How to hire low experience, high potential people

I was thinking the wall is the corporate process and departmental silos, turf wars etc. Startup is the muddy field where you have no support, but nobody in your way.

If you trust that the people you are working with are working towards the same goal, disagree and commit is important. You are not going to be right 100% of the time.

If the group is saying X is the right way to go and you’ve already given your reason why you think Y, you should disagree and commit. If you sit there complaining for weeks that they should be doing Y without any new information, you’re just being a shitty teammate and dragging everyone down.

The main point for the commit part is setting aside your ego to move the team forward. Most decisions are two way doors. If X doesn’t work out then try Y but don’t complain, work less hard, or sabotage because you didn’t get your way.

One big exception is if someone is making a decision that goes against company principles or morals.

This reminds me of "how to find future gems" between cryptocurrency small projects, or "how to analyze a good stock" in the stock market of smallcap companies.

You can have your run book. Your check points. Your procedure and tools. Still, you're going to hit, surprise, a 1000/1 loss rate in the long run.

At least from my point of view and past experience with hiring, young, inexperienced, but looking like a good fit.

It's ok to hire people with low experience, and use them like such a resource while they acquire hands-on experience (and that is not 2 months).

The real issue with this, is companies trying to cover experienced roles, with low experience people, from day one.

People without experience, won't be able to do some things, in the same way than experienced people.

And those more motivated, will make serious harm to projects.

And those non-technical roles with decision power, listening to them (low experience) like if they were experienced, and pretending that they know the future problems of what they are doing/talking, will increase the effect.

If you don't have money to invest in the strongest, or to hire experienced people... could you then put your money on an asset with dubious results and with a high probability of causing serious issues?

It's ok, then play with your few money, the careers of the rest of the team, and your startup future, in the casino. You're of course free of doing it.

IMHO The same way that you don't execute a random binary coming from a hacking forum, or a suspicious email, in the laptop of your bank accounts... you don't try to cover roles requiring experience and results, with low experience people.

You do not deploy a random app, with random unsupervised code, into production, right?

You hire low experience people, if:

1) You are willing to waste time of other (more expensive) persons into teach them a lot of important things

2) You have experienced people willing to do that

3) You have procedures and projects, to isolate their harm and what they do

4) You have procedures, to evaluate the evolution of those persons, during the months/years that you will be wasting the time of experienced people into teaching them those caveats that they don't know, or that will appear by first time in their face 11 months/years latter

5) You're not going to promote them before they are ready, for example if one experienced person from the same team, leaves the company. See point 4. You promote them when they are ready. Not by other reasons.

Signed: a past victim of companies trying to lowcost the teams with low experience people

I agree probing into the candidate's childhood is probably a bad idea as an interview topic.

However, for sake of argument, given that your story is true, shouldn't it also be evidence that those _not_ talking about "caring for dying aunt" is lying too? I mean, you told a story that didn't involve caring for a dying aunt, and that was a lie. We actually don't have evidence (either within your story, or in general I suppose?) that anyone would make up a story about a dying aunt to an interviewer...?

We built Fly.io resume-blind and without interviews, hiring people at every level of experience without having to make decisions based on that experience. We did it by throwing away all this stuff, ditching interviews, and replacing them with work-sample tests. Some of the best people on our team, the best I've worked with in my whole career, are working here in their first job in our field.

I'm a little grumpy about this "diamonds in the rough" shit. I'm more concerned about what's lurking in the diamond mines. If people can demonstrate that they can do the work, I don't much need to know if "they have a chip on their shoulders". More generally: I have zero faith in anyone's ability to learn much from psychological interviews.