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Hire Family People

37signals.com

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Re: Hire Family People

#141

Post by ks »

petercooper wrote: post #138
tptacek wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could it possibly be relevant to your hiring decision how old someone is, or what neighborhood they live in?

You can guess someone's age within a few years at an interview if you wanted to discriminate, so blocking a mention of age is naive. You could also work it out in most cases from the dates given on the resume (unless it becomes illegal to learn about a candidate's education or work history - which wouldn't surprise me to be honest). You could see what neighborhood someone lives in because that will also be typically…

> Instead, it should be law that it's optional for the candidate to ANSWER them.

Isn't every question optional? It's not like you go to jail if you don't answer a question. It's not a good strategy, but AFAIK it is legal

Re: Hire Family People

#142

Post by SwellJoe »

mosburger wrote: post #125
SwellJoe wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My co-founder has kids and is older than the OP, and we never felt like that had any impact on our acceptance to YC.

That's good to know! From some of the comments around here, I was starting to feel a little like the guy who showed up at the party uninvited. I probably take things too personally. :)

Just to further reassure you, the average age of YC founders has been creeping upward from the beginning, and there have been many over-30 founders at this point. And, in many polls of age here on News.YC the range of ages run higher than you seem to think. Young single folks are just able to take dramatic risks that occasionally lead to dramatic success, and thus get a disproportionate amount of press. Older folks tend to have responsibilities and more experience which leads to taking fewer and more carefully calculated risks. Successes are less surprising and look more like traditional businesses...so you don't see them talked about as much. But businesses are being started by folks of all ages and a lot of those folks are here at News.YC.

Re: Hire Family People

#143

Post by jcl »

petercooper wrote: post #138
tptacek wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could it possibly be relevant to your hiring decision how old someone is, or what neighborhood they live in?

You can guess someone's age within a few years at an interview if you wanted to discriminate, so blocking a mention of age is naive. You could also work it out in most cases from the dates given on the resume (unless it becomes illegal to learn about a candidate's education or work history - which wouldn't surprise me to be honest). You could see what neighborhood someone lives in because that will also be typically…

Instead, it should be law that it's optional for the candidate to ANSWER them.

That opens another can of worms. Any refusal to answer implies something to hide, which would be an immediate red flag.

Re: Hire Family People

#144

Post by baltoo »

dhh wrote: post #34
pg wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(If this exchange is confusing to anyone, it's because dhh was replying to my comment while I was still editing it.) But in reply to the second half: while 37Signals may be a counterexample to the rule that startup founders need to work long hours to succeed, there seem to be a lot more startups that did than didn't. Different people presumably have different points at which spending more time on something makes the…

I fully agree that different businesses require different levels of input to make it work. But this crowd seems to be mostly in the "web business" area, so I think our example is at the very least relevant. And we're saying here's an example of a web startup that didn't follow the traditional wisdom of "long hours necessary for business success", which is offered as one data point that perhaps "long hours" isn't the…

(As a new member of this forum I'm a bit shy to add to this thread, but here it goes anyway.)

I suppose you've both seen the writings of Alan Carter (http://the-programmers-stone.com/about/) and it seems to me that it just might be a way of getting these two seemingly differing viewpoints aligned.

If stress is the biggest factor then age or marital status might have very little to do with it. At least directly. Married people might have learned to handle stress well and younger people might be less affected by it.

That is to say, you both might have seen the "less stress affected" crowd and drawn conclusions about it.

Re: Hire Family People

#145

Post by tptacek »

petercooper wrote: post #138
tptacek wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could it possibly be relevant to your hiring decision how old someone is, or what neighborhood they live in?

You can guess someone's age within a few years at an interview if you wanted to discriminate, so blocking a mention of age is naive. You could also work it out in most cases from the dates given on the resume (unless it becomes illegal to learn about a candidate's education or work history - which wouldn't surprise me to be honest). You could see what neighborhood someone lives in because that will also be typically…

You are totally begging the question. If you have somebody's name, you can "ask" the Internet about their age, sex, religion, or race. That's illegal too.

What I'm asking is, one reasonable person to another, what possible reason could you have for wanting to know the age of an applicant? It is legal to ask if a candidate can legally work full time for you. Why would you ask anything more?

