It's easy enough to find high-potential people. The problem is how long they'll stay. If they stay for a couple of years, great, I'll take it. But anything less than that, and you're probably not recuperating the cost of hiring and training them. And the training cost can be extremely high if it involves the time of more experienced employees.
How to hire low experience, high potential people
281–290 of 433 posts
Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people
#282> Disagree and commit: I hate that this is such a common thought process. This is something that makes sense for soldiers in the military. But outside of this context (being a low-information cog in a gigantic machine), it's terrible. If you can't convince domain experts that the plan is sound, then maybe it's a bad plan. Honestly, disagree and commit goes against my... > Theory for excellence.
You're not providing an alternative, though.
You have a team of smart people. They come up with 3 interesting proposals. You have the bandwidth to execute on only one of them. At some point, a decision has to be made (by you, by vote, whatever).
Two guys on your team are going to hate that decision.
Are you going to be OK with those two not contributing to the end goal (i.e. the "commit" part)? Are you going to be OK with them bringing it up in each team meeting and 1:1 over the next year?
Are you going to be OK with them not voicing their opinions (i.e. the "disagree" part)?
What's your alternative?
As pointed out in a submission a few days ago, the worst experiences tend to be teams that always blindly do what the boss tells them, and at the other end of the spectrum, teams that question every little detail - all the time. Disagree and commit addresses the latter. I've been in that team - it sucks. Never again.
Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people
#283> “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…
I've noticed a trend where the lower the position, the more invasive the questions become. I think it's a power dynamic - they can ask the questions because they know the applicants are more desperate. For example, before I was an engineer, I was scraping by on odd jobs after the 2008 crash. Around that time I applied for a job at Red Robin (basically a fast food restaurant for those who don't know). One of the quest…
I hope that stuff has stopped somewhat but it was definitely all the rage during the mid-late 2000s. I applied for Best Buy GeekSquad when I was starting my career and “failed” their stupid hour long online psych eval that was probably (or should be) illegal. Considering my intelligence and the trajectory of my career they would have been lucky to have me, but I am glad I didn’t get the job, so I would say these are red flags you don’t want to work there anyway.
Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people
#284Having worked predominantly in startups, we've almost always been cash-constrained in hiring. Some of the best hires I've found are highly motivated fresh grads or recent grads. I always look for the desire to prove themselves and take charge and full responsibility of a project; a majority of the times, money is secondary to these folks to the ability to make a difference and prove you're capable of completing somet…
"I find many times, the quality of the average person at a big company is lower than the average startup fresh grad." I wouldn't blame it on the people but on the environment. I have worked at both big companies and startups. In a lot of big companies it's actually quite hard to make a difference. There are lots of people who can say "No", raise concerns, ask for plans, but not many people who say "Yes". So after a w…
I would like to second that.
Big corp introduces a constant uphill battle and people get minted to avoid conflict (Why do you want to spend money on a subject that is not on your bosses boss roadmap? Does this new service obey our IT-compliance-rules? I know a virus scanner on Linux is a bad idea, but compliance demands it. I do not care about your threat model, have you installed one already? Can you spend 30,000 Currency Units, but have it billed in November, accepted in December, and paid out in January next year? Answer me until end-of-business!).
People want to have an impact on their environment and conflict is the wrong way to start with.
Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
She's clearly isn't hiring developers.
Replace the subject matter with that of your own job, or pretend you are living inside the article and respond directly to the author if that feels right to you. Whatever gets you to seeing my point.
I didn't say that in a contrarian way, merely observed that literally none of the advice in the article applies to hiring computer nerds. Honestly I don't even know why this is on HN.
Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people
#286If someone asked me some of these questions in an interview I would laugh it off to try to help them save face, if they persisted in seriousness I would walk out. My interviewer is neither my better nor my therapist and has no business asking about my personal life or non-work past. That’s bananas.
Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author appears young. I would give them the benefit of the doubt. It has been my experience that people who have lived a fortunate, trauma free life cannot really understand the trauma experienced by others. They might appear to understand, say all the right words, and so on. Then a few days later or weeks later be confused or upset because of how you react to something. A good friend once said to me, "Wow, that…
That may be true, but it doesn't mean that I have to submit to an interview with people like this who are lacking empathy. It also wouldn't be great if these kinds of interviews proliferate. Empathy comes from being able to put yourself in other people's shoes. Reading fiction has been shown to increase empathy. If so then these guys need to do more reading.
Yes - I agree - intrusive interviews are a terrible idea. My comment is an observation about how some people might arrive at such ideas.
Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
I completely agree that toxic people destroy teams. I just have no idea how to detect that in an interview. It definitely makes sense to immediately filter out anyone who sets off "this person may be an asshole" vibes, but beyond that, what can you do? Some sort of "probationary let's see if we get along" period would probably be pretty effective, but that's unfair to new hires.
Probationary periods are pretty much standard in the Netherlands. First month you can leave or get fired for any reason, without delay.
Yes, but that's because in the Netherlands, after that period, you cannot fire an employee without cause, and firing for cause requires a sub-district court proceeding.
In the US, if someone only reveals that they're a tremendous asshole to months into the role, you just fire them two months into the role.
Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people
#289We built Fly.io resume-blind and without interviews, hiring people at every level of experience without having to make decisions based on that experience. We did it by throwing away all this stuff, ditching interviews, and replacing them with work-sample tests. Some of the best people on our team, the best I've worked with in my whole career, are working here in their first job in our field. I'm a little grumpy about…
Plus you get a bunch of free work out of every applicant if you delegate real issues out as work-sample tests :P I'm pretty sure the new Audi A8 cup holders are from my mechanical design engineer third round volkswagen interview a couple years ago
You do not in fact get free work.
Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That isnt everyone. > Some folks had a lot of adversity in their lives and are OK with talking about how they delt with it. Some people pay others to listen to this and call it therapy. Sure. But is "willing to talk about dealing with trauma" really a valid filter to sort potential employees by?
Ability to function during emotionally-difficult circumstances can be a job requirement. (Likely not software engineering, hence the scorn on this forum!) It's unlikely the interviewers are curious about the interviewee's story, but if a question about a traumatic experience makes someone freeze up then they may not be able to perform certain roles.
Off the top of my head, working in an emergency department of any major hospital is guaranteed to be filled with emotionally-difficult circumstances. Yet we don't ask doctors, nurses and technicians personally invasive questions to determine their ability to do their job.
For someone starting a job in an emergency department, having prior personal experiences with life or death situations is a very poor indicator of ability to handle that type of pressure in professional life. So why is that relevant to office jobs?