Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to hire low experience, high potential people

worktopia.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 433 posts

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#201

Post by ryandrake »

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…

Even if the candidate doesn't have a horrific childhood, the question is totally inappropriate and irrelevant. Like "get up and walk out of the interview" inappropriate.

This, and the general level of mysticism throughout (really? "Spike potential" WTF), causes me to dismiss the whole article.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#202

Post by TylerE »

grdgyredb wrote: post #151
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you measure "are they cool" without just directly transforming all of your biases and stereotypes about the candidate into a numeric score?

As long as you aren’t illegally discriminating, it’s more important that you avoid hiring shitty people than it is that you eliminate all bias. You can’t single-handedly solve the systemic problem of unequal access to opportunity.

One bad apple poisons the whole team. It's totally morale destroying.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#203

Post by swozey »

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…

I was asked this question by (I believe) a very Christian burger company from Austin (Mighty Fine) at the start of my career interviewing for some sort of IT admin job with them. I think I was 22-25.

He asked "So what extra curricular hobbies did you have in high school?" And I'll never forget that it was such a weird gross question to ask someone. What are you doing, judging whether I was in wrestling or theater? Judging if I didn't do any at all because I had to work after school? Judging if I took night classes and worked during the day? Judging if I'm not at christian school after class?

Are you just being chatty and friendly? Weird question. I couldn't even remember. I DID play hockey and wrestle but I was so shocked by the question I didn't even think of those IIRC. Not sure what I said. Maybe I did say those and I'm misremembering because I'm not sure what else I would've said other than "no hobbies."

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#204

Post by AnimalMuppet »

zer00eyz wrote: post #32
pavel_lishin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> maybe their experience caring for a dying parent. Yeah, you would have to claw this out of me with a hammer. There's absolutely no way I would be comfortable sharing that level of intimacy with a stranger.

That isnt everyone. Some folks had a lot of adversity in their lives and are OK with talking about how they delt with it. Some people pay others to listen to this and call it therapy. There are other ways to ask these sorts of questions: did you ever have a job that you dont want to go back to but would not give up the experience of? (Do you know how shitty a job can be, were you an amazon driver or a pickle shoveler…

> That isnt everyone.

> Some folks had a lot of adversity in their lives and are OK with talking about how they delt with it. Some people pay others to listen to this and call it therapy.

Sure. But is "willing to talk about dealing with trauma" really a valid filter to sort potential employees by?

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#205

Post by web3-is-a-scam »

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…

I have a large gap in my resume from a bout of depression that left me basically incapacitated for nearly 10 months.

I get asked about it all the time in interviews.

I just respond “I’m under NDA”.

I also get asked about GitHub profiles. I have a pseudonym on GitHub, and maintain a few projects. I dont divulge that information either.

“I’m under NDA” or “I only work in proprietary code with many trade secrets involved so I can’t”

I’ve probably been screened out of plenty of processes just for that, but I don’t care. I’ve been doing pretty good for myself without making my life an open book.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#206

Post by danielmarkbruce »

Easiest way to hire a bunch of young, smart, ambitious people is to work at a place where young, smart ambitious people want to work. Anyone who's worked at such a place will tell you it's easy in that environment and difficult outside it. The deck is so stacked in your favor at the right place.

It's much harder to keep the organization mildly functional so that such people want to stay. The number of highly capable, motivated people leaving orgs because "this place is a disaster" is astronomical.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#207

Post by ryandrake »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #165
hdhdhsjsbdh wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This interview style seems bound to create a psychologically enmeshed workplace with no healthy boundaries. Or a workplace full of people with charming, easily-shared backstories and nuclear families but no yucky problems. Would not want to work here, personally.

Any competent HR department would have a fit if they knew these kinds of questions were being asked. It's way too easy to wander into illegal discrimination when you're making hiring decisions based on people's backgrounds like this.

You'd think this was true, but I've seen some crazy shit in interviews, even at companies that were big enough and had a robust enough legal team, where you'd think they'd have their shit together.

I once interviewed at a medium sized, name brand Silicon Valley darling everyone on HN has heard of, where an interviewer outright asked me if I was married and if I had kids! Like, holy shit, just read your interview training manual! The very first sentence is probably "Do not ask any questions where the answer would even imply information about things that would get us in trouble discrimination-wise." Yet this person overtly asked! Here I was in the stairwell walking down to the second floor and she hits me up with one of the few totally forbidden questions! I thought about saying "What would HR think of that question?" but the asker was the HR manager! Totally bonkers.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#208

Post by karaterobot »

varjag wrote: post #196
karaterobot wrote: post #88

> “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. God damn that sounds exhausting. How about…

She's clearly isn't hiring developers.

Replace the subject matter with that of your own job, or pretend you are living inside the article and respond directly to the author if that feels right to you. Whatever gets you to seeing my point.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#209

Post by dheera »

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…

Yeah I was about to say this. "Tell me the story of your career" is a lot more appropriate.

You're probably still going to get a lot of irrelevant dreamy passion bullshit with that question though when in reality 95% of candidates are just looking for exchanging skills for income and you as an employer need to accept that that's how the world works.

Post reply on HN