> We don’t educate people in how to process their feelings in a healthy manner and to differentiate what they feel is happening and how they should behave. This results in anything like saying someone has “bad vibes” to be a reason to exclude them, to actively covering for someone with a known pattern of harming people simply because they are charming
In recent years the workplaces I’ve been involved with have actually had significant efforts to educate people to make overcome bias and override their feelings in decision making, but to be honest the outcomes haven’t been great.
When you forbid people from trusting their judgment and demand they use a shared, objective criteria instead, the grifters take notice. They become better at emulating the objective criteria than anyone else, because gaming that system is their goal and you just laid out a perfect roadmap for them to do it.
Of the few very bad hires I’ve had to work with in the past decade, all of them came with “bad vibes” during the interview process. They all had the right credentials and knew how to say the right things, though. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had taken classes or paid for coaching for how to act during interviews because what we got once they were hired didn’t match anything on their resume or that they claimed during interviews.
There is no spot on the committee-approved hiring rubric to indicate that the candidate was rude in their communication and left everyone feeling drained and in a bad mood after every interaction, though. But hey, they aced those LeetCode problems and they have FAANG on their resume, so we must focus on that.
I clearly remember people being scolded for raising concerns about the person that didn’t fit into the rigid hiring criteria that were supposed to eliminate our biases.
In most cases in my adult life where I’ve been instructed to ignore my gut feeling and substitute some alternate metric as my decision making guidance, I’ve regretted it later.