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Hire characters, not skill sets. My most important questions in interviews

voss.world

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Re: Hire characters, not skill sets. My most important questions in interviews

#41

Post by soft_dev_person »

hvidgaard wrote: post #17
soft_dev_person wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being friends with colleagues can lead to less enjoyable work situations, not to mention less focused work. Being friendly should suffice, not all of us want to get too personal with the same people we might need to have professional arguments with. We're all different.

I'll share a bit of wisdom my son shared when he was 4 or 5. In kindergarden they talked about what a friend is, and he said after some thinking: "A friend is a person you can disagree and fight with, and still play with later".

Getting that close to all my coworkers would be too daunting a task.

Edit: Not to belittle your son's wisdom, of course. I totally agree.

Re: Hire characters, not skill sets. My most important questions in interviews

#42

Post by janvoss »

pinaceae wrote: post #29

big grain of salt with this one. mr. voss has only ever worked for one company, maxed out as head of IT, team of 35. so his sample size is rather limited.

well, you are right. I built up and worked only for one company. Why exactly do I need a bigger sample size in order to write down how I recruit, how and what I learned about interviews and what has worked for me and what has not? I am not stating that I have a solution for every situation or every company on the planet. Take it as what it is meant to be: a possibility to reflect your own interviewing behaviour and perhaps taking one or two new ideas with you :-)

Re: Hire characters, not skill sets. My most important questions in interviews

#43

Post by humanrebar »

slgeorge wrote: post #20
ewar-woowar wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or "plays golf/football, comes from a similar background to us", where gender doesn't play a role, not even in the much-reported IT industry where there is a paucity of women . As a Brit in central Europe I have come up against this, not to the same extent as someone who isn't white, or comes from a markedly different culture, but the differences in culture even between some European nations can be enough that employ…

> What happened to hiring people who are not like us, because that's where the challenge lies and life is better when we are forced to evaluate our own misgivings? I think for many situations that comes down to three things: a. People who don't agree that hiring for diversity is good. While every manager knows that diversity is important (as demonstrated by their responses to HR and while on a training course) I don'…

> While every manager knows that diversity is important I don't believe it's as internalised as people say.

I don't think demographic diversity is a value (1), and I don't think many people treat it as a value to itself. The fact that people have to explain why it's valuable is telling. I think most of what you wrote supports the sentiment that diversity is a (purported) means to an end and not an end to itself.

For example, in many cultures, integration of diverse types of people (vaguely defined) is not valued at all. Are we interested in making sure we have proportional leadership positions for these sorts of people? Seems like we're being ethnocentric even by valuing diversity.

1) There is a lot of explanation I could go through there that would detract from my point. Please assume I'm not a bigot to save me the typing and you the reading. Though I could write it all out if people care that much.

Re: Hire characters, not skill sets. My most important questions in interviews

#44

Post by danieltillett »

wimagguc wrote: post #16

There is always a good debate on HN about hiring, but it feels like we really are comparing apples to oranges here. Hiring tactics depend heavily on the size of the organisation. They have to: for a 3-people startup you want someone who will break walls and get stuff done, for a thousand-people-heavy dev team you need people who can do one job very precisely . Those tasks require very different personalities, so natu…

This applies to almost everything. The really hard problem is recognising when the heuristics that worked in the past are now broken.

Re: Hire characters, not skill sets. My most important questions in interviews

#45

Post by soft_dev_person »

dguaraglia wrote: post #12
soft_dev_person wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So all interviewers are male, white upper-middle-class with a fondness for beer? Good to know.

Not all, but the vast majority fit exactly that profile. It's not difficult to find evidence of that, just Google for . So yes, they point about "hiring for character might bias the outcome" is still valid.

I guess, as a person not in the SV sphere, I don't really agree. Maybe I missed the implied SV context.

Re: Hire characters, not skill sets. My most important questions in interviews

#46

Post by humanrebar »

aegisxlii wrote: post #2

Agree 100%. Too much focus on happening to have encountered the particular skills you ask about in the technical grilling. Rather, hire smart people you'd like to work with (and who have demonstrated a capacity for learning).

> Too much focus on happening to have encountered the particular skills you ask about in the technical grilling.

I agree somewhat, but I've seen many people making mistakes, learning on the job what not to do, and making the entire team learn from their mistakes. So there definitely needs to be some technical experience at the helm of the team to make sure any technical mistakes can be corrected without undue effort.

In other words, knowledge, intelligence, understanding, and wisdom are all different things. I'm very excited to hire smart, humble people, but only if my org has some defenses against well-meaning people that are trying out some new technology for the first time. And if a good chunk of the team is smart, inexperienced people, even diligent code review doesn't really cut it.

