How to hire low experience, high potential people

https://worktopia.substack.com/p/how-to-hire-low-experience-high-potential

by chuckhend • 2 years ago

404 415 2 years ago

worktopia.substack.com

garciasn2• 2 years ago

This is exactly what I do with my team. I staff the upper levels first with people I trust (people have worked with me for 15 years across 4 different companies now) and then start fleshing out the rest of the teams beneath them with high potential n00bs.

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.

dojorno• 2 years ago

hiring?

jawns• 2 years ago

The list of indicators are great and spot-on.

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.

duxup3• 2 years ago

I like that this isn't your typical skills demo.

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.

spaniard89277• 2 years ago

I'm 36 And also trying to get my foot in. It's very hard, wish I could find someone who gives me an opportunity. I've been interviewed but it's always about the skillset you bring to the table.

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.

geraldhh2• 2 years ago

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.

chefandy6• 2 years ago

Ambiguity and uncertainty are anathema to approaching problems from the classic engineering mindset. That's not a bad thing when used properly, and it's great in school where people hand you a stream of problems designed to be interesting in that mentality, but it's not the general-purpose tool for interfacing with all problems, as some imagine. I've worked both as a developer and designer, and with design tasks, you've only got a fuzzy sense of the wrong answers before you manage to craft a right one. Many, if not most engineers find it much easier to assume designers sit around all day moving things about as they fancy rather than imagining what it would take to solve ambiguous problems with no way to determine if you've got a really good solution until many people start interacting with it.

poorman• 2 years ago

Most smart people are actually terrible at having the drive/follow through to take things to completion. They’ll usually want to give up at the first sign of failure or slowness.

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.

user_7832• 2 years ago

> Most smart people are actually terrible at having the drive/follow through to take things to completion. They’ll usually want to give up at the first sign of failure or slowness.

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.)

nradov• 2 years ago

Startups have just as much friction. The only difference is that the friction is more external than internal.

rabi_molar• 2 years ago

What makes you think a startup is a low-friction environment rather than a different kind of high-friction environment where the corporate person could be absolutely miserable and unprepared for execution with resource constraints?

HPsquared2• 2 years ago

It's the difference between being blocked by a wall (with 'no trespassing' sign) and being blocked by a muddy field. Some people find the former more stressful; some the latter.

kajecounterhack• 2 years ago

the corporate person could be absolutely miserable and unprepared for execution with resource constraints?

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.

duxup3• 2 years ago

The idea of low friction and similar environments and someone being productive always trigger me a little. In the sense that I think MANY people get a lot of things done in a low friction environment... BECAUSE it is a low friction environment. And once you have a few people who have to deal with the results that come out of nowhere, that other person is the friction for everyone else.

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.

noamchomsky1• 2 years ago

“Tell me about you. If your life was a book, give me the chapter titles from your birth till now.”

Utterly ridiculous.

stefanos82• 2 years ago

This reminds me of an interview I have had in the past that made me very uncomfortable.

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?!

beretguy• 2 years ago

Why do they ask such type of questions anyway?!

They are incompetent at doing their jobs.

SketchySeaBeast2• 2 years ago

"Well, I like to call chapter 7 'The Fuck Pig'. It'll make sense in a minute."

kdazzle• 2 years ago

Dat you, David Cameron?

trgn2• 2 years ago

Really condescending way of talking to a person.

Trasmatta• 2 years ago

Once you’ve gotten the overview, dive into each “chapter” and plumb the depths for their real stories. Go back to their childhood!

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.

reportgunner• 2 years ago

I'm getting red flags from this guide. "Tell me about your best X" is a very low effort question. Being excited about digging through person's life like it's an open book and even excited about them explaining how they cared of their dying parent is perverted at best.

bheadmaster2• 2 years ago

“Tell me about you. If your life was a book, give me the chapter titles from your birth till now.” Once you’ve gotten the overview, dive into each “chapter” and plumb the depths for their real stories. 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.

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.

paulcole5• 2 years ago

I don't think I'd be comfortable sharing this much personal information with a stranger on a job interview.

Then lie and tell a good story.

bheadmaster2• 2 years ago

Good point! Seems like the writer has accidentally optimized his interview for narcissists, psychopaths and pathological liers who excel at manipulation, instead of true high-potential young people :)

klyrs2• 2 years ago

Then lie and tell a good story.

