If they are so good at potential, then why haven't they proven it yet? It's an overly simple question, but if there are many potential reasons, accept that you may be wrong about hypothetical potential.
Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
81–90 of 95 posts
Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
#82Stop believing metaphors and analogies are persuasive. There's no reason to think that company performance is linear, or fits any basic function at all. Reality is far more complex than this. A metaphor or analogy greatly oversimplifies reality and will lead you to make terrible decisions. Please, please stop believing things just because the person who is making the claim sounds confident. I'm begging us, as a cultu…
> A metaphor or analogy greatly oversimplifies reality and will lead you to make terrible decisions. I think I disagree with this. Metaphors and analogies provide interesting ways to illustrate principles, and good decisions are often rooted in good principles. Attempting to model human behavior as a one dimensional line? Yeah, not good. But remembering a person is more than the moment you meet them in? Great advice.
I think the vast majority of metaphors are pointless and end up in most of the discussion being about how the metaphor doesn't make sense or how the magnitude doesn't make sense. They are very frequently used on topics which are quite simple to understand and need no metaphor at all.
The place where I find they make most sense is explaining certain incentive structures. Take for example the Prisoner's Dilemma, you could use this as a metaphor to explain a multitude of situations where people or companies are acting in a way that seems illogical from your perspective but when you simplify it down you can see how each actor has particular incentives.
Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
#83Whether or not this is a good idea can be debated, as demonstrated by the plethora of commentary here.
Nevertheless, this corresponds well with my lived experience in BigCo on both sides of the candidate / interviewer table. People who are almost qualified for a job, and show progression, get given the job aa a "stretch". People who have done the same job before don't get the job.
This can be interpreted as "ageism", but it's more a reflection of companies wanting to hire people that will progress (possibly into management), and not just perform the initial job at hand.
Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
#84This feels like something you'd find on linkedin.
Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
#85If folks are at all interested, ideas that are directly related to the point the author brings up have been studied quite in-depthly, both theoretically and empirically, in the human capital econ literature.
Gary Becker's lecture on Human Capital is a fantastic survey of the field (which he in part invented):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QajILZ3S2RE&list=PL9334868E7...
Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
#86Suppose my interviewing process is rather limited and I can only measure the y-intercept with pretty severe error bars... like to within +/- 30%. Also, my interviewing process is even MORE clueless at measuring the slope... it could be tilted +/- 30 degrees from where it is (note: that means the slope might well be negative) and also THAT measurement is especially subject to unconscious racial and similarity bias. Th…
I posted the reply as a top-level comment, but the very questions you bring up are issues that some econ fields have taken seriously and have tried to model it empirically and test parts of it empirically. The observing all of this is a lot of where the complexity lies, as you rightly point out. If you care at all to poke further, I posted a link to a lecture series which will talk far more about this than you'd ever want to hear.
Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
#87If folks are at all interested, ideas that are directly related to the point the author brings up have been studied quite in-depthly, both theoretically and empirically, in the human capital econ literature. Gary Becker's lecture on Human Capital is a fantastic survey of the field (which he in part invented): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QajILZ3S2RE&list=PL9334868E7...
Addendum: There's also a humongous literature on organizational economics which also addresses implications of the observability of these "slopes" or "intercepts", etc.
Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
also, how would you measure someone's slope? would it even be fair to evaluate them by it?
Even if it was linear, you can’t tell the slope of a line from one measurement, and an interview is one measurement. You’d need two interviews separated by some time, which is obviously impractical.
And even if you could, once interviewees know you're doing this, they could easily game it by intentionally bombing the first interview.
Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
#89Stop believing metaphors and analogies are persuasive. There's no reason to think that company performance is linear, or fits any basic function at all. Reality is far more complex than this. A metaphor or analogy greatly oversimplifies reality and will lead you to make terrible decisions. Please, please stop believing things just because the person who is making the claim sounds confident. I'm begging us, as a cultu…
I don't think the problem is metaphor or analogy - both of these can be persuasive, and both of these can be used to illustrate complex things.
The problem is this particular kind of tech-messiah metaphor, assuming that mathematics is the only useful lense, over-simplifying everything and not even understanding what is lost [1].
Metaphors aren't the issue; metaphors crafted by people who don't really understand them are.
Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lifelong learner with decades of experience will outperform a 5-year "senior" many times over, not just in output but also in the headaches and mess that they save you from having to experience. What we need is better titling. There's nothing shameful about being a junior or a mid-level for multiple years each. Until we get that, one can usually tease out the "seniorness" of the position by discussing salary.
So, that's an orthogonal problem. I was pointing to the direct advice and suggesting that people will look at this advice and their prejudices will lead them to hire a younger person over an older person because the older person will be mispercieved as having a "lower slope."
Yep. I think we run into a different problem, which is the diminishing return to the employer.
Even if a person's growth is linear, most companies' ability to realize a return on that growth probably isn't.
It's not that the companies couldn't benefit from experience if they knew how to realize that benefit. It's more that their processes are set up in a way that prevents the benefit from being realized. I'm thinking about heavy-handed architectural diktats and constantly changing priorities when I write this.