Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by smeeth | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

smeeth

People's intuitions around hiring aren't Bayesian enough. I think a good process reduces down to something like:

- 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.

View on HN

I have a 4-quardrant way of thinking about this that's similar.

- 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...

How do you test for curiosity?

You take the person off the beaten path in the interview.

Curiosity and ego seem to be inversely correlated.

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?

> How do you test for curiosity?

uh? tell me more

I like this, but I do think it misses the social stuff. Just a few neurotic/unethical people can completely ruin a team and make all the best people quit. I find this to be extra true on diverse teams (all types of diversity).

Yes, I now call this "vibes".

This is an interesting area because there's a lot of room for debate about what a good "vibe" is. Is being really positive all the time the right vibe? In many/most office environments, it is considered to be the right vibe. In a small startup where you're trying to validate PMF, it's not necessarily the best vibe IMO.

"Vibe" isn't so easy defined as being positive; more like the way you interact feels "natural" and doesn't lead to negative emotions.

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.

As nineplay@ remarked elsewhere, "there's a nauseating bias here against people who've had horrific childhoods".

Unethical is one thing, neuroticism should not be a disqualifier from decent employment.

neuroticism, no. asocial or antisocial behavior, yes.

Asocial? I guess autistic people are out!

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.

I suspect you may be interpreting this a bit too broadly, and it's obviously personal for you. Part of work is, nearly invariably, social.

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.

That’s a good insight there, thanks

Then there are some of us for whom this smooth communication is a huge challenge. We spend a lot of time and energy masking, trying to fake the perfect vibe (and failing of course, because the result is predictably unnatural), but this is a necessary survival tactic.

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.

Thanks for writing it in a clearer way than I could write it.

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.

I get that, really I do.

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'm mid-late 30s and neurodivergent myself.

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

It’s not about disqualification. We aren’t considering who we have to legally hire. We are thinking about what makes for great hires. Given the choice between neuroticism or no, why choose neuroticism?

out of curiosity, do you often run into low aptitude + low drive but highly politically skilled ? do they get caught early ?

It has happened. But generally, at least in tech, it is possible to filter this out with a good tech screen.

> low drive but highly politically skilled

These two don't really match up, they are just driven for different things I suspect.

low drive toward efforts :)

Aren't these quadrants from about 100 years ago? Some Prussian General von Whatshisname?

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.

They're simply 2-variable Karnaugh maps. Widely used in logic design in electrical engineering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karnaugh_map

I mean the smart/dumb lazy/hardworking axes, not the underlying concept

It's a similar shape but with quite different conclusions

- 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"

> These are the ones who Hammerstein avoids

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!

"A high drive, low aptitude individual", even if they have the best mindset in the world, shouldn't be placed in a sensitive position. As even a small chance of messing up with 'high drive' will really cause a lot of issues.

These are generally junior-level engineers so it's a non-sequitur.

Except when it’s not… when it becomes the most damaging, e.g. HP

> Hammerstein thinks some use can be made of these folks

In a military context it's plausible "don't hire" isn't an option.

Well he seems to advocate getting rid of the stupid and industrious.

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.

At the risk of sounding like a LinkedIn post, it seems clear that the difference between General von Hammerstein and CharlieDigital is whether they have a fixed vs. growth mindset about their potential team.

Another difference is that in a software company, "high drive + low aptitude" people usually don't cause anyone's death.

But you probably shouldn't give them passwords to the production servers.

> Y-axis is "drive"

Someone I learned much from way back called this "wattage". As in: "he's too low wattage".

High on both sounds like Spolsky's "Smart and Gets Things Done", and not surprisingly your conclusions rather agree :-)

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid...

> high drive + low aptitude: hire, train, and foster aptitude growth

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).

This is The Way™! I've heard this alternatively described as "slope" (for drive, which incorporates the curiosity, lack of ego, excitability) and "intercept" for "aptitude".

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.

Both can definitely change over time and that change can be influenced by a variety of factors including the types of projects, company culture, "vibes" with the rest of the team, and so on.