They'll review your story with your references; better hope your mom has a good sense of humor...

dinkleberg• 2 years ago

Yeah fuck that. Maybe those topics can come up after we’ve been working together for a while and have built up a strong rapport and trust (not a given). This feels totally inappropriate for an interview.

duxup3• 2 years ago

it sounds more like a psychological evaluation

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.

SketchySeaBeast2• 2 years ago

None of my current co-workers, who I have now spent several years and get along perfectly well with, know about my childhood, and I will never tell them.

notpachet5• 2 years ago

It depends on the role you're hiring for. I suspect a lot of comments in this thread, echoing your sentiment, will be written from the perspective of sharp-end-of-the-stick engineers for whom the idea of working on ambiguous organizational problems is an abstract concept, far from their day to day. Not saying that's you per se, but this is HN after all. This crowd loves for things to be clear-cut, especially when they absolutely can't be.

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.

finnthehuman2• 2 years ago

I don’t think “oh haha aren’t engineers robotic personalities” applies here.

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?

slibhb• 2 years ago

It's unclear to me how "non-engineering types" can make use of stories about e.g. "caring for a dying parent" in the context of a job interview. I mean, can anyone (layperson or not) actually "psychologically evaluate" someone based on anecdotes from their life?

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.

iamacyborg• 2 years ago

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.

That might be true but if it’s important then it should be conducted by a trained psychologist, not some random hiring manager.

verticalscaler2• 2 years ago

You want to have a picture of their psychology, because the problems you're hiring them for are often psychological in nature.

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.

PaulHoule4• 2 years ago

Sometimes I think some people in business have a pathological need for things to be poorly defined. They dread a visit to the ontologist even more than they do to the orthodontist. I think some people just don't feel like things are in control unless they have a large arbitrary structure that confounds everybody else and lets them do whatever they hell they want. (Meanwhile, Steven Covey would say you should be proactive, begin with the end in mind, "Seek first to understand, then to be understood", and "Sharpen the Saw" all things that seem to make bad businesspeople melt the way the wicked witch melted when splashed by water in The Wizard of Oz)

giantg24• 2 years ago

"But that's naive."

Or perhaps we realize that company "culture" or "fit" are often used to discriminate.

the_mar17• 2 years ago

"working on ambiguous organizational problems" is pretty much what I do. What's that gotta do with my childhood?

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.

Xelbair3• 2 years ago

It depends on the role you're hiring for. I suspect a lot of comments in this thread, echoing your sentiment, will be written from the perspective of sharp-end-of-the-stick engineers for whom the idea of working on ambiguous organizational problems is an abstract concept, far from their day to day. Not saying that's you per se, but this is HN after all. This crowd loves for things to be clear-cut, especially when they absolutely can't be.

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.

SkyBelow• 2 years ago

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.

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).

ElFitz• 2 years ago

This is not a popular opinion among engineering types; we like things arrayed in black and white, passing tests and failing tests.

This, however, seems to be a popular opinion. And one that I particularly hate.

Cheezemansam• 2 years ago

You want to have a picture of their psychology, because the problems you're hiring them for are often psychological in nature.

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.

pavel_lishin• 2 years ago

maybe their experience caring for a dying parent.

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.

zer00eyz• 2 years ago

That isnt everyone.

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.

mouzogu• 2 years ago

"dance monkey dance!!"

was hoping for something insightful...

we are truly in the worst timeline.

siva7• 2 years ago

I'd quit such an interview. Those questions are going over the boundaries of a strictly professional relationship. The thing with low-experience, high-potentials is that they may be bit more insecure than seniors and therefore might think that such questions are normal which they are not.

mmcgaha• 2 years ago

I couldn't agree more. I am not sure if there is a name for the tactic but I had two girl friends that probed like that early on in our relationships and both times it turned out to bite me during and after our relationships. It is almost a cult-like tactic to get into someone's head.

rqtwteye2• 2 years ago

Exactly. You are joining a company, not a cult. Basically they are filtering for people who can speak the same jargon correctly. I have heard a lot of stories about people failing DEI questions during an interview because they didn't know the "correct" phrases to use.

toast0• 2 years ago

The thing with low-experience, high-potentials is that they may be bit more insecure than seniors and therefore might think that such questions are normal which they are not.

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.

danielvaughn• 2 years ago

I've noticed a trend where the lower the position, the more invasive the questions become. I think it's a power dynamic - they can ask the questions because they know the applicants are more desperate.

