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What's going on here, with this human?

grahamduncan.blog

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Re: What's going on here, with this human?

#41

Post by mdorazio »

smnscu wrote: post #38
hiq wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also hard to do unless you're hiring for several similar positions at the same time. If you hired only one guy, who's to say that the others you rejected would have performed better or worse? If you hired 3 for similar positions, you can start making guesses from interview performances and (in)validating them one year after. But as you said I don't think it's done in practice anyway.

I once hired two engineers for the same role on my team; they both seemed about the same level during the interview. After working with them for a while, one of them was perfectly adequate, the other turned out to be the best engineer I've ever worked with.

Did that help you reframe your hiring strategy for the future? Curious what qualities in the second engineer both made them better and could have been revealed in an interview.

Re: What's going on here, with this human?

#43

Post by [deleted] »

bhrgunatha wrote: post #34
mcbishop wrote: post #3

> One of the greatest gifts we have for each other, for our children and spouses, for our teammates, is the positive feedback loop we can put someone into purely by believing in them, by seeing their genius and their dysfunction clearly and then helping them construct conditions for the former to flourish. Beautiful.

I used to teach children whose internal state is generally easier to assess than adults. I remember watching as one kid said to another "I believe in you" to help out in some moment of crisis. It struck me as odd - something cheesy they'd (probably) heard in a movie or cartoon. But if they are saying that to each other then I could probably use it to communicate better with them as long as it was sincere. I'd say it…

[deleted]

Re: What's going on here, with this human?

#44

Post by whatever_dude »

mdorazio wrote: post #39
ekianjo wrote: post #24

> As the gaming company Valve puts it: “Hiring well is the most important thing in the universe.” Nope, Hiring is basically almost random no matter how much energy or tests you put in it, you can never know someone well until you actually work with them on a daily basis.

Partially agree. A good hiring process can boost your odds of finding the “right” people, but my personal experience has been that firing well is at least as important as hiring well. Firing well is also something that most companies do very poorly.

This. It's extremely difficult to hire well, because no one knows what that even is. Firing well is somewhat easier because almost everybody knows who must be fired, but taking action is the difficult part.

Re: What's going on here, with this human?

#46

Post by k__ »

ekianjo wrote: post #24

> As the gaming company Valve puts it: “Hiring well is the most important thing in the universe.” Nope, Hiring is basically almost random no matter how much energy or tests you put in it, you can never know someone well until you actually work with them on a daily basis.

Isn't figuring out people just something you can learn?

The problem I usually see with most people is, they think they already learned it.

Many people I met thought they had good knowledge of human nature, even the ones who were failing constantly in different parts of their life. Even the ones who where obviously hanging out with toxic people all the time.

Everyone thinks, even if they don't know much, at least they know that, but I think it's one of the hardest things to know and nobody really puts in real work to get good at it.

Re: What's going on here, with this human?

#47

Post by as_i_fall »

Wow this is atrocious.

All of the fairly meager advice in this is either bad or totally unactionable.

The references to outmoded concepts from pop-psych and generic aphorisms also really aren't convincing me that this person has any idea what they're talking about.

Re: What's going on here, with this human?

#50

Post by wffurr »

rubatuga wrote: post #23
StavrosK wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens if the hungry mind is too hungry for your menial CRUD job, and you were actually better off with the unhungry mind that is content to do its job and go home at the end of the day?

Maybe they end up depressed and start looking for meaning in life.

Make sure you don’t pay quite enough for the rapidly increasing cost of housing in the area and make them feel dependent on your employer-provided healthcare. Then they’ll buckle down and deal with it for the sake of some illusory stability.
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