- Are they smart? (understands quickly + communicates effectively)

- Are they cool? (won't put poison in the keurig + pleasant to be around)

- Are they high energy? (initiative + action bias)

- Do they have the experience needed to be successful in the role?

Those are pretty strong priors for success. If you find someone with all the above, you've got an ~80% chance of a hit. No need to over-complicate.

In my experience, adding more boxes tends to index towards box-checkers who grew up wealthy. That's how you miss the hyper-smart/diligent state school kids who happened to spend their summers working instead of doing model UN.

- Y-axis is "drive"

- X-axis is "aptitude"

- low drive + low aptitude: never hire

- low drive + high aptitude: hire for targeted use cases where you need expertise

- high drive + low aptitude: hire, train, and foster aptitude growth

- high drive + high aptitude: hire on the spot

There's an indirect way of testing for this which is to test for curiosity and lack of ego. My experience has been that candidates with high curiosity tend to have low ego (they know what they don't know and are curious to learn). These candidates make great hires because you can teach them anything.

Wrote about this a little bit here (with a handy diagram): https://charliedigital.com/2020/01/15/effective-hiring-for-s...

In a startup, lots of mistakes will be made. A team with the right vibe knows and acknowledges this, but focuses on fixing the problems rather than finger pointing.

In that sense, "vibe" is not inherent to the individual, but I like to think of it as "we're on the same wavelength" when it comes to key things. So it really means "does this person fit with this team and this mission?" -- "vibes" sums that up for me.

Unethical is one thing, neuroticism should not be a disqualifier from decent employment.

I assume you’re young: there are many reasons people might be perfectly good at a job but not want to socialize with those people, or any other people.

This whole thread makes me sad as an unemployed autistic person. HN folks are horrible hiring managers!

Edit: and now downvoted for showing you losers that your personal model of the world and the people in it might be lacking; fuck vc tech bros.

Not wanting to get Friday beers with the team shouldn't really be a factor.

Not being able to communicate smoothly and effectively with them in a work context absolutely is.

I suspect the poster you are responding to is focusing on the latter, and you on the former.

i think you're not helping your case by this comment itself being antisocial.

my use of "asocial" was specifically the very common connotation attached to it of being hostile or inconsiderate which are the exact words used when you google its definition

Edit: General von Hammerstein

I divide my officers into four classes as follows: the clever, the industrious, the lazy, and the stupid. Those who are clever and industrious I appoint to the General Staff. Use can under certain circumstances be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy qualifies for the highest leadership posts. He has the requisite and the mental clarity for difficult decisions. But whoever is stupid and industrious must be got rid of, for he is too dangerous.

- low drive + low aptitude: never hire

Hammerstein thinks some use can be made of these folks

- low drive + high aptitude: hire for targeted use cases where you need expertise

Hammerstein has this group as high leadership positions

- high drive + low aptitude: hire, train, and foster aptitude growth

These are the ones who Hammerstein avoids

- high drive + high aptitude: hire on the spot

These go to the "General Staff"

But you probably shouldn't give them passwords to the production servers.

My experience has been that aptitude can be developed. In the context of "low experience" (generally junior engineers), the ones that succeed are the ones that put the work in to learn and get better.

But I can appreciate Hammerstein's perspective, especially if there isn't an added nuance of Carol Dweck's "fixed" vs "growth" mindset. A high drive, low aptitude individual -- seen through a fixed mindset lens -- is indeed dangerous!

In a military context it's plausible "don't hire" isn't an option.

The stupid and lazy can be put to work and will probably get something harmless done, they just can’t be trusted with anything challenging.

The stupid and industrious are an active danger wherever you put them in the hierarchy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karnaugh_map

This needs to be subdivided. There are plenty of people who've had a lot of opportunity for aptitude growth, but they didn't grow. And having high energy in those circumstances really messes up a lot of stuff (they're incompetent, but jump into and be involved in everything, and you have to politely tell them to get off your project).

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid...

Implication is that if you're high-slope, you'll eventually become high-intercept.