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.

bombcar3• 2 years ago

Those are definitely interview questions "sold" to companies as being able to weed out undesirables (read: find the answers to questions they cannot ask because of anti-discrimination laws).

tristor2• 2 years ago

I hope that stuff has stopped somewhat but it was definitely all the rage during the mid-late 2000s. I applied for Best Buy GeekSquad when I was starting my career and “failed” their stupid hour long online psych eval that was probably (or should be) illegal. Considering my intelligence and the trajectory of my career they would have been lucky to have me, but I am glad I didn’t get the job, so I would say these are red flags you don’t want to work there anyway.

dennis_jeeves2• 2 years ago

I think it's a power dynamic - they can ask the questions because they know the applicants are more desperate.

Or they are more stupid. Stupid people tend to psychoanalyze and stereotype other people more often.

nineplay3• 2 years ago

There's a nauseating bias here against people who've had horrific childhoods.

"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.

the_mar17• 2 years ago

Thank you. I found the part where the author throws in "cared for a dying parent" particularly distasteful, it's like a benchmark for "palatable damage"

kapp_in_life• 2 years ago

Yes, I think I'd be fine weeding out people who can't read a social situation and decide to traumadump to their future coworkers.

lysecret2• 2 years ago

Or weeded out honest people.

benreesman• 2 years ago

My youth was by no means exceptionally traumatic, but it was no fucking fun, and cumulatively amounted in me being a “from the wrong side of the tracks” figure in software, which was eminently doable when I was getting started and is still doable, but one works awfully fucking hard for the privilege as the ambient level of bad behavior well-concealed, cronyism, insularity, and utterly obliviousness about the public’s feelings hits 88mph.

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.

chazu• 2 years ago

Absolutely - anyone who focuses this much on personal life during an interview is almost assuredly clueless as to how to manage people.

mrandish• 2 years ago

bias here against people who've had horrific childhoods.

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."

_a_a_a_2• 2 years ago

Word. Mine was nightmarish (siblings didn't have it any better either). Sounds like the Disneyfication of interviewing.

mc32• 2 years ago

I agree. This is very off putting. There should be boundaries btwn people we don’t know. I’m not going to share personal experiences for a stranger and be their little zoo monkey they want to evaluate for the circus.

This person is out of touch in such a bad way. Why would you put someone through such a cringeworthy exercise?

ravenstine• 2 years ago

There can also be a bias against people who haven't had horrific childhoods or particularly interesting ones, depending on the background or attitude of the interviewer.

"If he hasn't struggled, then what does he really know about anything at all?"

ryandrake3• 2 years ago

Even if the candidate doesn't have a horrific childhood, the question is totally inappropriate and irrelevant. Like "get up and walk out of the interview" inappropriate.

This, and the general level of mysticism throughout (really? "Spike potential" WTF), causes me to dismiss the whole article.

dheera• 2 years ago

Yeah I was about to say this. "Tell me the story of your career" is a lot more appropriate.

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.

dkarl2• 2 years ago

I didn't have a particularly horrific childhood, but every chapter title would be about social struggles, anxiety, and depression. The positive stuff was random events, and the organizing themes were negative. Isn't that true for most people?

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.

sensanaty• 2 years ago

I've by any and all accounts had an extremely privileged, happy and stress-free childhood/life, and I'd still balk at this kind of interrogation. It's just plain inappropriate to ask something like this of anyone in a professional setting, people's life stories are simply of no relevance to the job and more importantly, nobody else's business.

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.

unshavedyak• 2 years ago

Yup. I had a rough childhood. Not something i'm exactly keen on diving into, let alone sharing.

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.

andix• 2 years ago

I like the general idea of this article. But that question would be a huge red flag for me. That’s intrusive and I would consider such a question as offensive.

But maybe this is a cultural thing, and works differently in other cultures (didn’t check where the author is from).

hedora• 2 years ago

This sort of question reminds me of the now-discredited “cultural fit” question in standard interview rounds.

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.

jmac01• 2 years ago

Almost anyone can solve problems. You want to find someone who you actually want to work with. The days of the anti social "lone genius" are long gone.

Scubabear68• 2 years ago

Agree completely. This interview approach is going to lead to terrible biases coming to the forefront that have nothing to do with job performance.

It also sounds like an HR nightmare in some states here in the US.

kayodelycaon• 2 years ago

It's an HR nightmare in the entire country thanks to ADA. You really don't want to dig into someone's past and hit a mental health issue and then refusing to hire them because they didn't disclosure a disability to you.

yodsanklai• 2 years ago

Yes, this is creepy and would be a red flag for me too. People gives a lot of flak to big corps behing dehumazing and such, but at least they have standard processes and this type of BS is explicitly forbidden (well, at least where I worked).

htrp• 2 years ago

You've never had to take a psych test before an interview?

