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Comment by LaGrange | Hacker News Reader

Actually, spotting and weeding out sociopaths is one of the points. I know that you may believe that you're a good judge of character, but actually a smart sociopath (not the norm, btw) is likely to be able to game you just as easily as the test.

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There are three buckets of people you don't want to hire:

  - helpless
  - depressed
  - jerks

In my subjective experience:

The top one has about %50 shot of being a character flaw, eg, no amount of confidence-building will help.

The middle one has the most hope, if the talent potential is significant. The best in the field can be painfully shy as well as depressed. The problem is that depression (not shyness) hurts morale. [1]

The last has a %75 chance of being a lost cause. Impossible to manage as they are incredibly disruptive to morale and productivity. [2] Their survival is often linked to mastery of politics, which inculcates their position.

[1] http://m.fastcoexist.com/1679208/a-sad-worker-is-a-bad-worke...

[2] The No *sshole Rule by Robert Sutton

    - people that put their percentage symbols in the wrong place

    - People who capitalise their sentences.

ps. lol

    - People who spell 'capitalize' as 'capitalise'

pps. lolol

- the colonies

Your buckets are quite simplistic and I doubt your company will be successful. First, if this is the states, you are not allowed to discriminate against clinical depression, so (2) will just lead to a lawsuit eventually. As for (1), if they have the skills are they helpless? Jerks are quite deplorable, but its a gradient right? How much jerkiness do you tolerate, or do you want saints?

I agree. I am working with people have these 3 types of characteristics. This 3-type categorization is way too simplistic to describe an individual. I find no problem working with them. People are interesting. They all have some kind of quirks and behavior patterns. It's important to be tolerant and adaptive. But people with strong technical depth is really hard to come by.

Duh. Value is holistic. We can find anything we want to find to support an argument.

When you have worked with someone that screams at their coworkers, can barely feed/clothe themselves or refuses to lift a finger to help you... then you will know how much time and emotional effort these behavioral traits can waste.

Toxic employees exist at the extremes of those buckets. Avoid hiring toxic employees, but the filters available to you might not be good enough to screen them out, so fire them quickly. During the interview, you might just be able to observe minor quirks which are hardly indicators either way.

I cringe whenever I read job ads that are aiming for a culture fit: "we only want to hire harmonious, independent, extroverted employees;" when in my experience, the best employees do not hold strongly to those ideals, but neither to do they hangout at the other extremes.

All or nothing hiring is too risky. Gradual formality makes the selection from both sides cooler, you know. We don't do interviews either; hazing sure, but no stupid hypothetical questions to test loyalty. There is no loyalty. Greed is good. =)

There is the another option. Make something people want and build it up slowly, on the side. If you do, you may free yourself from being at the beckon call of other masters (other than users). Others have, so it's possible. We are each masters of our own fate.

Peace.

Hiring is discrimination. That's the point.

Only someone without life experience would not read between the lines that buckets are ideals and need the explanation that hiring is holistic.

To then make a straw man fallacy out of the opposite of an ideal is to be inconsistent: you can't have it both ways.

Well, my main objection is to hiring people on the basis of their character, whether it's with a test or not. Assess for whether or not the person can do the job and make you a profit.

If one's character meaningfully predicts job performance on top of whatever other methods you are using, then assessing on their character is the same as assessing on whether or not they can do they job (or at least, how well they can do it). Integrity tests have demonstrated this in many contexts, even taking into account the possibility of faking.

Except that obviously wasn't the case in the linked article.

Can you spot the person who interviews well, but is a skilled sociopath who will destroy the morale of your team, causing other skilled talent to leave?

That's the value of these tests (when properly applied): They allow an evaluator to make statistically accurate predictions of specific types of behavior. The key is the two words: statistically and specific. A single composite score will not tell you anything, but the idea that there's a 68% chance that the person you're about to hire is a schizophrenic kleptomaniac should give you pause.

> the idea that there's a 68% chance that the person you're about to hire is a schizophrenic kleptomaniac should give you pause.

I don't believe in employment discrimination on the basis of mental illness. After all, John Nash was schizophrenic.

> there's a 68% chance that the person you're about to hire is a schizophrenic kleptomaniac

Sorry, I don't believe "psychometric tests" can do that either. At least not at the level that we're talking about: distinguishing an otherwise qualified person from someone who's got some sort of psychopathology.

Then you didn't read the other replies in the original thread from actual research psychologists. They described the process and posted links to peer reviewed academic papers. Your baseless disbelief is equivalent to disavowing climate change or vaccines.

You can't catch psychopaths using tests like these. The whole point of being a psychopaths is that you can change the perception of your personality at will.

So what your letting in is a subgroup of people who pass, and psychopaths.

That isn't actually what psychopathy means.

It's not what it means, but it is something they are capable of. They can be charming, and they can be horrible. They decide what they are going to be like, to fit into an overall selfish strategy. If being shy is an advantage, they will become that. If being confident is advantage, they will become that. They can gain your trust, then flip when it is an advantage to do so.

In these tests, they know what to say, what to do, to give a certain impression. These tests can't catch them, because they are not honest, and lack integrity(No consistent values, only ones that benefit them).

More specifically, the psychopaths that you're likely to run into in a tech company fall into this class.

There are certainly psychopaths who are hopeless at concealing the fact. These are typically the less smart ones, so you wouldn't meet them; they are more likely to be in and out of prison than your office.

There are also psychopaths who are just about perfect at pretending not to be, and have no intention of ever doing otherwise. You can work with one of those for decades, and never notice a thing unless something extreme enough to make 'acting normal' seem a long-term liability happens.

Again, go read the links that the actual PhDs in psychology posted in replies to the parent thread. They provided documentation in the form of peer-reviewed studies that back the claims that this kind of personality is detectable despite your belief that they are not.

In the case of the military it can be the opposite: they weed out applicants who they are not confident will pull the trigger every time they are asked to.

Well, they try.

I don't remember where I got the number, but apparently something like two-thirds of the regular army still end up unwilling/unable to aim properly when a combat situation actually happens. That's from the Great War, though; procedures may have gotten better since.

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