If you're a startup, you want to bias towards a mix of high slope, low intercept and positive slope, high intercept.

I think it's also worth pointing out that people can have negative slopes (due to social reasons, ego reasons), and that slope is not invariant over a person's career but often changes.

Ideally, you want to find people whose slope is positively-impacted by the environment of the company – a great hire is only a great hire if it's a great mutual-fit, in that way.

I think the industry really wants an objective, formulaic way of identifying these individuals, but the reality is that a lot of it does still come down to subjective factors since there's so much variability along so many different facets.

What I can say personally is that I've had pretty good success hiring, but I wouldn't claim that my "intuition" can be systematically applied by anyone to achieve the same success.

   If it were necessary to rely on a shaft that had grown perfectly straight, within a hundred generations there would be no arrow. If it were necessary to rely on wood that had grown perfectly round, within a thousand generations there would be no cart wheel. If a naturally straight shaft or naturally round wood cannot be found within a hundred generations, how is it that in all generations carriages are used and birds shot? Because tools are used to straighten and bend. But even if one did not rely on tools and still got a naturally straight shaft or a piece of naturally round wood, a skillful craftsman would not value this. Why? Because it is not just one person that needs to ride and not just one arrow that needs to be shot.

Better that you can identify candidates with potential and have a system of knowledge transfer and training to make them productive.

[0] https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/11/14/han-fei-tzu-d-233-bce-lega...

Someone I learned much from way back called this "wattage". As in: "he's too low wattage".

You meet minimum requirements on both, and if you do your contribution better exceed your high maintainance demands.

But one way to try is to wholly hand off greenfield projects within your company. The whole idea of a "startup within a company" is fundamentally flawed, but you can attempt it anyway.

These two don't really match up, they are just driven for different things I suspect.

If you ask relevant but technically hard and esoteric questions _without the expectation of an answer_ you can sometimes see it in the manner of the response. Do they probe the question? Do they explore the idea, even if they don't know the answer? Do they readily admit that they don't know?? Or do they become defensive? Do they fake their way through it? If they make a mistake and you point it out, how do they respond?

uh? tell me more

Some candidates can't make it through an interview without being condescending to someone, making snide remarks, being arrogant, trying to start arguments about trivial things, or other negative behaviors. If they're doing this during the interview, you're only seeing the tip of the iceberg. It's going to be 100X worse when you have to deal with that person 5 days a week.

Other candidates behave well during interviews but have a history of causing social problems at other companies. It takes some work to uncover these (and, importantly, validate their veracity). Some of the most toxic people I ever worked with were very charming in interviews. They swung from company to company, leaving a trail of unhappy coworkers behind them. They could only get hired into new companies where nobody knew any of their past coworkers, because a simple reference check would reveal how difficult they were to work with.

Filtering this behavior out before someone joins the team is very important. Hiring a single socially toxic or subversive person into a team is like dropping a bomb on a healthy team dynamic. You may lose multiple good employees before you figure out what's going on and put together a case for firing the bad apple.

Asshole means different things to different people but if someone is power flexing, condescending, aggressive, uses process as a weapon, bullying etc. this is what I mean rather than say straight shooting and direct talk.

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.

Would love to hear any strategies others have found successful.

this may well be a feature of (social) economics and hence a necessary evil

You can’t single-handedly solve the systemic problem of unequal access to opportunity.

You're choosing companion for 8h a day. Nothing wrong with checking culture fit (because that's basically what it is).

Are they someone that's going to disrupt your team's focus on product and execution. No? Cool.

Of course a bit of a chicken and egg with hiring the diverse team.

People's intuitions around hiring are extremely Bayesian, which is why we have all sorts of laws and regulations and HR departments that try to counteract various prejudicial priors.

It is a super cool story to hear in what jobs somebody already has worked in and a good indicator. I worked as a dancing instructor assistant and learned so much about people. This job does not correlate with my current job as a Java/Kotlin/Android dev but was taken quite well by everyone the interviewed me 10 years back.