TylerE3• 2 years ago

There's a difference between the results of a test and microanalysing the subject WHILE they're being tested.

avgcorrection• 2 years ago

It’s revealing that the author feels entitled to the interviewee just volunteering such information for the sake of a job.

tussa• 2 years ago

Most people I know would walk out of that trainwreck of an interview.

geonic• 2 years ago

This is highly inappropriate for a job interview at least in my country. You can’t ask these type of personal questions. Who would feel comfortable sharing this with a complete stranger anyway?

lumost• 2 years ago

This sounds like a "Like me" bias in hiring. Your looking for someone with a similar "high potential" upbringing as what the interviewer had.

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.

swozey3• 2 years ago

I was asked this question by (I believe) a very Christian burger company from Austin (Mighty Fine) at the start of my career interviewing for some sort of IT admin job with them. I think I was 22-25.

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."

web3-is-a-scam• 2 years ago

I have a large gap in my resume from a bout of depression that left me basically incapacitated for nearly 10 months.

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.

lukas0992• 2 years ago

I'll have to remember that one.

the_mar17• 2 years ago

- "tell me about your childhood" - "I'm under NDA"

thank you for a great laugh

lostlogin• 2 years ago

It’s heartening to read the article, pause at that section and then see this comment here.

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.

myth_drannon• 2 years ago

That reminds me of Shopify's "Story of your life" interview.

Tell me everything about your life, what did you like in elementary school? High school? Tell me all...

zebraflask• 2 years ago

+1 to the comments pointing out that these types of questions can easily veer into highly intrusive, if not overtly discriminatory, territory.

This reminds me of LinkedIn pablum more than anything else.

flerchin• 2 years ago

Aka interviewing for culture fit.

giantg24• 2 years ago

Aka veiled/implicit discrimination.

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.

throwaway987972• 2 years ago

the common denominator is the author

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

glitchc2• 2 years ago

So you're looking for a creative, self-starting, committed, open, persuasive team-player that can go their own way and work with the team to achieve big goals. Got it. /s

P.S. The /s is sarcasm.

_Nat_3• 2 years ago

So you'd see applicants like those that the article describes as being very desirable?

glitchc2• 2 years ago

Sure, much like magic and unicorns are desirable. The kind of human they are looking for doesn't actually exist.

griffinkelly• 2 years ago

Having worked predominantly in startups, we've almost always been cash-constrained in hiring. Some of the best hires I've found are highly motivated fresh grads or recent grads. I always look for the desire to prove themselves and take charge and full responsibility of a project; a majority of the times, money is secondary to these folks to the ability to make a difference and prove you're capable of completing something difficult. And ultimately, that's always something a startup can offer a young employee. That said, I've often had to teach them foundational things, but the desire to learn and get moving quickly outweighs any cons.

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.

rqtwteye2• 2 years ago

"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.

faiD9Eet• 2 years ago

I would like to second that.

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.

apwell23• 2 years ago

Hiring low experience doesn't make any sense because most places the salary difference is not worth the risk.

Its just not a good deal for an employer.

gwbas1c4• 2 years ago

Sometimes you just don't have the cash to hire for experience.

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.

giantg24• 2 years ago

Low experience correlates with young people, who are more likely to be healthy and less likely to have a family. The benefits cost saving can be large.

thih9• 2 years ago

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.

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

SilverBirch2• 2 years ago

To just chime in, it also massively incentivizes liars, bullshitters and people who are straight up delusional.

verticalscaler2• 2 years ago

“Tell me about you. If your life was a book, give me the chapter titles from your birth till now.” Once you’ve gotten the overview, dive into each “chapter” and plumb the depths for their real stories. 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.

I actually have some great example recordings of just such interviews as described in the article if anybody wants some actionable pointers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwRg5PiovHQ

smeeth2• 2 years ago

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.

CharlieDigital9• 2 years ago

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...

powerset• 2 years ago

How do you test for curiosity?

smeeth2• 2 years ago

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).

agumonkey2• 2 years ago

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

walthamstow2• 2 years ago

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.

dboreham• 2 years ago

Y-axis is "drive"

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

brianmcc• 2 years ago

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...

BeetleB2• 2 years ago

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).

gen220• 2 years ago

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.

nerdponx2• 2 years ago

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.

