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

brookeallen.com

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

#311

Post by g33n »

JeremyMorgan wrote: post #7

The first time I got a front page link to my site on HN, it did this exact same thing, which prompted me to move away from Wordpress. Static HTML ever since. But to comment on the article, I think this is a fantastic idea. I do wonder though how he found so many enthusiastic people. Maybe it's just a new era, but I have a hard time finding people who even want to do a 1 hour coding challenge. He got these folks who w…

I actually applied to work with Brooke a couple years ago, and I probably still have the Craigslist post saved.

The original ad was posted with the title "If you enjoy mathematics, no prior work experience needed" and a really intriguing body that alluded to interesting work that they'd train you on. He asked if we had any questions for him, if we could get to his office (i.e. were in commuting range), what was interesting about us, and finally asked for a brief summary of our work/schooling. He specifically didn't ask for resumes, although a lot of people sent them to him (and then dressed for the open house in a suit, lol) because of how ingrained the standard motions of hiring are among candidates.

He followed up to every email with a personal response where he sounded like a human being, and then told candidates that there'd be an open house and then we could decide if we wanted to keep on in the process.

I imagine some people shied away because of the time commitment of learning what we could about a new, weird language over a week, and there were some things that didn't work very well because of how different his hiring process was from the norm, but it was enriching and fun in the end.

The big thing that might have worked in Brooke's favor was that this all took place in 2011, when the job market was even worse than it is now.

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

#312

Post by mcguire »

doorhammer wrote: post #273
tomp wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> did you even read the article you are commenting on? No, I was just commenting on the logic of the quote in the parent comment, which I find faulty. I'm not saying people aren't racist, or subconsciously racist; I'm just saying that you can't reduce any statistical effect down to racist, while other explanations are just as possible. > And what the hell does someone coming from a poor neighborhood have anything to…

> No I'd really encourage you to read it an other articles on implicit bias; they're really important issues that have disastrous impacts. > I'm pretty sure that if you run statistics, you would find out that people from poor neighborhoods are more likely to be criminals, violent, less educated, less intelligent. The problem I have with this is that it's a hunch that sounds reasonable, but there's no data to support…

> > I'm pretty sure that if you run statistics, you would find out that people from poor neighborhoods are more likely to be criminals, violent, less educated, less intelligent.

> The problem I have with this is that it's a hunch that sounds reasonable, but there's no data to support the claim.

I would bet that there is data to suggest that "people from poor neighborhoods are more likely to be criminals, violent, less educated, less intelligent", and even data to suggest the other inferences tomp brought up.

However, the vast majority of people are not "criminals", at least in the habitual sense, and the vast majority of people from the 'hood are also not "criminals".

"When the incidence, the proportion of those who [are criminals], is lower than the [proportion of people from the 'hood who are not criminals], even tests that have a very low chance of giving a false positive in an individual case will give more false than true positives overall."

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

#313

Post by freework »

The best example I've seen for putting together a team comes from my high school football team. Instead of tryouts, they let anyone play who wants to play. The best players excel from day one, but the crappy players quit after a few days. The coach never says to a player "we've decided you aren't good enough, so you're off the team". It was each players decision that they came to themselves to leave the team.

The guy in the article pretty takes the same approach. I've always felt the best way to interview engineers is to go over installing the company's development environment on their machine. In other words, there is no evaluation, just expectation of results.

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

#314

Post by mcguire »

RobertKerans wrote: post #98
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…

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…

I've sat in more than my share of interviews and my experience is almost directly opposed.

It certainly takes longer than thirty seconds (or a few minutes) to determine that someone who looks good on the surface, who is clean and neat and who sounds like someone who would fit in the team fine, should be avoided like the plague because they can't actually do the job.

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

#315

Post by vonnik »

FutureAdvisor's in-house recruiter here.

I recently ran a hiring event in San Francisco with Brooke called Staffup Weekend. Brooke is one of the smartest, hardest-working and most generous people I know. I read the post linked to above last fall, and worked with him to bring jobseekers together to work on meaningful projects. The event was called Staffup Weekend, and it was held in the Chron building on Mission and 5th.

