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Noticing You're Confused

arr.am

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Re: Noticing You're Confused

#31

Post by jaspax »

sdan wrote: post #25
juanbyrge wrote: post #15

What if you missed out on hiring the Steve Jobs of the catering industry? Jobs had no real engineering experience to bring to the table. He had a small amount of education from Reed College, but it was in a completely unrelated major, and he had dropped out early. But he had a way with words, seemed to have a passion for technology, and probably lied about having worked at Hewlett-Packard. "I figured, this guy's gott…

There's a difference between lying about one position and making entire linkedin profiles that you set up. One's mischievous and one's deception.

No, they're both deception, and they're both strong negative signals.

Think of it this way. Out of the 1000 people who will outright lie about having worked some place, 999 of them are sociopaths or grifters who will do serious harm to your company if you hire them. The last one is Steve Jobs. We only hear about the last one, usually, but if you're hiring someone and you know that they've lied about their experience, don't take that chance.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#32

Post by jiofih »

nordsieck wrote: post #8
sumanthvepa wrote: post #2

Clearly there was fraud here. But I'm curious about the the interview process. If the person was a fraud, how did he get through the technical and management interviews? Surely talking to someone for 5 mins would help you figure out if they were technically competent. So apparently the interview process had zero decision value. Why bother interviewing candidates then? They should just check references and get on with…

> If the person was a fraud, how did he get through the technical and management interviews? Surely talking to someone for 5 mins would help you figure out if they were technically competent. So apparently the interview process had zero decision value. Why bother interviewing candidates then? They should just check references and get on with it. Or fix your interview process. There are many things people evaluate dur…

How does it not appear to be broken, when they approved the guy as a Director even though he had nearly zero experience as a manager?

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#34

Post by speedplane »

sdan wrote: post #25
juanbyrge wrote: post #15

What if you missed out on hiring the Steve Jobs of the catering industry? Jobs had no real engineering experience to bring to the table. He had a small amount of education from Reed College, but it was in a completely unrelated major, and he had dropped out early. But he had a way with words, seemed to have a passion for technology, and probably lied about having worked at Hewlett-Packard. "I figured, this guy's gott…

There's a difference between lying about one position and making entire linkedin profiles that you set up. One's mischievous and one's deception.

> There's a difference between lying about one position and making entire linkedin profiles that you set up. One's mischievous and one's deception.

As a human, you can only bring a few things to the table: inherited wealth, demand for your talents, and credibility. The first is a gamble, the second is impossible to control given the market, your credibility is the only thing you can really guide.

Be honest, be trustworthy. It takes forever to build, but in the end, it's how people make judgment calls about everything else.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#35

Post by gield »

arram wrote: post #27
kstenerud wrote: post #13

Hang on... I'm confused here: > Not only had he lied about his experience, he’d set up fake identities complete with LinkedIn profiles with hundreds of connections, then gotten people who were complicit in his lie to pretend to be those people on the phone. > I sat down and tried to trace the source of my confusion. Sam didn’t have a LinkedIn profile, and when I asked him why he said he turned it off because he got t…

Author here. Your guess is as good as mine, but probably for the reasons other people have mentioned here. It would be making the lie in public, attached to his own name. The fake profiles aren't attached to anyone real.

What is up with you taking one of the most reproduced images in history [1], but not even linking or showing it?

[1] https://arr.am

>I took a photo that may now be one of the most reproduced images in history.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#36

Post by pure-awesome »

drewcoo wrote: post #7

So "the rationalist community" relies on gut feelings? Now I'm confused and it's only the first non-italic paragraph.

Yes. Taking into account gut feelings has been a part of the rationalist community's strategy for as long as I can recall.

The rationalist community's "Rationality" is not about using cold calculation for everything. It's about not letting your human biases and motivated reasoning get in the way of finding the truth and being effective. (Whether or not the movement is successful is a bit of a debate, of course, but the core philosophy is sound).

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/z9hfbWhRrY2Pwwrgi/summary-of...

> System 1—the intuitive system—is the older of the two and allows us to make quick, automatic judgments using shortcuts (i.e. heuristics) that are usually good most of the time, all while requiring very little of your time and attention.

> System 2—the deliberative system—is the newer of the two and allows us to do things like abstract hypothetical thinking and make models that explain unexpected events. System 2 tends to do better when you have more resources and more time and worse when there are many factors to consider and you have limited time.

