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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

#101

Post by nommm-nommm »

wolfgke wrote: post #38
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.

> This sounds like a cool idea, but I've seen where hiring for personality often leads towards hiring discrimination. You also discriminate against applicants who don't seem to be very capable in programming or seem to have really toxic personality traits (which is a good idea). How do you come to the idea that discrimination that "hiring for personality" is biased to leads to worse outcome?

Discrimination in employment law only refers to specific classes of people based on race, religion, gender, military service, etc. Passing up on someone who isn't qualified for a job isn't discrimination.

"Hiring for personally" can result in "hiring potential drinking buddies" which means your hiring may skew towards people who share your race, gender, creed, and religion because humans usually pick people like ourselves for friends. This can become a positive feedback loop.

If your hiring practices are discriminatory that is illegal.

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

#102

Post by lazyant »

pc86 wrote: post #98
lazyant wrote: post #97

So candidates where preparing for "what's your biggest weakness" and now they have to prepare for a twist of the also common "tell me about yourself"? again this question filters for people who practiced the question and are enthusiastic (or fake it).

I'm not sure what your complaint is. You will have a better time passing interviews if you are comfortable talking about yourself - strengths, weaknesses, experiences, goals, etc. Enthusiasm is good. Faking enthusiasm is still better than crossing your arms and demanding you be judged on your GitHub profile alone and not have to answer questions about yourself.

Not complaining, only stating that common questions can be trained and faked, diluting their value. Of course letting you explain yourself about what you are good at etc is better than narrow tricky questions, at the end there's only so much you can learn from a person you just met in one hour. Asking a candidate about themselves is good, is just no silver bullet.

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

#103

Post by heisnotanalien »

munin wrote: post #93
lexicality wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

there are some mega weirdos out there and sometimes it's best to just not ask. "hey, what'd you do this weekend?" "well, my friends and I run a historical re-enactment society where we all go to this remote retreat in the mountains, dress up as Nazis, and pretend that they won World War 2." and you know what, if it was possible to just hold your finger down on the "rewind time" button for 15 seconds to just never ask…

You just need to get use to the admittedly unfashionable idea that it is possible to like people for some reasons and dislike them for other reasons.

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

#104

Post by cylinder »

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…

Management is very bad across the board in the US. Very short-sighted and hierarchal culture.

Great leadership is humility and service to those being led. In America the ego worship and adoration for the Type A nutjob stands in the way.

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

#105

Post by badminton1 »

humanrebar wrote: post #37
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…

> 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.

Pass on the blame, keep the credit. That's the way to the top in many companies unfortunately.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability

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

#106

Post by tossrblab443 »

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…

Short of more details, this sounds like organizational failure as a whole versus the failure of one developer. Was this one developer the founder or something? It doesn't make sense they got away with so much and no push back from the team?

Should it be one developers job to do more than 20% of the job when it comes to shipping an entire companies products/services?

It feels like you're poo-pooing the idea of a Lone Ranger coder, while being annoyed the person didn't do 100% of the work? If it's supposed to be a team effort, why should they do more than 20% of the job. The rest of the team should be contributing the other 80%.

Sounds like they were there and fired before you even started. So I'm going to have to /dev/null this post as hearsay.

Having a hard time understanding how this isn't downvoted to oblivion. With all the rhetoric here about quality content and posting only that which moves conversations in a constructive way, this ends up being full of holes and after the fact blame gaming. Rarely useful.

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

#107

Post by badminton1 »

tossrblab443 wrote: post #106
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…

Short of more details, this sounds like organizational failure as a whole versus the failure of one developer. Was this one developer the founder or something? It doesn't make sense they got away with so much and no push back from the team? Should it be one developers job to do more than 20% of the job when it comes to shipping an entire companies products/services? It feels like you're poo-pooing the idea of a Lone…

20% of the work meaning implementing only functional requirements and neglecting non-functional requirements. Error handling, monitoring, security, configuration, maintainability, unit testing, performance, scalability, etc.

I think that is a personal responsibility to some extent. Even if you are doing agile or your team is small. If you don't plan to engage those requirements immediately, they need to be communicated to your stakeholders (e.g: in the form of a task in your backlog, though many of these might require refactoring/rework). Stakeholders should be aware of their completion status to make informed decisions around priorities and risk management.

In an analogy, a non-functional requirement is not "adding a room to a house", it is "the construction material and construction standard to build a room". It is not something that can be added later on without rework.

If they mindfully decide to accept the risks of neglecting functional requirements, it's fine, but that's their decision to make. It should not be a surprise later on that those requirements are not implemented.

Then, yes, it was an organizational failure. The person was one of the first hires. But I am talking from the perspective of the article being discussed. Management put the character of the individual over skills in their hierarchy of relevance at the moment of hiring, with the results I mentioned.

Then, it's not "hearsay". Evidence left: tickets, code, etc. Reading code that reflects someone not understanding CS fundamentals is not hearsay.

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

#108

Post by humanrebar »

pessimizer wrote: post #85
humanrebar wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'd prefer you didn't get to know me

I'd prefer not think about it and just get to know people as well. That's what I was trying to get at.

It's disappointing that my attempt to express the catch-22 from my end turns you off to the point of ending the conversation. This is part of the problem with 'diversity' qua 'diversity' IMO.

Culture blew past tolerance and on to something else a long time ago. I'm not sure we want real diversity so much.

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

#109

Post by humanrebar »

nommm-nommm wrote: post #90
PaulHoule wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I usually tip well and complain to management when I get bad service for this reason. Unless business is slow and the server is obviously goofing off in the back or something.

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

#110

Post by drinknderive »

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…

excuse me while I humble brag and talk about myself for a second
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