Re: Hire Family People

#146

Post by tptacek »

jcl wrote: post #143
petercooper wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can guess someone's age within a few years at an interview if you wanted to discriminate, so blocking a mention of age is naive. You could also work it out in most cases from the dates given on the resume (unless it becomes illegal to learn about a candidate's education or work history - which wouldn't surprise me to be honest). You could see what neighborhood someone lives in because that will also be typically…

Instead, it should be law that it's optional for the candidate to ANSWER them. That opens another can of worms. Any refusal to answer implies something to hide, which would be an immediate red flag.

This line of reasoning seems nonsensical. There are no non-optional interview questions. But all questions asked during an interview are used to discriminate between candidates; that's the point of an interview. How do you ask a candidate what their age is without discriminating based on age? If you're not discriminating on age, why on earth would you ask the question?

Re: Hire Family People

#147

Post by sabat »

davidw wrote: post #110
sabat wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm in the minority. I think DHH's arrival here is a big gust of foul air. Suddenly the arguments are getting out of control, and pg's participating. Nitpicky, negative, petty debates. I've read every DHH post that's appeared here in the past days, and every one of them comes off like the work of a sophomoric contrarian who believes that the minor success he's had entitles him to tell the world how to think. I…

pg and dhh have been very civil in their exchanges, even though perhaps they're not exactly arguing over profound ideas. It appears that you are the one who has introduced personal attacks on dhh. Would you say those things to him in person?

Read again. No, they haven't. David goads; PG apparently feels the need to defend himself. I presume that it's because he's answering DHH -- the argument itself is pointless, and DHH's points are sophomoric and trivial. It is devolving.

Re: Hire Family People

#148

Post by sabat »

asmosoinio wrote: post #111
sabat wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm in the minority. I think DHH's arrival here is a big gust of foul air. Suddenly the arguments are getting out of control, and pg's participating. Nitpicky, negative, petty debates. I've read every DHH post that's appeared here in the past days, and every one of them comes off like the work of a sophomoric contrarian who believes that the minor success he's had entitles him to tell the world how to think. I…

I have enjoyed the comments in this post, even if sometimes negative. For example the PG's and DHH's discussion about definition of a "startup" might seem like nitpicking when taken out of context, but I found it extremely valuable.

Extremely valuable? Why? Because DHH deigned to comment on our little forum? Can't be for any other reason: he's not saying anything interesting or useful, anything less than obvious.

Re: Hire Family People

#149

Post by sabat »

neilk wrote: post #112
sabat wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I'm in the minority. I think DHH's arrival here is a big gust of foul air. Suddenly the arguments are getting out of control, and pg's participating. Nitpicky, negative, petty debates. I've read every DHH post that's appeared here in the past days, and every one of them comes off like the work of a sophomoric contrarian who believes that the minor success he's had entitles him to tell the world how to think. I…

We all argue from our narrow perspective. Certainly pg did, at least at first, when he offered his own startup experiences as a model for others. Perhaps since then his vision has been more empirically verified. But DHH's advice is basically conservative -- he's just arguing that web businesss can grow like other conventional small businesses -- so it has a fair amount of weight behind it too.

"Narrow" is a relative term. PG is not as narrow as DHH.

Re: Hire Family People

#150

Post by sabat »

davidw wrote: post #108
sabat wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it's gotten this far now? DHH loves to start fights so much that he had to come over to PG's forum and start them? PG, who is always civil here, dragged into a stupid semantic fight? I boggle. "So 37signals would have been a startup if we sold to Google tomorrow, but not if we kept on as an independent company just making money?" No, man. You're just playing semantic games, and you know it . The company would have…

I think it's quite interesting to see him here. He disagrees, in a polite way. That kind of thing is healthy. I don't really agree with dhh's definition of a startup, but there's probably not a sharp line between 'startup' and 'a new business' in some cases. In any case, I like the 37signals model, even though I have some nagging doubts about whether it's really quite so simple in an on line world where network effec…

Polite?

You're giving him more credit than he's due. He is not polite. Passive-aggressive arrogance is not the same thing as "polite".

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