PeterStuer• 2 years ago

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.

intelVISA• 2 years ago

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

astura• 2 years ago

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.

randomdata5• 2 years ago

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.

throw18376• 2 years ago

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.

CobrastanJorji3• 2 years ago

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

946789987649• 2 years ago

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.

grdgyredb• 2 years ago

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.

Aurornis2• 2 years ago

"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.

th3byrdm4n• 2 years ago

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.

dzikimarian• 2 years ago

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).

mixermachine• 2 years ago

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.

bigbillheck2• 2 years ago

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.

s0rce• 2 years ago

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.

babyshake2• 2 years ago

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

j7ake2• 2 years ago

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.

Shocka1• 2 years ago

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.

captainbland• 2 years ago

You wouldn't need to hunt so hard for someone who was "hungry" if what you were hiring for was meaningful work. As it goes this diseased process is the result of abstract BS profit hacking being a huge part of what people are hiring for.

mywittyname2• 2 years ago

Disagree and commit:

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.

trgn2• 2 years ago

lol

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.

beisner• 2 years ago

I hate that this is such a common thought process.

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/...

mywittyname2• 2 years ago

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.

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.

delecti• 2 years ago

Agreed. You eventually need to take some course of action, so if you can't get everyone on exactly the same page, someone won't get their way. Those people can either accept that their approach isn't being taken, and thus work towards the approach which has been decided upon, or refuse to cooperate, hurting the team in the process.

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.

skellera• 2 years ago

If you trust that the people you are working with are working towards the same goal, disagree and commit is important. You are not going to be right 100% of the time.

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.

em-bee11• 2 years ago

indeed, only working in unity allows a team to face and fix mistakes and bad decisions, because then there is noone shouting "i told you so" when something fails.

unity in a team is more important than being right.

Aurornis2• 2 years ago

If you can't convince domain experts that the plan is sound, then maybe it's a bad plan

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.

BeetleB2• 2 years ago

You're not providing an alternative, though.

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.

anjc• 2 years ago

This reads to me like codified psychopathy. Maybe it's profitable to assess people's insecurities or "experience caring for a dying parent" when hiring, but I wouldn't be advertising it.

photochemsyn• 2 years ago

The succinct guidelines from "Mastering the Art of War" (Zhuge Liang, Liu Ju) for interviewing people are still among the best (c.200 / 1300 CE). This is also good practive for the interviewee, you want to assess whether or not accepting a job offer at Theranos is a good idea (#5 is perhaps questionable):

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.

rho4• 2 years ago

"excellence does not mean having 100k followers on Twitter" - idk, seems like an arbitrary dismissal of what i perceive as quite an achievement

devwastaken• 2 years ago

With drive, anyone can do anything. Almost everyone has had drive at some point. Those that no longer do were punished by the gamed system for trying to leave the socioeconomic caste they were born into. This applies to the wealthy just as well as the poor.

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.

bdcravens• 2 years ago

Dig into their ability to learn. Not their education: there's many in our industry without college degrees who excel. Not just depth, but breadth: how quickly can they pivot? The key is finding those who succeed at not being confined to a given box.

m0d0nne11• 2 years ago

Great. As if age discrimination wasn't already blatant enough.

ZoomerCretin3• 2 years ago

Agreed, it's important to combat age discrimination against the young.

karaterobot2• 2 years ago

“Tell me about you. If your life was a book, give me the chapter titles from your birth till now.” Once you’ve gotten the overview, dive into each “chapter” and plumb the depths for their real stories. 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.

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.

varjag2• 2 years ago

She's clearly isn't hiring developers.

karaterobot2• 2 years ago

Replace the subject matter with that of your own job, or pretend you are living inside the article and respond directly to the author if that feels right to you. Whatever gets you to seeing my point.

BryantD• 2 years ago

The thing I really like about this piece is that it’s a recommendation to apply DEI to the hiring funnel, although I don’t know if the author realizes that.

Shrezzing• 2 years ago

“Tell me about you. If your life was a book, give me the chapter titles from your birth till now.” Once you’ve gotten the overview, dive into each “chapter” and plumb the depths for their real stories. 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.

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.

freeopinion• 2 years ago

Tip #1: You're never even going to get an application from these people if your job posting requires 7+ years with AI+Erlang+Azure.

