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He got 1%, we can't hire him

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Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him

#361
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol. London does quite a lot of risky financial shit. Also you might have heard of a little company kicking the shit out of Intel... ARM. Based in Cambridge UK, that is also where most tech investments in Europe are happening (not London or Berlin). Also, Germany and Switzerland are much more quiet and private about investments. You won't hear about many of them. These days you can invest in a UK startup, and have th…

Don't developers in London get paid crap though? I've heard horror stories about ridiculously low London salaries here on Hackernews. Are the low salaries just because their is a surplus developer talent in the UK?

UK Developers seem to have no idea what they are worth, and work for peanuts. IMHO.

The varied answers you get about London salaries is because the financial industry pays pretty well, competitive with SV or NY money. Everyone else gets paid peanuts. Or goes contracting like me.

Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with psychometric tests is that they're easy to game by answering them with the values the company is almost certainly looking for. Any company issuing a psychometric test is looking for obedience, hard work, discipline, profit orientation, civility, non-threatening creativity, etc. etc. etc. So what you get by discouraging a broad diversity of personalities is a mix of people who actually have those spec…

>The problem with psychometric tests is that they're easy to game by answering them with the values the company is almost certainly looking for. You'd think that, but a quality psychometric test can't be gamed if it was developed in-house and is only taken once by the candidate. This particular company might not have had one of those, however. Professional personality tests can't be gamed - you also can't find these…

Can you go into more detail? It's hard to imagine how a test could be devised that wouldn't be gameable by giving answers that would be expected of a person with a normal personality.

Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with psychometric tests is that they're easy to game by answering them with the values the company is almost certainly looking for. Any company issuing a psychometric test is looking for obedience, hard work, discipline, profit orientation, civility, non-threatening creativity, etc. etc. etc. So what you get by discouraging a broad diversity of personalities is a mix of people who actually have those spec…

>The problem with psychometric tests is that they're easy to game by answering them with the values the company is almost certainly looking for. You'd think that, but a quality psychometric test can't be gamed if it was developed in-house and is only taken once by the candidate. This particular company might not have had one of those, however. Professional personality tests can't be gamed - you also can't find these…

Often, at least in the work contexts, it doesn't matter if they can be gamed. Validity testing is done with the effects of gaming built-in, and there is some evidence that gaming has relations with performance benefits.

A acquaintance of mine is finishing his dissertation on faking on personality and integrity tests, so I'll know more on that soon.

Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him

#364
post #350

There is absolutely zero reason why HR/recruiting people should have final say on a candidate. None. It should be inconceivable, at a technical company, to hand over that much hiring power to a non-technical person. HR people are valuable in a company. But their role is to get resumes in front of the real decision makers, and to take care of all the stuff like W-2 forms and whatnot nobody wants to deal with, not make…

What is "Big Corp" though? I work at MS and they certainly don't do tests like this - and from my understanding neither does Google, Amazon, Facebook (is fb a "bigcorp"? perhaps not yet..). Dunno about IBM - wouldn't be surprised either way I guess. Perhaps the bigger lesson here is to not do personality tests. With that said, obviously gauging team fit is super important - but you don't need (and should avoid) a tes…

> What is "Big Corp" though? I work at MS and they certainly don't do tests like this - and from my understanding neither does Google, Amazon, Facebook (is fb a "bigcorp"? perhaps not yet..). Dunno about IBM - wouldn't be surprised either way I guess.

I'm an Amazon employee and I can confirm that I didn't have to take any kind of personality test when I applied here.

I was also encouraged to apply to IBM via a friend of a friend, and while I didn't have to take a personality test for them, I did have to fill out a questionnaire asking me about my years of experience in various topics. I was automatically rejected by their system for not having X years of experience in language/framework Y. I didn't find this quite as bizarre as rejecting a brilliant candidate due to some personality test, but I definitely found it a similarly poor experience. It was weird to run into an issue that seems to be brought up every time developers talk about poor interview/recruiting practices.

The only time I can remember actually filling out any kind of personality test when applying for a job was when I applied to McDonalds as a kid, which echoes the GP's point.

Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him

#365

I used to work for a company that writes and administers these tests. This company broke the cardinal rule. #1 - Only give personality tests in their native language. This is unacceptable , a personality test is NOT a language aptitude test. Personality tests will have questions like this: True or False I am happy when others are taking advantage of me. Non-native speakers may not appreciate that "taking advantage" i…

The correct answer, in any case is "True". Employees who object to their bosses taking advantage of them are a liability risk and are automatic no-hires.

LOL, I have always answered no to this. I guess it's more than coincidence that led me to applying to places that don't administer these tests.

Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him

#366

I used to work for a company that writes and administers these tests. This company broke the cardinal rule. #1 - Only give personality tests in their native language. This is unacceptable , a personality test is NOT a language aptitude test. Personality tests will have questions like this: True or False I am happy when others are taking advantage of me. Non-native speakers may not appreciate that "taking advantage" i…

The correct answer, in any case is "True". Employees who object to their bosses taking advantage of them are a liability risk and are automatic no-hires.

You're only thinking about the smallest cogs. Do you want a middle manager to be taken advantage of by those under him? Do you want someone in Sales to be taken advantage of by customers?

Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him

#367
post #276

Wow. The articles about completely idiotic hiring procedures never cease--because the reality of companies using idiotic hiring procedures never ceases--and each new submission is actively discussed here on Hacker News. How to hire good workers is already a solved problem, but most hiring managers don't do even minimal research to find out what best practice is. I'm told that this Hacker News community disfavors repe…

Surprising and disappointing that the best methods were only barely over 50% correlation with performance on the job. What does the algorithmic whiteboard coding tech interview count as? Does it qualify as work sample and brain teaser combined with interview? I suspect it's too far removed from what software engineering is actually like to be a good work sample, and the prior knowledge required to solve algorithm pro…

Surprising and disappointing that the best methods were only barely over 50% correlation with performance on the job.

That's probably about the best we could expect, as job-seeking behavior when a candidate desires a job is different from job-doing behavior over the long term after someone is hired and knows more about the company. The appalling thing is that companies still use procedures (personal unstructured interviews, "personality" tests, and in Europe even handwriting analysis) that are demonstrably much worse than that, rather than the work-sample tests and general cognitive ability tests that at least give companies their best chance to hire workers who will do well on the job.

Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him

#369

Oh god, I am shocked and horrified to hear that these sorts of tests may now be making their way into the tech industry. I've never encountered one of these personally, but my then-girlfriend who was a recent nursing school graduate looking for her first job ran into them and failed the first few of them. After reading about them online I'm convinced the only way for you to "pass" these tests is to be slightly psycho…

>> ... now be making their way into the tech industry.

I remember to fail one such test somewhere around 2001, the reason being: "... lack of a status-driven momentum ..." and " ... lack of aggressivity in pursuing career goals ... " or something to that effect.

Not that I walked out smiling, but they explained me in two sentences why I would not have liked to work there. So, addressing your quote above, I'm astonished that these tests are still around. Basically this company (and others) are putting their culture into the hands of an external service (Mercury Urval if I remember correctly in this case) and they can lose big by handing off influence on the choice.

Re: He got 1%, we can't hire him

#370
post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The correct answer, in any case is "True". Employees who object to their bosses taking advantage of them are a liability risk and are automatic no-hires.

For the sake of argument though, if the point of the test (in OP's case anyways) is to determine culture fit, should it matter what the "right" answer is if the rest of the team got it "wrong"?

Ugh!

This comment conveys the all-too-common reality that "cultural fit" is code for "everyone should be like us." To the extent that cultural fit is a defensible hiring criterion, or even a good one, it doesn't mean pure homogeneity.

There are a lot of ways where it's obvious that you don't want homogeneity. Take the question above. It may be good for the company if all of the individual contributors like being taken advantage of, as they'll work long hours for bad pay or whatever. But if your upper management or sales team likes being taken advantage of, they're going to let the company be taken advantage of, and now it's not so good.

In a lot of things, it's way healthier to have a mix. You want people who like and excel at starting projects and laying good groundwork, and you want others who like refining and maintaining systems that are already defined, because any company that's still building new systems will need people to do both. In most development teams, having all of either will be bad news.

And the same goes for personality issues. It may seem great to build a culture around people coming in at the same abnormal time as you and liking the same kind of fun as you. We're all together all day! We can bond through that fun! But there are a lot of problems that crop up as you grow. Once your culture is defined by, say, being a bunch of 23-year-old men who come in at noon and love video games and drinking, people who don't fit some or all of those characteristics might not feel especially welcome. Hiring people for areas other than engineering gets hard. Hiring senior engineers who are more likely to need to be home by 6 gets hard. Hiring women gets hard. You've just boxed yourself into a pretty small corner of your potential talent pool.

I've seen great companies built out of beautiful mixes of people. A married foodie who lives in SF working alongside a through-and-through Southerner who thinks In-N-Out is exotic. Fresh out of college video game players alongside parents with two decades of experience who like hiking. People still got along great and had a lot of fun together. There were certainly some commonalities, but I'm sure people would answer personality questions in drastically different ways. That doesn't mean they don't "fit" together.

There certainly are some cases where rejecting someone on "fit" reasons makes sense. Say you interview someone who is technically great, seems to be able to generally work well with others, but is terrible at pair programming. Will never cede the keyboard or listen much to their partner, and doesn't seem to be trying to fix it. If your company does a lot of pair programming, don't hire them. If you're a company that doesn't really do pairing, this might be a bit of a red flag, but it's not a deal breaker. There might be some analogs in the personality space.

But culture fit definitely should not mean "we have identical personalities."

This stuff matters. I'm the kind of person who would pass a lot of "culture fit" homogeneity tests (young, white, male, pretty nerdy, elite university), but I hate the homogenous cultures that often crop up at Valley companies and actively avoid them. A major factor in choosing to intern at Matasano this summer instead of some companies that are filled with very happy 22-year-old men is the much more reasonable culture, and all 'tptacek has written on HN about how "culture fit" is often BS.

So if you build a culture where "fit" means "be like us," you won't just cut out a lot of people who aren't like you, you'll cut out people who are like you but prefer communities of diverse people.

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