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How to hire low experience, high potential people

worktopia.substack.com

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Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#71

Post by chefandy »

PaulHoule wrote: post #33
notpachet wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the role you're hiring for. I suspect a lot of comments in this thread, echoing your sentiment, will be written from the perspective of sharp-end-of-the-stick engineers for whom the idea of working on ambiguous organizational problems is an abstract concept, far from their day to day. Not saying that's you per se, but this is HN after all. This crowd loves for things to be clear-cut, especially when the…

Sometimes I think some people in business have a pathological need for things to be poorly defined. They dread a visit to the ontologist even more than they do to the orthodontist. I think some people just don't feel like things are in control unless they have a large arbitrary structure that confounds everybody else and lets them do whatever they hell they want. (Meanwhile, Steven Covey would say you should be proac…

Conversely, some in the engineering mindset have a pathological need to nail down ambiguous things to a definition because it fits their style of reasoning. Nobody thinks it's easier to work with poorly-defined things-- even with a well-defined overall goal, when the specific goals and risks in achieving it are a bit ambiguous, you're pretty likely to get it wrong if you try to stuff the problem into a neat little box, and in some cases-- e.g. teams with tight budgets-- getting it wrong is a huge problem. That sort of flexibility is what many developers lack when they get "promoted" to a managerial position because they're skilled developers rather than competent managers.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#72

Post by finnthehuman »

em-bee wrote: post #34
finnthehuman wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think “oh haha aren’t engineers robotic personalities” applies here. Fucking nobody I know gives too much of their real personality at work, let alone when interviewing. But “haha aren’t all engineers only friends with other nerds and barely live in the real word” so what do I know?

nobody I know gives too much of their real personality at work i don't believe that. are you claiming that they are all faking it? i would not want to work in a place where people fake their personality just to fit in. my experience from working on FOSS projects suggests that the stereotypical behavior we see in some engineers is in fact real. not as exaggerated as people claim, but the signs are there. more importan…

> i would not want to work in a place where people fake their personality just to fit in.

You know that statistically some number of the people you work and collaborate productively with, and get along with. They would, if given the option, never interact with you again for the rest of their lives. You know this, right?

I am a boring robot engineer because it’s easy to do. The “how was your weekend” conversations are about tech hobbies because I’m not sharing the occasions I got drunk, took mushrooms and hung out in a pool full of naked people for most of a day.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#74

Post by devwastaken »

With drive, anyone can do anything. Almost everyone has had drive at some point. Those that no longer do were punished by the gamed system for trying to leave the socioeconomic caste they were born into. This applies to the wealthy just as well as the poor.

Corps with "sane people" running them and hiring is very rare. It's against the rules of the game. It assumes that the people being hired are honest and aren't gaming you. The reason corps have all these large walls and barb wire fencing is to prevent the 1/1000 people who may cause political turmoil, use Title IX to their advantage, steal business plans/tech, or otherwise act in ways harmful to the company. These cannot be predicted by "good behavior" because such people know the game and are acting that way.

Large corps that have obfuscated hiring methods do it because the fed has set up the rules in this way. Larger scope of hiring = higher chance of a destructive hire. If we want hiring to be sane then the rules have to not be punitive.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#75

Post by smeeth »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #54
smeeth wrote: post #41

People's intuitions around hiring aren't Bayesian enough. I think a good process reduces down to something like: - Are they smart? (understands quickly + communicates effectively) - Are they cool? (won't put poison in the keurig + pleasant to be around) - Are they high energy? (initiative + action bias) - Do they have the experience needed to be successful in the role? Those are pretty strong priors for success. If y…

I have a 4-quardrant way of thinking about this that's similar. - Y-axis is "drive" - X-axis is "aptitude" - low drive + low aptitude: never hire - low drive + high aptitude: hire for targeted use cases where you need expertise - high drive + low aptitude: hire, train, and foster aptitude growth - high drive + high aptitude: hire on the spot There's an indirect way of testing for this which is to test for curiosity a…

I like this, but I do think it misses the social stuff. Just a few neurotic/unethical people can completely ruin a team and make all the best people quit. I find this to be extra true on diverse teams (all types of diversity).

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#77

Post by sesm »

PaulHoule wrote: post #33
notpachet wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the role you're hiring for. I suspect a lot of comments in this thread, echoing your sentiment, will be written from the perspective of sharp-end-of-the-stick engineers for whom the idea of working on ambiguous organizational problems is an abstract concept, far from their day to day. Not saying that's you per se, but this is HN after all. This crowd loves for things to be clear-cut, especially when the…

Sometimes I think some people in business have a pathological need for things to be poorly defined. They dread a visit to the ontologist even more than they do to the orthodontist. I think some people just don't feel like things are in control unless they have a large arbitrary structure that confounds everybody else and lets them do whatever they hell they want. (Meanwhile, Steven Covey would say you should be proac…

Some people thrive by “catching fish in muddy waters”. The real motives of people very often differ from declared ones, but at a workplace it’s usually either getting promotion/pay rise or stealing from company in some way (kickbacks, bribes, benefits for their side business, etc).

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#78

Post by the_mar »

nineplay wrote: post #57
bheadmaster wrote: post #7

> “Tell me about you. If your life was a book, give me the chapter titles from your birth till now.” Once you’ve gotten the overview, dive into each “chapter” and plumb the depths for their real stories. Go back to their childhood! I learn a lot about their grit and commitment to excellence from their basketball obsession or maybe their experience caring for a dying parent. I don't think I'd be comfortable sharing th…

There's a nauseating bias here against people who've had horrific childhoods. "Let me tell you about the years of physical/emotional/sexual abuse I've suffered though." That's just not going to happen - and if it did happen the interviewer is probably not going to come away with "What a brave person to overcome all of that!" but "What a damaged person, I don't need them around". Well done, you've weeded out people wh…

Thank you. I found the part where the author throws in "cared for a dying parent" particularly distasteful, it's like a benchmark for "palatable damage"

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#79

Post by PaulHoule »

tuatoru wrote: post #60
PaulHoule wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I think some people in business have a pathological need for things to be poorly defined. They dread a visit to the ontologist even more than they do to the orthodontist. I think some people just don't feel like things are in control unless they have a large arbitrary structure that confounds everybody else and lets them do whatever they hell they want. (Meanwhile, Steven Covey would say you should be proac…

It's just that the real world is fractal. With apologies to Jonathan Swift, the exceptions have smaller exceptions that upon them prey, and they have smaller yet to bite 'em.

It's a subject (reasoning with defaults) that I've thought about a lot because it's a core part of commonsense reasoning. Back when production rules were a thing people never standardized a way of dealing w/ defaults and one of very few default-oriented programming languages is

https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/

default-oriented programming might well resolve some of the conflicts involving object-orientation and its discontents. (e.g. defaults could be a better model for "inheritance" that works in more complex relationship graphs.)

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