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?

purpleblue• 2 years ago

Another garbage "how to hire!" article with no data to back it up, just a bunch of opinions. There's nothing to indicate whether what this person suggests has any success whatsoever and no data to back it up. How many times did she use this methodology and it didn't work out?

dartharva• 2 years ago

Every time I read articles like these I cringe hard and feel sad about how far the youngsters of today have to struggle and bear bullshit just to get a good job and be financially independent.

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.

AlwaysRock• 2 years ago

This is a pretty okay list of things to look for. It's hard to actually identify people who have these traits and people who are acting like they do during interview.

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.

jpm_sd• 2 years ago

I've interviewed hundreds of people and participated in hiring decisions on 50 or more in various roles.

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.

dkasper• 2 years ago

Some of these questions may be borderline illegal. In my experience interviewing folks for Meta we are taught not to ask such questions because of the obvious bias. Even probing into what neighborhood someone lives in is dubious (oh you grew up on the wrong side of the tracks?). I don’t even look at résumés anymore, although recruiters have to screen them. Focus on the job, if you are conducting a coding interview asking coding questions, maybe ask about something they built in the past for fun/work/learning . If you’re doing system design ask them to architect something. If you’re doing behavioral interviews this is trickiest but focus on the on the job behaviors, even if their previous job was not tech or they only have educational experience you can see how someone works with others on a project. Personal questions like this are a really bad idea.

tiktaktow• 2 years ago

I tick a lot of boxes and I've always excelled beyond expectations when hired for positions that I did not have good match on experience. Hire me! My guarantee, I'll surprise you.

lysecret2• 2 years ago

Hiring for potential means to me, they didn't have the time to learn something yet. So, the most important thing is: How quickly do they learn new stuff? Are they excited about learning new stuff? You can figure this out by letting them talk about previous situations where they had to learn something new quickly.

nickdothutton• 2 years ago

FWIW my advice on the same: Hire for intellect, doesn’t have to be in the precise area you are working in. Some of the best people I’ve hired did not come from a CompSci or Informatics background. They were mostly STEM though. Hire for enthusiasm and energy. There are people who are radiators, and there are people who are drains. Don’t hire drains. Hire for the soft skills. People who can communicate. People who you _want_ to help (because they will need help at least at the start). People who are easy to work with (because little is achieved in most endeavours by a loner these days).

sevagh• 2 years ago

I think getting a no-hire signal after spilling your guts about your childhood, birth, and real stories would feel like shit. Same reason as not wanting to write cover letters anymore. If it's going into the shredder, who cares? Keep it light and airy.

elevatedastalt• 2 years ago

I never thought I'd say this, but... I'd rather grind Leetcode instead of being psychoanalyzed by a "Hip hop enthusiast masquerading as a San Francisco technologist".

tinycombinator• 2 years ago

The comparison may be superficial, but this article really reminds me of the times when I wrote essays for college admissions (not in a good way).

34679• 2 years ago

If anyone is actually interested in hiring a "low experience, high potential" person, I'm available.

neilv2• 2 years ago

With AR or HUD eyeglasses, there could be a stealthy app for interviewees, which does facerec of the interviewer across from you, quickly scours the Web for things they've written or been indoctrinated in during formative early career, for whatever pop psych, management fad, or astrological litmus tests they'll likely believe in for hiring, and then discreetly directs what notes to hit, outlines example 'life' stories, prompts when to make a particular facial expression, etc.

txutxu• 2 years ago

This reminds me of "how to find future gems" between cryptocurrency small projects, or "how to analyze a good stock" in the stock market of smallcap companies.

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

freetanga• 2 years ago

Wow, the fun I would have in such a process. I would retell Oliver Twist meets Annie. Maybe with a musical number to jazz things up.

More like /r/LinkedinLunatics than HackerNews material.

humbleferret• 2 years ago

"And of course, once you get one of these diamonds in the rough within your company, get ready to provide them with lots of mentorship – they’re truly a lot of work to polish, but the best of them make it all worth it."

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.

tptacek12• 2 years ago

We built Fly.io resume-blind and without interviews, hiring people at every level of experience without having to make decisions based on that experience. We did it by throwing away all this stuff, ditching interviews, and replacing them with work-sample tests. Some of the best people on our team, the best I've worked with in my whole career, are working here in their first job in our field.

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.

strich• 2 years ago

In a world where chat gpt exists I think even work samples are untrustworthy sources of excellence unfortunately. It would seem one has to either watch the process or devise unique and difficult to game tests.

tptacek12• 2 years ago

Work samples aren't all straight coding; in fact, only a small subset of ours are.