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.

But aptitude can be split into "experience" and "natural talent", which are different things and I think that's meant to be the whole point of the article.

In Chinese philosophy, there is a school of thought called "legalism" that was founded by Han Fei-tzu. There is a piece of writing in there that I'm quite fond of [0]:

   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.

If you only rely on natural talent, then your pool of candidates will always be very, very small and you'll be competing against Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and so on.

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...

I'd go with the crazy/hot axis myself.

You meet minimum requirements on both, and if you do your contribution better exceed your high maintainance demands.

how do you keep 'high drive + high aptitude' from escaping to run their own venture?

You don't. You just harness what they have and direct it while you can.

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.

>low drive + high aptitude: hire for targeted use cases where you need expertise

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.

How do you measure "are they cool" without just directly transforming all of your biases and stereotypes about the candidate into a numeric score?

Have a diverse team and have them also score for cool?

Of course a bit of a chicken and egg with hiring the diverse team.

As long as you aren’t illegally discriminating, it’s more important that you avoid hiring shitty people than it is that you eliminate all bias.

You can’t single-handedly solve the systemic problem of unequal access to opportunity.

I can't clean the world, but my kitchen is my responsibility.

One bad apple poisons the whole team. It's totally morale destroying.

"Cool" isn't a good word to use, but it is important to filter for people who can get along with others.

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.

I completely agree that toxic people destroy teams. I just have no idea how to detect that in an interview. It definitely makes sense to immediately filter out anyone who sets off "this person may be an asshole" vibes, but beyond that, what can you do? Some sort of "probationary let's see if we get along" period would probably be pretty effective, but that's unfair to new hires.

Also culture plays a big part. If asshole behaviour is unacceptable all the way to the top it tends not to happen. Being the only asshole sticks out and if there is a safe way people can complain that helps. Worked at a wide range of cultures on the asshole scale. Being at a zero asshole company is why I will probably life it here even if it hurts TC.

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.

Probationary periods are pretty much standard in the Netherlands. First month you can leave or get fired for any reason, without delay.

Yes, but that's because in the Netherlands, after that period, you cannot fire an employee without cause, and firing for cause requires a sub-district court proceeding.

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.

> Some of the most toxic people I ever worked with were very charming in interviews

this may well be a feature of (social) economics and hence a necessary evil

" 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." --> Any tips on how to effectively conduct reference checks? In my experience, candidates will only provide references from folks that they know will give glowing review, so you end up with generic positive feedback that ends up not being informative.

Would love to hear any strategies others have found successful.

I think "cool" is synonymous with, "would they be a good fit for your team/culture" ... not a specific type/race/ethnicity/political persuasion...

Are they someone that's going to disrupt your team's focus on product and execution. No? Cool.

You put bias next to stereotype like it's the same and taint it with bad connotations. I might have team where talkative person can be good fit. Other teams may consider such trait distracting.

You're choosing companion for 8h a day. Nothing wrong with checking culture fit (because that's basically what it is).

> People's intuitions around hiring aren't Bayesian enough.

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.

This is pretty much how I hire but also try to gauge "conscientiousness". Some people are smart, cool, high energy and decently experienced but just don't seem to care about the success of the team and aren't the best for a lot of roles. Its hard to judge because extraversion/cool/high energy can appear similar in an interview.

Breath of fresh air to see this at the top. The focus on leetcode always confused me, and this is coming from someone who took all the fancy graduate level algo courses.

Is "poison in the keurig " a euphemism for spreading bad morale?

> who happened to spend their summers working

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.

What you state do not seem like priors at all. They look like observed data.

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.

> adding more boxes tends to index towards box-checkers who grew up wealthy.

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.

i think that in the United States, this is simply not the case up until the true super-rich.

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.

> 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?

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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

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.

If you have a tech startup you probably come from money already, are surrounded by people who come from money and are mostly going to talk to candidates who come from money.

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.

This is spot on stuff.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com