You just have very little time during a job interview and mistakes are costly.

> Are they smart? > Are they cool? ... Are the right questions that need to be answered, but not asked directly. The article talks especially about what to ask to get meaningful answers.

A prior would tell you how much each of those attributes would change your viewpoint.

Having very strong priors actually means your decision won’t change unless you have very strong evidence on the contrary.

Yeah, but that's the point. Those who come from wealth bring connections. Connections are what make or break a business. A mediocre worker with rich parents is far more beneficial to the business than a standout worker that came from the slums.

the vast majority of rich people are not well-connected enough to drive any business your way. if you have a tech startup do you really care that you hired the son or daughter of a car dealership magnate from the other side of the country?

in the USA it's possible and in fact more common to become a very wealthy without becoming hugely influential.

they may be well-connected in their particular geographic region or within a certain business sector, but this would be a specific advantage which usually wouldn't benefit your business.

this may be different in some other countries, where nearly everyone wealthy is part of the same national elite group.

but generally, in America, you'd be better off hiring the better employee.

The tech world is filled with wealthy people not wanting to believe that their wealth was a determining factor in their success. Having the social and financial stability to found a company and get money to hire people is the kind of thing that takes a degree of wealth and tends to attract people with wealth and repel people without.

I don't think people consciously choose to hire the rich kid, but the pool of people to choose from will be filled with rich kids.

> if you have a tech startup do you really care that you hired the son or daughter of a car dealership magnate from the other side of the country

If their child was able to go to an expensive prestigious school across the country and then an expensive graduate school instead of needing to work, have a larger network of friends and colleagues from those experiences, and can pay for them to have better healthcare and a nicer apartment in San Francisco because you're not able to pay enough then yes. It's more likely you're going to pick them and they'll say yes to you.

Of course! That's an incredible resource. Even if they don't specifically drive business your way, having the person's ear is something that can be leveraged to great effect. You don't exactly become a car dealership magnate without knowing a thing or two about business and they can teach your startup a lot. A magnate is more likely to chum with investors who might be interested in helping your business. The list goes on and on. Unfortunately, at least statistically, the poor parents will never be able to offer the same.

American individualism may be the American identity, but individualism doesn't get you far in business. America is not unique like you are trying to suggest.

This is an enormous stretch. I highly doubt the son of the owner of Henrysburg Chevrolet in Henrysburg, Georgia is going to bring anything to the table that a startup in San Francisco needs, purely due to his dad. You have no idea if dad knows anything about business. And if he does, you have no idea if dad taught any of it to kid. And if he did, you have no idea if any of it is relevant to developing biotech software. Nobody in the company is going to care about dad's connections to the dude that runs Henrysburg Laundromat. But sure, go hire his kid because of some vague pedigree reason.

And what is it that you think this hypothetical startup actually needs? The most motivated janitor money can buy?

> You have no idea if dad knows anything about business.

A magnate that knows nothing about business? That doesn't make any sense. A magnate is literally characterized by their involvement in business. Perhaps you mean that mom could be the magnate instead of dad? There was nothing to suggest that she isn't the magnate. It was never specified.

> And if he does, you have no idea if dad taught any of it to kid.

And? You're not hiring the kid for his business acumen. You are hiring the kid for their mediocre capabilities in whatever work you need done and using them as a connection to get in touch with the magnate of the family.

A slightly better worker isn't significant like you make it out to be. In fact, even if you do find the 'magical rockstar', chances are they'll quickly move on to the next job anyway, and then you're back to dealing with mediocre. May as well design the company around mediocre from the start. Let's be real: Startups are generally not attractive places to work as compared to the alternatives the best of the best have in front of them. If the 'rockstar' really, truly, wants to live the startup life, they are going to start their own and eat your lunch in the process.

> And if he did, you have no idea if any of it is relevant to developing biotech software.

But the advice of a welfare parent is? There are no guarantees in life, but when playing the odds that is who you are choosing?