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.

xena• 2 years ago

As a fly.io employee, I can tell. I can tell fairly quickly.

BadHumans2• 2 years ago

Is this how Fly still operates? If you're hiring Rust developers, are you open to someone who has never touched Rust in their life?

tptacek12• 2 years ago

We wouldn't know if you've never touched it, only whether you can solve problems in it today.

swozey3• 2 years ago

So you communicated via email and the only consideration was the quality of their sample?

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.

tptacek12• 2 years ago

Our process runs mostly through email until the last challenge, which is interactive (for every role in the company we simulate some kind of design or problem solving exercise on Slack with an random member of our team, which is then rated based on a rubric by a panel that reviews the transcript; it differs from an interview in a variety of ways, most notably that the team member delivering the exercise doesn't ever interrogate the candidate).

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.

mplanchard• 2 years ago

Do y’all have any blog posts on this? Would be curious to know more about the work sample tests, and about the process in general.

tptacek12• 2 years ago

https://fly.io/docs/hiring/

jefc11112• 2 years ago

I don't know if I would hire like this, but I do think a lot about the current hiring landscape is pretty broken, so maybe I should! I expect an employer needs a certain amount of cachet before being able to do this or anything else similarly left-field.

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!

tptacek12• 2 years ago

I've been at Fly.io since 2020. I wouldn't describe us as an Elixir company so much as a company that appreciates Elixir. Some of our backend is in Elixir but the majority of it is Rust and Go.

geor9e2• 2 years ago

Plus you get a bunch of free work out of every applicant if you delegate real issues out as work-sample tests :P I'm pretty sure the new Audi A8 cup holders are from my mechanical design engineer third round volkswagen interview a couple years ago

tptacek12• 2 years ago

You do not in fact get free work.

gwbas1c4• 2 years ago

It's nearly impossible to scope useful, shippable work that can be accomplished in a job interview. Otherwise, you're asking for 20+ hours of work, which means that only fools / suckers will do your interview.

Do you really want a company full of fools and suckers?

i_h8_lc_grind2• 2 years ago

This is good to know. I think a lot of people are tired of wasting their lifespan on grinding lc-medium/hards.

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.

em-bee11• 2 years ago

i seem to remember an HN post about such a site, or at least one about a site that evaluates companies hiring processes. also related, about companies development practices.

try searching the HN post history. (and report back if you find something :-)

swifthesitation• 2 years ago

https://github.com/poteto/hiring-without-whiteboards

gwbas1c4• 2 years ago

Just remember that all interview techniques have bias; what works well for one company / role may not work well for your company / role.

That being said, it sounds like your interview technique works well for you.

tptacek12• 2 years ago

That may be, but I don't believe interviews work well for anybody.

firstplacelast• 2 years ago

I started an interview at fly like 1.5 years ago.

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.

swayvil• 2 years ago

Speaking as an AS slacker with more gaps than not. Ho ho ho.

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...

MichaelRo• 2 years ago

> How to hire low experience, high potential people

In other words interns. Wouldn't have guessed.

ZoomerCretin3• 2 years ago

Hiring for entry-level engineers is so broken that "hey engineers fresh out of college are frequently good people to hire" is now novel and contrarian advice. Even before the pandemic, fresh graduates from non-target schools were sending out hundreds of applications to get their first job.

very_good_man• 2 years ago

Oh I shouldn’t cargo cult the biggest and most dysfunctional technology companies?

wseqyrku• 2 years ago

How to hire low experience, high potential people

So basically, how to hire best for cheap.

ZoomerCretin3• 2 years ago

Meanwhile, on tech Twitter, you have people loudly saying the opposite: That there do not exist diamonds in the rough, that the job market is perfectly efficient, and any effort spent trying to find these diamonds is wasted: https://twitter.com/thdxr/status/1754614624446501347

_Nat_3• 2 years ago

How could someone find a recruiter like the author?

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?

danielmarkbruce• 2 years ago

Easiest way to hire a bunch of young, smart, ambitious people is to work at a place where young, smart ambitious people want to work. Anyone who's worked at such a place will tell you it's easy in that environment and difficult outside it. The deck is so stacked in your favor at the right place.

