Quit Social Media, Your Career May Depend on It (2016)

Does NYT just let anybody write for them nowadays? This article came off as very... amateurish.

Facebook, Reddit, HN.

I think I failed to communicate.

Let's try a different version and call it the "no assholes rule".

If I hired someone who was a top 1% engineer but was a complete asshole to work with, that's someone who would fail the asshole test. It's extremely unlikely I'd have hired that person, we built a team of people who were both good at what they did and friendly with each other.

The grocery store test I apparently completely screwed up in getting across what I meant. Someone who failed the asshole test would fail the grocery store test. What the grocery store test is trying to get across is how you would react when you saw a co-worker outside of work. Do you like them enough that you'd go say hi, maybe chat a little before moving on with your shopping? Or do you dislike them enough that you'd try and avoid them?

If applied in the right way, it makes you think about the person in a broader sense than just their coding skills. If you like how they code and you would like to chat with them outside of work, that's a pretty strong indicator, in my experience, that you'll bond as a team.

I'm not sure how I failed so badly at explaining that, whatever. The point is that building a team is not just about individual skills, it's also about how the team gets along. A soccer player recently was trying to make the same point when he said "you can buy any player you want, you can't buy a team".

tl;dr: building a team is not just about skill, it's also about chemistry.

Resume screen first. Phone screen next. In person screen next though I may well have done the google search before the in person thing if I'm paying to fly them out.

And it's worth stating that for me, social media is any sort of web foot print I can find with google (or these days duckduckgo).

We did the same thing with prospective customers. You google them and see if you find a bunch of people complaining about them. Yes? Work less hard on that sale. No, everyone loves them? Work more hard on that sale.

Man, so much of what seems defensive pushback, I don't get it.

Here's the deal. I ran a small company for almost 2 decades in the valley. Everyone worked with everyone else very closely. One bad apple can screw up the whole company, make everyone miserable. So I used every chunk of info I could get to make sure that a potential hire was gonna be a fit. That's just being prudent.

If you are posting on mailing lists about how you screwed your boss out of a pile of work by outsourcing it to some dude in India, yeah, not a great fit. If you are posting on facebook how you partied all week on your companies' dime while they thought you were working, yeah, not so much. Etc.

If you are in to Harley-Davidson motorcycles (which I hate), well, not gonna hold that against you, though I'll let you ride my r1200gs (every Harley guy who has taken me up on that walks away looking at that GS like that's the bike he should have gotten).

I'm somewhat surprised that people question a hiring manager looking around. If you were building a team that had to work together are you seriously telling me you wouldn't look? I'd like to hear that from anyone who has successfully built multiple teams and then have them explain why they wouldn't look.