> Nobody in the company is going to care about dad's connections to the dude that runs Henrysburg Laundromat.

Except for the person who actually has to make the business a success, not just collect a paycheck and get a new job if the business fails. They don't get to sit around writing code all day. They have to actually get out there and meet people who will move things forward.

I get it, Field of Dreams is a fun concept... for a movie. But that's not how things work in the real world. Simply building it is not enough. Business is, at the end of the day, about people.

I'm a little grumpy about this "diamonds in the rough" shit. I'm more concerned about what's lurking in the diamond mines. If people can demonstrate that they can do the work, I don't much need to know if "they have a chip on their shoulders". More generally: I have zero faith in anyone's ability to learn much from psychological interviews.

Nobody at any point literally spoke to this person?

We've had a ton of issues at my corp of people having other people handle their interview questions, code, or having AI listen to the conversation and answer questions by text as if we prompted it. Then they show up online after being hired and they have webcam problems or never go on cam, talk as little as possible, basically never communicate to anyone really, miss a lot of meetings, etc.

We've had probably 5 instances of this last year we're absolutely super strict about things now. Our assumption is that they want to get in, potentially get any bonuses if there are any, get a few huge (for their call center) paychecks until they get caught. Do no or almost no work. And it's a call center you can sometimes hear tons of convos going on in the background so they're just doing this en masse.

This is happening ALL over since covid. I think some of them may have even filed unjust termination sort of things to the workforce commission but I may be wrong. Huge companies are dealing with this at a really rough scale.

Most of our work sample stuff is design/architecture based. I'm not worried about how LLMs impact it.

This is the sole way we've hired engineers at Fly.io since 2020 and we have never once brought someone on who turned out to be 3 raccoons in a trenchcoat. Raising the bar further on ourselves: we hire globally, at SF scale salary worldwide.

The rubric heavily draws from what questions the candidate asks, and which topics they choose to zoom in and spend time on. It's interesting; I warn candidates that studying for it ahead of time (for instance: for a long time our workdays were all based on a block storage problem) puts you at a disadvantage, by robbing you of good questions to ask. It's not a big disadvantage, but interview-style preparation isn't doing much to help you either.

I'm always reluctant to talk too much about the workday process, in particular because the more I describe it the less chill it sounds. In reality, it's you joining a Slack channel with an engineer from our team and just shooting the shit about something we're (in the simulation) planning to build.

A lot of what that challenge is evaluating is communication. We're an all-remote company with team members in virtually ever time zone; being able to work out in the open in the environment we've created is important.

I think our workdays are a pretty quirky feature of our process. You could instead do a scripted interview, where everybody gets precisely the same questions or prompts. The big thing we do with the workday that I think everyone should clone is: deliver the interview over Slack, and don't allow the person delivering the interview to grade it; instead, have someone else grade from the transcript. It was like a light went off (on?) for us when we figured out to stop having workday participants offer performance feedback about candidates.

(One thing you immediately get from it is a process to iterate on the quality of your staff delivering the workday/interview; you can immediately see which team members click with candidates and which don't, and then nudge people in the right direction. It is wild to me that people do free-form interviews without this kind of iteration system in place.)

Side note - I started down two paths of significant new learning early last year: Security & Elixir / BEAM. I love Security Cryptography Whatever and had no idea you crossed over into the Elixir world (fly.io). Cool!

Now everyone assumes that a runtime means it will take 30 seconds and 8GB of RAM to show a loading screen.

Is there a website with a list of companies that don't participate in the leetcode/FAANG interview process? I feel like there is a need for one.

try searching the HN post history. (and report back if you find something :-)

That being said, it sounds like your interview technique works well for you.

Figured I’d give it a shot, they were very responsive, gave me the challenge and I spent more time than was suggested. They had a few core technologies I was not familiar with at all, but figured I could hack it…I could not.

Anyway, I really appreciated it. Walked away with nothing but positive feelings.

