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How to hire low experience, high potential people

worktopia.substack.com

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Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#31

Post by verticalscaler »

notpachet wrote: post #18
bheadmaster wrote: post #7

> “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…

It depends on the role you're hiring for. I suspect a lot of comments in this thread, echoing your sentiment, will be written from the perspective of sharp-end-of-the-stick engineers for whom the idea of working on ambiguous organizational problems is an abstract concept, far from their day to day. Not saying that's you per se, but this is HN after all. This crowd loves for things to be clear-cut, especially when the…

> You want to have a picture of their psychology, because the problems you're hiring them for are often psychological in nature.

This reminds me of a blind date I went on in Korea. We somehow ended up kidding around about how some women really take astrology way too seriously only for her to demand my blood type later on in the evening.

I never knew this, turns out in Korea your blood type is very important as it determines your personality traits.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#32

Post by zer00eyz »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #19
bheadmaster wrote: post #7

> “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…

> maybe their experience caring for a dying parent. Yeah, you would have to claw this out of me with a hammer. There's absolutely no way I would be comfortable sharing that level of intimacy with a stranger.

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.

There are other ways to ask these sorts of questions: did you ever have a job that you dont want to go back to but would not give up the experience of? (Do you know how shitty a job can be, were you an amazon driver or a pickle shoveler)

When they dont have that much experience you want to know that they can be mentored.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#33

Post by PaulHoule »

notpachet wrote: post #18
bheadmaster wrote: post #7

> “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…

It depends on the role you're hiring for. I suspect a lot of comments in this thread, echoing your sentiment, will be written from the perspective of sharp-end-of-the-stick engineers for whom the idea of working on ambiguous organizational problems is an abstract concept, far from their day to day. Not saying that's you per se, but this is HN after all. This crowd loves for things to be clear-cut, especially when the…

Sometimes I think some people in business have a pathological need for things to be poorly defined. They dread a visit to the ontologist even more than they do to the orthodontist. I think some people just don't feel like things are in control unless they have a large arbitrary structure that confounds everybody else and lets them do whatever they hell they want. (Meanwhile, Steven Covey would say you should be proactive, begin with the end in mind, "Seek first to understand, then to be understood", and "Sharpen the Saw" all things that seem to make bad businesspeople melt the way the wicked witch melted when splashed by water in The Wizard of Oz)

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#34

Post by em-bee »

finnthehuman wrote: post #27
notpachet wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the role you're hiring for. I suspect a lot of comments in this thread, echoing your sentiment, will be written from the perspective of sharp-end-of-the-stick engineers for whom the idea of working on ambiguous organizational problems is an abstract concept, far from their day to day. Not saying that's you per se, but this is HN after all. This crowd loves for things to be clear-cut, especially when the…

I don’t think “oh haha aren’t engineers robotic personalities” applies here. Fucking nobody I know gives too much of their real personality at work, let alone when interviewing. But “haha aren’t all engineers only friends with other nerds and barely live in the real word” so what do I know?

nobody I know gives too much of their real personality at work

i don't believe that. are you claiming that they are all faking it?

i would not want to work in a place where people fake their personality just to fit in.

my experience from working on FOSS projects suggests that the stereotypical behavior we see in some engineers is in fact real. not as exaggerated as people claim, but the signs are there.

more importantly however is that among engineers i feel there is less expectation to conform to some kind of normalized behavior or personality. at best, certain aspects of someones personality don't get an opportunity to show. say for example how someone cares for their family or animals, or volunteers in non-tech areas.

an alternative interpretation of your statement would be that people do not show all of their personality at work, but only those aspects that are relevant for the work. and that is just what is needed. showing someones full personality at work is not what is expected here.

a more negative side of this is that in some places certain aspects of a personality are being actively suppressed. say, calling out problems that hurt the company, or trying to be helpful to others (and possibly hurting your own performance because of it)

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#35

Post by thih9 »

> I really like questions with maximalist qualifiers like "tell me about your best X.” If it's not good, you know that their best isn't good enough.

Note that this approach, when not supplemented by other questions, favors outlier great results over consistent good results. E.g.:

Distribution A: 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 1, 100, 2, 1, 3; MAX(A) = 100

Distribution B: 72, 73, 78, 79, 44, 75, 78, 79, 78, 79; MAX(B) = 79

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#36

Post by giantg2 »

notpachet wrote: post #18
bheadmaster wrote: post #7

> “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…

It depends on the role you're hiring for. I suspect a lot of comments in this thread, echoing your sentiment, will be written from the perspective of sharp-end-of-the-stick engineers for whom the idea of working on ambiguous organizational problems is an abstract concept, far from their day to day. Not saying that's you per se, but this is HN after all. This crowd loves for things to be clear-cut, especially when the…

"But that's naive."

Or perhaps we realize that company "culture" or "fit" are often used to discriminate.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#37

Post by gwbas1c »

apwell23 wrote: post #26

Hiring low experience doesn't make any sense because most places the salary difference is not worth the risk. Its just not a good deal for an employer.

Sometimes you just don't have the cash to hire for experience.

IMO: It's important to hire all levels of experience. If you hire too many noobs, you get too many mistakes of inexperience. If you only hire experienced employees, you get too many people who are stuck in their ways.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#38

Post by stefanos82 »

noamchomsky1 wrote: post #6

> “Tell me about you. If your life was a book, give me the chapter titles from your birth till now.” Utterly ridiculous.

This reminds me of an interview I have had in the past that made me very uncomfortable.

They asked me the same question and I paused for a moment and replied "excuse me, but this question makes me feel uncomfortable; I'm here for an interview not for a date!".

They realized they overdid it and asked me actual questions.

Eventually decided I was the right candidate for them, but until they decided to reply back, I already had found job elsewhere.

Why do they ask such type of questions anyway?!

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#39

Post by verticalscaler »

> “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 actually have some great example recordings of just such interviews as described in the article if anybody wants some actionable pointers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwRg5PiovHQ

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#40

Post by duxup »

poorman wrote: post #5

> Most smart people are actually terrible at having the drive/follow through to take things to completion. They’ll usually want to give up at the first sign of failure or slowness. You can also hire that really "smart" person from a large co to a startup and watch them be extremely successful in a low-friction environment for crossing the finish line.

The idea of low friction and similar environments and someone being productive always trigger me a little. In the sense that I think MANY people get a lot of things done in a low friction environment... BECAUSE it is a low friction environment. And once you have a few people who have to deal with the results that come out of nowhere, that other person is the friction for everyone else.

I've worked a lot of places where there's that special someone who gets to cowboy everything because they're "really good" and of course they look really good, because the rules or structure don't apply to them and they can move faster than anyone else by design. It's a never ending cycle.

Meanwhile everyone else or people who come later have to deal with everything the special someone did / didn't think of and so on.

I don't disagree with the premise, but there's consequences and a sort of inescapable feedback loop sometimes too.

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