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How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

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Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#261

Post by Klockan »

Confusion wrote: post #241
kazinator wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then there is the perspective from having heard "no": 1. Never believe anyone's rationale regarding their "no". They acted on instinct, and made up a clever story to afterward to convince themselves it was a rational decision. Or worse: it was some prejudice that they are consciously covering up. Or perhaps some internal reasons that they don't want to discuss with outsiders like sudden news that affects all hiring a…

There is often no difference between the rationale and the instinct. Initially you subconsciously reach a rational conclusion, but you are only consciously aware of the conclusion. We call that instinct, but there is no reason why that could not have rational underpinnings. It takes some effort to get your subconscious to inform your conscious mind of the rationale. You are not conjuring up a clever story: you are di…

If this were true then we wouldn't have thousands of books and courses on how to trick interviewers.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#262

Post by deong »

kyllo wrote: post #146
RobertKerans wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't do the actual hiring, but sit in in one of the two interviews, and as a team we carefully discuss each candidate. We've got a good team, the work environment & people are great, hiring process is solid enough. And we all agree that, almost without exception, we can tell within about thirty seconds of meeting them whether someone is likely to be hired. I assume this is overwhelmingly common? Bar sending a poli…

And we all agree that, almost without exception, we can tell within about thirty seconds of meeting them whether someone is likely to be hired. So you just admitted that you make your hiring decisions based on a snap judgment. OK. But that doesn't mean you can tell in 30 seconds is whether someone is actually going to be good at the job.

30 seconds clearly has to be an embellishment, but what tends to happen is that people make a decision pretty early on, and then conduct the rest of the interview in such a way as to make that decision into the correct one. The same answer can be viewed as "he got it mostly right, and in arriving at his answer, he clearly picked out the main salient issue" or "he got the obvious insight about the problem, but fumbled on arriving at a correct solution after that". Which one you go with depends on whether you've already decided the person is generally good or generally poor.

It's usually not a conscious thing, and it's something we're all prone to doing.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#263

Post by pbhjpbhj »

DanBC wrote: post #244
tomp wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not from the US, but don't many American blacks have white-sounding names? And I assume those blacks are more likely to come from families that are wealthier and better educated. If yes, the other explanation could be that the employers were considering the name an indication of background, i.e. a "Jamal" is more likely to come "from the hood" (poor neighborhood) than a "James". The point is, "discrimination" is…

> The point is, "discrimination" is sometimes just applying statistics. Just because some statistical factors correlate with race doesn't mean one is being racist; they are just optimizing their selection process. If your optimized selection process selects away from Black candidates it is by definition racist.

Hang, on that's not the definition of racism.

Racism is [dis]favouring a particular group based on race. If you choose the 10 highest scorers in a maths test in a group and the racial make-up doesn't match that of the group as a whole that's not racist.

One could manipulate your choice characteristics in order to achieve the racial profile that you want. That's serious conspiracy theory territory though.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#264

Post by waylandsmithers »

yaddayadda wrote: post #260
yarou wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot upvote your comment ( and the parent ) enough. If the labor market in tech was a perfectly competitive market where all parties had perfect information, hiring would be a lot more straightforward. However, as you state, cognitive biases and lack of rationality on both the supply and demand side muddy the waters.

Many orchestras have found a fairly simple solution to the problem - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22blind+auditions%22+hiring+music... I'd hope to have a similar 'audition' approach that included not only basic programming skills but also –and as a junior level programmer, more importantly – learning skills. For example, commenting or debugging internal framework code (something that all interviewees are experiencing f…

That would be pretty cool-- and although software development is meritocratic, it's not as meritocratic as those orchestras, right?. They simply want the best musicians PERIOD, whereas lots of software companies would probably hesitate to hire someone with a lot of talent but a toxic attitude.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#265

Post by FeeTinesAMady »

RobertKerans wrote: post #236
_pmf_ wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I, seriously, don't understand how this works, unless your candidates appearance and accent are your main tools for judging a candidate. I would prefer to think that's not the case. Companies would like you to think this, too, and law makers would very much like to think that their rules regarding non discrimination have any effect. The real situation tells another story. But it's OK, companies can just include a n…

If you're insinuating that this is the situation, then that's incredibly insulting (yeah, got to fess up, we hired that last guy because it would look good in the company brochure, we're just pretending he came across as a genuinely nice guy and someone who'd likely pick things up quickly, we all hate him really!)

