important to save time and if someone doesn't have any real interest other than money, they should be dropped.
P.S. The /s is sarcasm.
I wonder what sort of prospective employers might be looking for the sorts of things that this article describes?