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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

#371

Post by sensanaty »

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…

I've by any and all accounts had an extremely privileged, happy and stress-free childhood/life, and I'd still balk at this kind of interrogation. It's just plain inappropriate to ask something like this of anyone in a professional setting, people's life stories are simply of no relevance to the job and more importantly, nobody else's business.

Not to mention the minefield of discrimination avenues present here, conscious ones and otherwise. Hell, even a positive feel-good story about a happy life could lead to a negative reaction depending on who's hearing it, these sort of things are inherently perilous to talk about in professional settings.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#372

Post by Cheezemansam »

notpachet wrote: post #18
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…

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…

>You want to have a picture of their psychology, because the problems you're hiring them for are often psychological in nature.

You are abstracting the issue so far that you are misrepresenting the primary criticisms people are having. You are not a trained psychologist, and trying to get a psychological profile of someone to try to reverse engineer how good of an employee they are going to be is naive and, frankly, nauseating.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#373

Post by dr_dshiv »

jprete wrote: post #188
smeeth wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

As nineplay@ remarked elsewhere, "there's a nauseating bias here against people who've had horrific childhoods". Unethical is one thing, neuroticism should not be a disqualifier from decent employment.

It’s not about disqualification. We aren’t considering who we have to legally hire. We are thinking about what makes for great hires. Given the choice between neuroticism or no, why choose neuroticism?

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#374

Post by babyshake »

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…

Is "poison in the keurig " a euphemism for spreading bad morale?

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#375

Post by babyshake »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #123
smeeth wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Yes, I now call this "vibes".

This is an interesting area because there's a lot of room for debate about what a good "vibe" is. Is being really positive all the time the right vibe? In many/most office environments, it is considered to be the right vibe. In a small startup where you're trying to validate PMF, it's not necessarily the best vibe IMO.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#376

Post by rahimnathwani »

dkarl wrote: post #230

For hiring software engineers, something I read decades ago that has been a consistent indicator for me is Bjarne Stroustrop's observation that good programmers are almost always good writers in their native language. In my experience, this includes high level writing skills all the way down to sentence structure, but not including the ability to write in a formal or "educated" register. Basically, it shouldn't take…

> good programmers are almost always good writers in their native language

This doesn't just apply to software engineers!

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#377

Post by the_mar »

Uinchuling wrote: post #367
the_mar wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn’t a correlation. I am charming and would like to think generally pleasant to be around. But if you’re going to interrogate me about the entire life story of mine, you aren’t going to think that anymore. Screening for people with life stories that you/anyone deems acceptable is extremely problematic, because realistically you will never have access to deeply personal information about 90% of your coworkers.…

You're one of those people who can only deal in absolutes, huh? All else being equal, a person who enjoyed an idyllic childhood is typically going to be a more well-adjusted adult than someone who experienced the most depraved, violent, extreme child abuse imaginable. I don't even have any interest in discussing the finer points with someone who completely denies the long-term effects of adverse childhood experiences…

You seem to be dealing in absolutes here.

We are talking about specifically work-related scenarios, that usually have pretty straightforward boundaries and surface-level interactions. "All else being equal, a person who enjoyed an idyllic childhood is typically going to be a more well-adjusted adult" - not necessarily in this specific context, people that didn't experience trauma are not immune to being awkward, immature, neurotic, anxious and various other things that makes working with them difficult.

That is not to say that people who have experienced childhood abuse can't have issues with basic human functioning. The point is, neither are necessarily are better or worse to work with just based on their trauma or lack of thereof.

It is irrelevant that people with normal childhoods are statistically more likely to be well-adjusted in most aspects of their lives, because we are only considering workplace interactions.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#378

Post by fardinahsan »

Everytime I read one of these "how to hire" posts, it's always a opinionated clusterfuck of a process that is arbitrary/capricious, gameable and biased towards what OP thinks are good traits.

This is a problem that is very easy to solve if you were allowed to use proxies for intelligence and grit. Just test for IQ and trait conscientiousness. [1]

----

[1] IQ is a stronger prediction of on the job performance than anything else. https://www.steveloh.org/news/2020/5/27/best-predictor-of-jo...

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#379

Post by TylerE »

jefc1111 wrote: post #265
tptacek wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been at Fly.io since 2020. I wouldn't describe us as an Elixir company so much as a company that appreciates Elixir. Some of our backend is in Elixir but the majority of it is Rust and Go.

Some significant names from that world on the fly.io roster :) Like a lot of people I feel like Elixir / BEAM has a real value proposition that is unrealised in the wider IT landscape ... but maybe that's not such a bad thing from some perspectives.

It’s a really a shame that Java poisoned the GCed JIT Runtime well.

Now everyone assumes that a runtime means it will take 30 seconds and 8GB of RAM to show a loading screen.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#380

Post by j7ake »

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…

What you state do not seem like priors at all. They look like observed data.

A prior would tell you how much each of those attributes would change your viewpoint.

Having very strong priors actually means your decision won’t change unless you have very strong evidence on the contrary.

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