Our hypothesis was: The only thing that correlates with performance is performance. Everything else -- degrees, pedigrees, buzzwords, interview skills -- are a waste of time. About 20 people worked through the weekend to create various apps. They made wonderful things: one was a Chrome extension that gives you the emails of the founders of the company web pages you visit. Another was a LinkedIn 2.0 for people who wanted to feature their work and themselves. We made 8 interview offers and one hire from the weekend, and I think everyone involved came away feeling like it was worth it. Write me if you're curious to learn more: chris.nicholson@futureadvisor.com

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

#316

Post by will_lam »

humanrebar wrote: post #41
sekasi wrote: post #28

I've done a LOT of interviewing, recruiting and ultimately a lot of saying "no" to people. Over the years I've landed on a series of personal rules on how to do just that. 1. Always explain rationale around the No, to help them improve 2. Always let people down gently reinforcing positive notions as well, you never know what state of mind they are in. 3. Always respond to requests for more information This takes me a…

> Always explain rationale around the No, to help them improve This is my inclination: "We liked your attitude, you seem intelligent, and well-spoken, but we have concerns about your knowledge of , maybe start contributing to or experiment in and reapply in a year or two." ...my concern is opening up my company for legal liabilities. Am I just being paranoid?

Even if it's not an official response, there are ways to be able to get backchannel information.. only if you're able to leverage relationships you've already built for people working at the company you interviewed with.

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

#317

Post by yaddayadda »

JohnBooty wrote: post #305
yaddayadda wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I also realize that no two people or situations are alike, and that I have no idea what you're going through! But from a fellow introvert who has had success with interviews: an interview is a good example of a social situation that's fairly "hackable." By hackable I mean an interview is something where, at least compared to an open-ended conversation with a stranger, there are certain... branching paths of conversat…

Thank you for the advice and good luck!

In all of the interviews I've been to recently, the interviewers continue to press me if I focus on their company and don't say something about why I want to leave my current employer.

After a particularly bad interview, I did start practicing for these types of questions and I'm getting better, but that's still relative. Part of the problem is that I've been in the toxic workplace so long and I'm so desperate to get out of it, that thoughts of escaping push to the front of my brain while I'm in interviews and I either blurt out something I shouldn't [1] or I just freeze up (think deer in headlights), typically a combination of the two which is even worse.

[1] I don't blurt out anything quite as bad as "my current boss is an ass", rather things like "My boss doesn't believe in bug trackers and I think they're extremely important." So far so good, right? But then there's a pregnant pause and I catch myself blurting out, "At least a client threatened to take away our business if we didn't start keeping bug records, so now we have 3-ring binders and paper forms to record our bugs. But that doesn't do any good when the same bug is reported multiple times in every binder and the boss doesn't actually look at the bug reports or give anyone else access to the code." At which point the looks on the interviewers face tell me I've blown it again. (Very true scenarios about our bug reporting and my idiotic blurting out in an interview.)

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

#318

Post by kyllo »

deong wrote: post #262
kyllo wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Absolutely true, and that's why it's important to make a conscious effort to fight these types of unconscious biases.

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

#319

Post by doorhammer »

mcguire wrote: post #312
doorhammer wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No I'd really encourage you to read it an other articles on implicit bias; they're really important issues that have disastrous impacts. > I'm pretty sure that if you run statistics, you would find out that people from poor neighborhoods are more likely to be criminals, violent, less educated, less intelligent. The problem I have with this is that it's a hunch that sounds reasonable, but there's no data to support…

> > I'm pretty sure that if you run statistics, you would find out that people from poor neighborhoods are more likely to be criminals, violent, less educated, less intelligent. > The problem I have with this is that it's a hunch that sounds reasonable, but there's no data to support the claim. I would bet that there is data to suggest that "people from poor neighborhoods are more likely to be criminals, violent, les…

I should have said "there's no data you're presenting to support this claim."

The problem I have is with phrases like "I would bet there is" or "I assume those blacks [with white sounding names] are more likely to come from families that are wealthier and better educated."

It seems like an obvious correlation to make, but they're not based on data. I think it's in our best interest, intellectually, to take a few minutes and look for some information. The internet means it can take fifteen or twenty minutes to find a decent chunk of data to start working with. It won't make you an expert (and I'm by no means one either), but it can help highlight a lot of the nuance that exists in issues like this.

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

#320

Post by doorhammer »

UrMomReadsHN wrote: post #304
doorhammer wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No I'd really encourage you to read it an other articles on implicit bias; they're really important issues that have disastrous impacts. > I'm pretty sure that if you run statistics, you would find out that people from poor neighborhoods are more likely to be criminals, violent, less educated, less intelligent. The problem I have with this is that it's a hunch that sounds reasonable, but there's no data to support…

>I think the problem a lot of people have is that it feels a lot like we're saying everyone is racist, which feels a lot like an attack And the article I linked to says that. Individuals don't MEAN to be racist (or sexist, etc.) but are, because culture gives us biases. Addressing unintended racism is hard, because it isn't visible. We aren't attacking individuals.

Yeah. Implicit bias is tough. For anyone interested, there's a quick rundown here:

http://med.stanford.edu/diversity/FAQ_REDE.html

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