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.

cm2012• 2 years ago

Do an IQ test and a work sample test, everything else is cruft.

stevengraham• 2 years ago

The irony of midwits running "talent acquisition"

rednerrus• 2 years ago

"Tell me about/diagram a system you understand well." Ask follow up probing questions. How well people understand systems and how the pieces fit together is how you'll find untapped potential. It really doesn't matter what the system is.

stemlord• 2 years ago

Sidenote: how does substack get my email address? I don't have an account with this site but they autofilled the "subscribe" field with my email address.

neilv2• 2 years ago

It’s almost impossible to find the right inexperienced ones to do the former, who are inventive and original and yet also disciplined. They don’t have any obvious past experience that helps you figure out how special they are.

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.

dkarl2• 2 years ago

For hiring software engineers, something I read decades ago that has been a consistent indicator for me is Bjarne Stroustrop's observation that good programmers are almost always good writers in their native language.

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.

rahimnathwani• 2 years ago

good programmers are almost always good writers in their native language

This doesn't just apply to software engineers!

sokoloff• 2 years ago

I think there's a simple way:

Hire a lot of low experience people (right out of college) and work to identify and retain the exceptional ones.

cjk• 2 years ago

I stopped reading when I saw the suggestion to avoid hiring people that are insecure. Some of the best software engineers I’ve ever hired lacked self-confidence and struggled with insecurity. In my experience, those folks tended to have extremely high standards for themselves, and did great work.

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.

whoswho• 2 years ago

Judging by the comments here the article in question was intended to elicit a strong emotional response out of readers. A reflex that predominantly swings towards controversial.

It succeeded in its supposed mission.

quickthrower22• 2 years ago

Meanwhile all the grads are on teamblind and grinding out leetcode. They know Amazon is easier to get a job at but will work you hard. They already know the system and are playing it.

dc-programmer• 2 years ago

This is agitprop

ultrasaurus• 2 years ago

+1 to looking for "wins above replacement" -- there are great players on mediocre teams and weak players on strong teams. The resume tells you what teams they were on but in an interview you need to determine what they really contributed.

(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)

l2silver• 2 years ago

It's easy enough to find high-potential people. The problem is how long they'll stay. If they stay for a couple of years, great, I'll take it. But anything less than that, and you're probably not recuperating the cost of hiring and training them. And the training cost can be extremely high if it involves the time of more experienced employees.

tristor2• 2 years ago

If someone asked me some of these questions in an interview I would laugh it off to try to help them save face, if they persisted in seriousness I would walk out. My interviewer is neither my better nor my therapist and has no business asking about my personal life or non-work past. That’s bananas.

precompute• 2 years ago

Off the top of my head, non-exhaustive.

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.

tacheiordache• 2 years ago

"How to hire low experience, high potential people" who would be also okay with low compensation and great promises for the future?

itsdrewmiller• 2 years ago

Usually the places that are trying to hire HiPos do IQ tests-once-removed like https://www.criteriacorp.com/candidates/ccat-prep. There is plenty of evidence that general cognitive ability strongly correlates with job performance.

whatscooking• 2 years ago

Or the shortcut: hire based on nepotism

j7ake2• 2 years ago

They’re usually first year graduate students. Or fresh out of undergrad.

febed• 2 years ago

Next article: How to fire high experienced, low potential people

fardinahsan• 2 years ago

Everytime I read one of these "how to hire" posts, it's always a opinionated clusterfuck of a process that is arbitrary/capricious, gameable and biased towards what OP thinks are good traits.

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]

----

[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...

SilverBirch2• 2 years ago

It's always funny to see the embedded "unconventional" theme come up again and again. Hot take: You don't need someone unconventional. You need someone good. Unconventional people are just the people you notice because they're outliers, and now rather than looking for what you need - which is someone good, you're looking for this other thing. This is particularly funny of course because this person spent 6 years working at Stripe, a company founded by a genius techie who went to MIT, dropped out, joined YC sold a company for a few million. Started a new business - Stripe, and got a load of funding from Peter Thiel. His path through life could not have been a more conventional story for a tech CEO.

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?

lifestyleguru• 2 years ago

The title is codeword for "it's impossible to find housing in the locations where are our offices, but we still want somewhat competent people and pay them below average".

jaredliu233• 2 years ago

Thank you for sharing this insightful article, it was a pleasure to read. I learned a lot about hiring low experience, high potential individuals and I appreciate the effort put into crafting this informative piece. Looking forward to implementing these strategies in the future!

wglb• 2 years ago

I used a very similar approach when building the security team while I was CSO at Relativity. I wrangled as much as I could with HR to do it this way. It boiled down to an initial phone call where I described the company, the job, and our process and asked if there were any questions. I did not ask the candidate any questions about their background.

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.

How to hire low experience, high potential people

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