Comment by skolor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by skolor | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Then again, the question is also: Do you really want to hire people who do exceptionally in Academics?

From my experience, you will very often see a very intelligent student blow off tests and homework, only to do average in the class, despite having easily picked up the concepts. On the other hand, you'll see someone with average intelligence (or slightly above average, but nothing remarkable) get straight A's because they spend hours every night studying.

Personally, I would rather have the intelligent person who may get sidetracked easier, but is able to pick up new concepts easily than a extremely disciplined person who may take 3 times as long to learn new concepts. I like to think of the intelligent, non-disciplined person as someone whose time to complete a task has very high variance, but averages low, and a highly disciplined, average intelligence person as someone whose time to completion has very low variance, but a higher (possibly considerably higher) average.

Do you really want to hire people who do exceptionally in Academics?

I think that is a good question variant. I would definitely want to hire someone who is

a) smart (as demonstrated by something I can observe)

and

b) self-disciplined (ditto). I might or might not care about a job applicant's school grades, depending on where the applicant went to school, what I'm hiring for, what the applicant's accomplishments outside of school are, and so on.

In most real-world hiring situations, it is hard to find an applicant who is at the top of the heap in all hiring criteria, so one must make trade-offs. My own taste runs less to regarding school grades as a good sign than to giving applicants work-sample tests, but I tell my children that many hiring processes give very high regard to school grades, so that it is expedient to work to get good grades.

Only takes one completely blown off task to ruin the brilliant ADHDer's average though.

Besides, a student blowing off tests and homework may not be less disciplined at all, they may just be working much harder on other things.

The answer depends entirely on the job role. For instance a QA person needs attention to detail which is far more likely to be found in the academically successful person. But a senior software developer needs flashes of brilliance that you're only going to find in the intelligent person.

Best, of course, is someone who is good at both. But they tend to be rare.

And in my experience, "picking up the concepts" isn't enough. The learning that matters happens in the doing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com