...

> The main thing to take away from this System 1 and 2 split is that both systems have strengths and weaknesses, and rationality is about finding the best path—using both systems at the right times—to epistemic and instrumental rationality.

> Being “too rational” usually means you are using your System 2 brain intentionally but poorly. For example, teenagers were criticized in an article for being “too rational” because they could reason themselves into things like drugs and speeding. But this isn’t a problem with being too rational; it’s a problem with being very bad at System 2 reasoning!

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#37

Post by jiofih »

downandout wrote: post #11
sumanthvepa wrote: post #2

Clearly there was fraud here. But I'm curious about the the interview process. If the person was a fraud, how did he get through the technical and management interviews? Surely talking to someone for 5 mins would help you figure out if they were technically competent. So apparently the interview process had zero decision value. Why bother interviewing candidates then? They should just check references and get on with…

Or maybe he had plenty of experience and technical expertise to competently answer all the interview questions, and even to perform the job in question extremely well. Perhaps he would have been a model hire. There are lots of reasons that people exaggerate their experience, and not all of them mean that the candidate is not well-suited for a given job. I’m not saying it’s a good idea to do what “Sam” did, but you ca…

“Inflated his resume” and “simple LinkedIn manipulation” are extremely mild ways of describing what he did. He lied about his entire work experience, role at previous job, and got someone else to pretend they were a VP and cover for them on the phone. This is fraud, not ‘inflating your CV’.

That is, if this story is even real.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#38

Post by blackflame »

jacquesm wrote: post #26
kstenerud wrote: post #13

Hang on... I'm confused here: > Not only had he lied about his experience, he’d set up fake identities complete with LinkedIn profiles with hundreds of connections, then gotten people who were complicit in his lie to pretend to be those people on the phone. > I sat down and tried to trace the source of my confusion. Sam didn’t have a LinkedIn profile, and when I asked him why he said he turned it off because he got t…

I don't have a Linkedin profile. What's suspicious about that? Or do you mean just in the context of cultivating that network? If so, how would you know given that there is no nexus to that network?

Some people get confused and think LinkedIn is where the best networks are grown. They are wrong. It's by picking up the phone.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#39

Post by hliyan »

nodesocket wrote: post #29

Something about this story doesn’t add up to me. Maybe I am being cynical but it seems like this was fabricated for the exposure.

I sensed this too. So I looked at the author's profile. Now I'm even more confused:

From https://arr.am:

Stuff That’s Happened to Me

I took a photo that may now be one of the most reproduced images in history.

I once came up with an idea with a friend that accidentally became a national TV ad featuring Nicki Minaj, Serena Williams, Usher, Kylie and Kendall Jenner.

I once crashed a fashion show, pretended to be a model, and walked on-stage as dozens of photographers snapped pictures of me.

I was paid in whiskey for a live harmonica performance at a jazz bar in Tokyo. I don’t play harmonica particularly well.

I DJ’d for Chamillionaire. I don’t know how to DJ.

I was yelled at for five minutes by the founder of Skye Vodka for taking his favorite table at a restaurant.

I’ve discovered and excavated dinosaur bones in the Montana badlands.

Re: Noticing You're Confused

#40

Post by Yessing »

if the best candidate you interviewed is a fraud:

- either the candidate was competent:

then why did he need to lie to get the job? maybe you're over-filtering based on resume and years of experience. The variable your looking for is competence. Years of experience, is just a proxy. if the proxy is drying up your supply, maybe it's not an effective one.

moreover, people are not born managers. why not give new talent a chance.

- the candidate was not competent:

The interview process is therefore broken and is not measuring competence. Maybe you're overvaluing confidence or the speed of answering. Maybe the questions are not Technical enough? I don't know. But notice that valuing anything that is irrelevant would lead to a lower expected value of candidate's competence.

Using ineffective tools while searching for something rare is unsurprisingly hard.

As a side comment, I'm kinda taken aback by the fact that interview results like "culture fit" are shared this way. I would've expected a higher standard of privacy. Is this commonly accepted?

Another point, I've noticed that the hiring process involved a lot of "friend / wife of a friend". Wouldn't this if left unchecked cause some ethnic/age-based bias ( not necessarily in a legal sense)?

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