Re: Hire characters, not skill sets. My most important questions in interviews

#47

Post by hvidgaard »

soft_dev_person wrote: post #41
hvidgaard wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll share a bit of wisdom my son shared when he was 4 or 5. In kindergarden they talked about what a friend is, and he said after some thinking: "A friend is a person you can disagree and fight with, and still play with later".

Getting that close to all my coworkers would be too daunting a task. Edit: Not to belittle your son's wisdom, of course. I totally agree.

It was merely that "it's okay to befriend a coworker, and if it doesn't work out, was it really a friend anyway?" kinda thing.

I think he mostly got it from my wife and I sitting down with our children after having a fight and telling them that we're still mom and dad, we've put it behind us, and it's okay not to get along all the time.

Re: Hire characters, not skill sets. My most important questions in interviews

#48

Post by humanrebar »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #7

So many people have these really bizarre and outdated (by not just years but centuries ) notions about how knowledge work gets done. They want to squish it into the model of factory work, but it just doesn't work that way. Knowledge work is typically creative, the right model is an art studio, a movie set, or a band. This makes hiring very difficult, which is exacerbated by the fact that engineers are innately bad at…

> the right model is an art studio, a movie set, or a band

> Knowledge workers aren't cogs, they're part of a team.

That's a bit ironic because movie sets and bands (almost always) are structured teams with industry standard roles (drummer, audio technician, key grip, gaffer) that make it easy to hire people for the duration of a gig.

Developers, analogously, might operate instruments; manufacture their own instruments; compose and/or improvise music; manage their own careers; negotiate their own contracts; edit their own recordings; package their own work for distribution; distribute their own work; and even perform their own focus group studies. Sometimes there's no time to figure out all those things out so you have to pick up one of the instruments of your predecessors and play something useful immediately.

I can perform the same exercise for film production, sports teams, and surgical centers. One of the big problems with software development is that we don't have distinct roles. Everyone is a developer/coder/engineer. It would be as if the entire music industry were executives and music developers. Or the entire film industry were producers, directors, and film engineers.

Anyway, I actually agree with you underlying point that the health of a team trumps the skills of a team every time. And since the structure of a software team is so fluid, cohesiveness and cooperation is actually more important than it is in a band.

Re: Hire characters, not skill sets. My most important questions in interviews

#49

Post by SeanCrawford »

takno wrote: post #31
reflexorozy wrote: post #4

This sounds like a cool idea, but I've seen where hiring for personality often leads towards hiring discrimination. I think it's more likely to reinforce the lack of diversity in tech than to combat it as people unlike the interviewer tend to be viewed less favorably and would be less likely to be viewed as a person who could pick up the specific knowledge he/she doesn't already know.

I feel like it's telling that he refers to the candidates as guys throughout

If you mean the article, then I disagree, for I read him as using this person, candidate, and even the gender neutral "them" in the singular.

As for "guy," the word is like nation and nationalist: it must be read in context: nation can mean Kurds and Quebec, or Iraq and Canada. Yes, if you want Quebec to separate then you are a nationalist, and if you want Canada to stay whole then you are a nationalist.

In talking to two women I can mention a gorgeous guy in my classroom and then ask, "Are you guys going to the concert?"

Re: Hire characters, not skill sets. My most important questions in interviews

#50

Post by humanrebar »

quanticle wrote: post #25
InclinedPlane wrote: post #7

So many people have these really bizarre and outdated (by not just years but centuries ) notions about how knowledge work gets done. They want to squish it into the model of factory work, but it just doesn't work that way. Knowledge work is typically creative, the right model is an art studio, a movie set, or a band. This makes hiring very difficult, which is exacerbated by the fact that engineers are innately bad at…

Knowledge work is typically creative, the right model is an art studio, a movie set, or a band. Knowledge workers aren't cogs, they're part of a team. And if you look at how bands, movie studios, art studios or professional teams hire, it bears little to no resemblance to the hiring process described in the OP's article. All of the professions you describe hire through some kind of auditioning process. No sports mana…

> "Do I think this person is a cool person?" No movie director would hire an actor on that basis.

Well, considering the amount of work Mel Gibson gets these days (more or less zero), this does factor in a bit. I also gather that studios hire actors for reasons beyond their acting skill quite often. Consider also how many actresses fall off the face of the earth when they hit a certain age. Where's Mira Sorvino? Halle Berry? Jennifer Garner? Jessica Alba? Did they suddenly forget how to audition?

Considering all the TV shows where the actors are cast by the 8x10 glossies, it might even be the default to undervalue auditions.

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