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Comment by ballard | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

    - 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

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