I have spent enough time applying/interviewing over the last decade that I am often in a dilemma when I get an offer that I don’t want bc the process is so fucky/I already have negative feelings. From HR setting expectations and then not meeting them, the laid-out interview process not lining up, remote/hybrid changing, inability to describe actual projects I would work on, not meeting people I would work under/with, made to feel like I lack intelligence by interviewers, etc.

I’m not a “rockstar” programmer and never have tons of offers, but I have turned down offers because of screwy interview processes/interviewers just to stay at the evil I know.

Later

I want to add: I fully believe LLMs can reliably knock out the code for most programming challenges, but a good coding work sample is as much about what you choose to code as it is about the code itself.

If you're asking people to invert binaries trees or whatever, that's not a work-sample test, it's a coding quiz. Work-sample tests mirror the actual work you're doing; that's what makes them predictive. Writing a function to do X, Y, or Z is usually the easy part about building software; the hard part is deciding which X, which Y, and which Z, and how they fit together.

We didn't deliberately set out to design work samples where the decisions we're grading are things LLMs don't just do for you; we do a lot of systems programming work and those kinds of decisions just dominate systems programming.

Do you really want a company full of fools and suckers?

Utterly ridiculous.

Oh God. A job interview isn't a therapy session. Why would people ever feel this type of questioning is appropriate for a job interview? How would someone who's dealt with intense trauma during some of those "chapters" respond? Especially given the power imbalance in a job interview, and the pressure you feel to give an answer.

I'd like to believe that I would be willing to politely decline to answer questions like this, thank the interviewer and tell them there just seems to be a mismatch, and walk out of the door. But I don't know if I'd be able to, due to the stress of a job interview.

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?!

They are incompetent at doing their jobs.

God damn that sounds exhausting. How about let's skip to the current chapter, titled I'm Good At Computers And I Want A Job.

Why? Because that’s what I was when I started and now I’m paying it forward.

It’s been a very successful model and continues to be.

When I've been at big companies, it's all about experience and grey hair, and people become more motivated by money and low risk. 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 while people learn that it's not worth the effort.

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.

I changed careers at age 40+, learned to code, now years later enjoying it. It just took someone who thought I could grow.

Interestingly I was hired along side some capable, albeit green, college grads. The difference in terms of understanding how a business works, speaking to customers, asking questions / follow through to get down to the problem we're solving was enormous. They could code circles around me, but they also just wanted to be told exactly what to code and had no interest beyond exactly that.

Can I throw you against a codebase and be productive quickly? Do you already have experience with this obscure library? I want to build now a website using React + Function Calling + Puppeteer, IDK what else to do to impress people.

Same happening with my gf, who is a graphic designer + UI/UX. She has some experience but only as freelancer, she's never been hired by anyone because it seems never enough.

I teached her HTML + CSS and she's been able to do this by herself (https://sofialenti.com/) so IDK what more a designer can learn. The only thing that's left IMO is to learn JS and be able to code some awesome stuff, but at that point she would be almost an unicorn.

It seems the market is just too saturated, despite the frequent news about we need millions of people who can do X! It seems like a way to get cheap and disposable labor.

seems a good bet to stay clear of industrialized work environments if one doesn't want to be cheap and disposable labor.

I don't think I'd be comfortable sharing this much personal information with a stranger on a job interview.

Additionally, it sounds more like a psychological evaluation, than evaluation of a person's potential at a job. I understand that maybe that's exactly the writer's intention, but I'd personally be wary of companies which ask questions like this.

"Let me tell you about the years of physical/emotional/sexual abuse I've suffered though." That's just not going to happen - and if it did happen the interviewer is probably not going to come away with "What a brave person to overcome all of that!" but "What a damaged person, I don't need them around".

Well done, you've weeded out people who've already suffered enough.

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.

Not things I'd be inclined to talk about when those things are ripe for opening myself up to discrimination.

If not a jerk, then grossly lacking in sensitivity, empathy and tact.

The reality, the beauty of human relationships is that they are between people with all these issues and dimensions, all the nuance and detail that make up human beings. In the wild, there's no laboratory people - no clean, perfect specimens in simple environments.

