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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

#81

Post by halviti »

ajuc wrote: post #19

> It surprised me that people define theirselves via their CV: “Who are you?” -> “Here is what I have done in my professional life!”. Anything weird about that? I wouldn't expect my potential employer to be interested in my family, hobbies or beliefs. So I would respond with job-related stuff as well.

This is largely a regional/cultural thing..

In Europe people tend to care more about these things because they're interested in creating a good healthy workplace. If you only wrote about your professional achievements, it would be a sign that your lack of a personality could cause problems within the workplace.

Everyone is different and there is no one-size-fits-all thing here that works for every country / job opportunity.

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

#82

Post by sharemywin »

lexicality wrote: post #8
heisnotanalien wrote: post #3

I sort of like the sentiment but this sort of interview, at least for me, would feel a bit too personal. Look I'm not your friend so let's not pretend that's what this or you just really want to get to know me. No. You just want to know if I can do the job so just get me to do a task which meaningfully reflects what I'd be doing day-to-day then ask me questions about it.

Do you not try to be friends with your colleagues? You spend about a third of your life at work, it seems to me that you should try to make it as enjoyable as possible.

Who do you eat lunch with? After 7 years I became pretty good friends with a lot of my co-workers. We went to hockey games and other activities.

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

#83

Post by kyllo »

halviti wrote: post #81
ajuc wrote: post #19

> It surprised me that people define theirselves via their CV: “Who are you?” -> “Here is what I have done in my professional life!”. Anything weird about that? I wouldn't expect my potential employer to be interested in my family, hobbies or beliefs. So I would respond with job-related stuff as well.

This is largely a regional/cultural thing.. In Europe people tend to care more about these things because they're interested in creating a good healthy workplace. If you only wrote about your professional achievements, it would be a sign that your lack of a personality could cause problems within the workplace. Everyone is different and there is no one-size-fits-all thing here that works for every country / job oppor…

And it's also much harder in Europe to fire a problem employee.

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

#84

Post by ajuc »

halviti wrote: post #81
ajuc wrote: post #19

> It surprised me that people define theirselves via their CV: “Who are you?” -> “Here is what I have done in my professional life!”. Anything weird about that? I wouldn't expect my potential employer to be interested in my family, hobbies or beliefs. So I would respond with job-related stuff as well.

This is largely a regional/cultural thing.. In Europe people tend to care more about these things because they're interested in creating a good healthy workplace. If you only wrote about your professional achievements, it would be a sign that your lack of a personality could cause problems within the workplace. Everyone is different and there is no one-size-fits-all thing here that works for every country / job oppor…

I'm from Europe :) Poland to be exact. And I care about healthy workspcae, but I don't think anything said on interview can be an accurate indicator. It's inherently misleading situation, like a first date almost.

I was only asked similar question once on an interview for a foreign (Lithuanian FWIW) company ("do you have wife, children?"). It was jarring to me, I assumed they wanted to know if I'll be OK with crunch time. Maybe it's the way they asked (like another thing from a checklist).

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

#85

Post by pessimizer »

humanrebar wrote: post #39
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 think it's more likely to reinforce the lack of diversity in tech than to combat it... I have mixed feelings about this. I have a hard time valuing diversity for its own sake, especially since there are so many qualities to have diversity in, and especially since the ones that actually affect the organization (like diversity of perspective) are so hard to measure and quantify. That being said, it's hard for me to…

Not discriminating against people not like you has absolutely nothing to do with "diversity for its own sake."

Honestly, if when I go in to interview with you, you're already having a mental narrative and discussion with yourself about "diversity candidates", I'd prefer you didn't get to know me. Just ask me technical questions, please; I'm begging for a whiteboard to get out of that. Or a different face to wear when I go to job interviews.

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

#86

Post by Cthulhu_ »

soft_dev_person wrote: post #45
dguaraglia wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is HN, a community consisting mostly of middle-upper-class white males orbiting around SV.

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

#87

Post by collyw »

badminton1 wrote: post #23

The problem is how to determine how someone is smart. In my company we had this very eloquent, outgoing person who implemented many features very fast. To the eyes of management he was a champ, the king of "shipping". But a little bit later things started to seem weird. Noone was productive except for this person. Only he could understand the code organization because the system wasn't well structured. Then bug repor…

This like the last couple of applications I have inherited. Layers and layers of complexity built into the application, which could be done in a couple of database calls. It means understanding the code takes way longer than it should, and difficult to redactor, as all the extra layers add complexity and little more.

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

#89

Post by TheCoelacanth »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #60
humanrebar wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To the eyes of management he was a champ, the king of "shipping". So management also was bad at their jobs. They probably didn't get canned, though they deserved it as much as the King of Shipping. But, congratulations, you know the "What's Bad About Working Here". Maybe there's a way to train management what their implicit job responsibilities are. I've never seen it happen in the wild, but maybe it's possible.

Management trusted the developer knew what he was doing, and didn't micromanage. I would go as far as say that management should be setting requirements in terms of security, maintainability, documentation etc, but I guess in this case (because apparently it was just one dev), they gave the developer full freedom. Misplaced trust, in this case. In a lot of cases though, I'd rather management ask me what should be don…

Yes, but it seems that they didn't extend the same trust to the rest of the team. There surely would have been other people on the team who could have told them that the product was not headed in a good direction if they had just been asked how they felt it was going.

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

#90

Post by nommm-nommm »

PaulHoule wrote: post #53
humanrebar wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To the eyes of management he was a champ, the king of "shipping". So management also was bad at their jobs. They probably didn't get canned, though they deserved it as much as the King of Shipping. But, congratulations, you know the "What's Bad About Working Here". Maybe there's a way to train management what their implicit job responsibilities are. I've never seen it happen in the wild, but maybe it's possible.

That's the problem, management is bad at their jobs. Management is so bad in the U.S. that everybody imagines they can hire their way out of situations rather than manage their way out of them. For instance, when you tell people that you went to a Burger King and it took them 30 minutes to serve you a cup of coffee, the conventional answer is "it's hard to find good help these days." That's a loser attitude on the pa…

This is the reason why I find "tipping" food servers for "good service" so perverse. the quality of the service you get is almost always a function of how well the place is managed.

Was your hard working server set up for failure by someone making 4 times her wage? A good manager can take a terrible team and make them a great team.

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