You're the one who said that you decide whether or not to hire someone in 30 seconds.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#267

Post by vidarh »

kazinator wrote: post #99
sekasi wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems you've had some bad runs. I can pretty much debunk 1 and 3 personally. Good companies and people take hiring very seriously.

That people sometimes do first, then afterward invent a rationalization for what they did, and then accept that as the reason they did it, cannot be easily debunked. E.g. woman buys new shoes on pure impulse. At home she finds they go really well with a certain purple dress. Why that's precisely why she got them, of course. Eight months later, that's all she remembers: I had that dress in mind when I saw those shoes.

Our brains not only arbitrarily post-rationalises a bunch of stuff, but we often believe it to be the truth from the moment we think of it in many cases even when the rationalisation can't possibly be true.

(There's at least one study on people with severed brain stems that is fascinating in this respect, but I can't remember where I read about it, and don't have time to track it down)

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#268

Post by vidarh »

skybrian wrote: post #134
RobertKerans wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't do the actual hiring, but sit in in one of the two interviews, and as a team we carefully discuss each candidate. We've got a good team, the work environment & people are great, hiring process is solid enough. And we all agree that, almost without exception, we can tell within about thirty seconds of meeting them whether someone is likely to be hired. I assume this is overwhelmingly common? Bar sending a poli…

Isn't that kind of suspicious? What are you really detecting in 30 seconds? I would suspect unconscious bias.

Yes, it will be biases.

But he's also right. There's been studies on this. Avoiding initial impression from dominating hiring decisions is incredibly hard and requires a ton of process that pretty much "nobody" does. Few places do much to handle even much more apparent biases.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#269

Post by yaddayadda »

waylandsmithers wrote: post #264
yaddayadda wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many orchestras have found a fairly simple solution to the problem - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22blind+auditions%22+hiring+music... I'd hope to have a similar 'audition' approach that included not only basic programming skills but also –and as a junior level programmer, more importantly – learning skills. For example, commenting or debugging internal framework code (something that all interviewees are experiencing f…

That would be pretty cool-- and although software development is meritocratic, it's not as meritocratic as those orchestras, right?. They simply want the best musicians PERIOD, whereas lots of software companies would probably hesitate to hire someone with a lot of talent but a toxic attitude.

Unfortunately I'm in bind with first impressions. By nature, I'm a massive introvert, which has always caused me problems. But I'm also coming from a toxic workplace environment (our boss regularly berates employees in front of other employees, to include profanity and yelling loud enough to be clearly understood through multiple walls, and he's been know to literally rip doors off their hinges, just because he's mad at the world). In the handful of interviews I've been on, I've tried to focus on the positives of potential new jobs, instead of the negatives of my current job, but I always seem to slip up and mention something about the toxic nature of my current position. The combination of these two factors means I have a really hard time "making a good first impression".

I recently completed a programming bootcamp and when I explained this to several of my classmates they made a point of highlighting what a great programmer I am (relatively to our peers) and that I'm a really great person to work with "once people get to know me". But, there's the crux of the matter for me - in an interview situation, if I'm ruled out in the first 30 seconds then nobody "gets to know me" or my programming potential. To add to the irony, about 2/3rds of my current co-workers know that I'm looking for a job and they regularly make comments to me about how much they don't want me to go, followed by comments about understanding my need to work in a less toxic environment.

Re: How my life was changed when I began caring about the people I did not hire

#270

Post by davidgerard »

yarou wrote: post #206
courtf wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree with this. No amount of formality and forced stoicism is going to eliminate the myriad biases that creep into every minute action and decision we all make every day. Hiring is a notorious minefield where believing in your own impartiality merely demonstrates a lack of self-awareness, or worse.

I cannot upvote your comment ( and the parent ) enough. If the labor market in tech was a perfectly competitive market where all parties had perfect information, hiring would be a lot more straightforward. However, as you state, cognitive biases and lack of rationality on both the supply and demand side muddy the waters.

And the fundamental game theory of the interview processes: all the incentives for both players are to lie, lie, lie.
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