My rule is, I don't know what someone else has been through and is going through. Never, ever judge. If absolutely necessary (e.g., I need to decide to partner with them or not), make my best guess but don't judge.

imo, people often take what people say literally or default to a first-instinct interpretation, rather than trying to understand what the speaker is attempting to convey. I try to interpret what people say charitably (a few of my friends think much too charitably), but I really believe that the vast majority of people seldom intent any malice in their comments.

In the example, it might have been intended in an empathetic way - "Damn, sorry, I didn't realize you were still hurting. I would have extended a shoulder to you if I realized". Or a pragmatic way - "I think the situation isn't as bad as you think, want to talk about it?" It could have been bluntly honest (personally, I typically appreciate honesty over politeness) or a totally aloof statement made on reflex. It could also just have been someone being a jerk, but I suppose the point of my rambling is that there's a myriad of ways to interpret a comment, and it's largely based on both the speaker's experiences and how they communicate.

I find that the person I'm talking to, if I treat them as if they are a*holes, act as if that was their intent the whole time. If I treat them as if they in good faith, they act that way.

It's hard to resist the flow of conversation, to not go along with the way it's framed. I think that's why people act how you treat them; I think that's why people even confess falsely to crimes - the interrogator talks to the suspect as if they did it. Other sophsticated communicators also use that intentionally.

I once interviewed at a medium sized, name brand Silicon Valley darling everyone on HN has heard of, where an interviewer outright asked me if I was married and if I had kids! Like, holy shit, just read your interview training manual! The very first sentence is probably "Do not ask any questions where the answer would even imply information about things that would get us in trouble discrimination-wise." Yet this person overtly asked! Here I was in the stairwell walking down to the second floor and she hits me up with one of the few totally forbidden questions! I thought about saying "What would HR think of that question?" but the asker was the HR manager! Totally bonkers.

This case is strictly worse because the questions are explicitly being asked to evaluate eligibility for hiring.

An interesting strategy?

Are you a virgin?

https://youtu.be/fwYy8R87JMA

I could definitely see arguments for asking these sorts of questions in how they could be job related but not worth the legal risk

I haven't had (nor ever likely will) have the luxury of working somewhere where potential/smarts is too relevant past a relatively low threshold

Are you suggesting that this is bad? What do you hope to gain by seeking out obnoxious people with traumatic backstories and broken families with yuck problems? Misery loves company?

Obviously performance is also a critical factor but your comment gave me the impression that you don't see any value (or even harm) in targeting charming people without yucky problems. They do indeed sound like "perfect" colleagues to me!

Screening for people with life stories that you/anyone deems acceptable is extremely problematic, because realistically you will never have access to deeply personal information about 90% of your coworkers. As in, you should not be forcing Janet from accounting to disclose to you that she was abused by her stepfather, because if she is a well-adjusted adult it would have absolutely no bearing on your interactions with her at a workplace

We are talking about specifically work-related scenarios, that usually have pretty straightforward boundaries and surface-level interactions. "All else being equal, a person who enjoyed an idyllic childhood is typically going to be a more well-adjusted adult" - not necessarily in this specific context, people that didn't experience trauma are not immune to being awkward, immature, neurotic, anxious and various other things that makes working with them difficult.

That is not to say that people who have experienced childhood abuse can't have issues with basic human functioning. The point is, neither are necessarily are better or worse to work with just based on their trauma or lack of thereof.

It is irrelevant that people with normal childhoods are statistically more likely to be well-adjusted in most aspects of their lives, because we are only considering workplace interactions.

But as it relates to actual work? No.

Usually the answer to a single resume gap is something personal and none of my business as an interviewer, it's not my place to pry if you were raising children, caring for dying relatives or battling severe depression

It'd be a pretty easy win.

I apologize to the author in advance if this assumption is off base, but the biopic at the beginning reads like the kind of life no one from my neighborhood had.

What I will say to the author is: be a lot more careful with the power over people’s lives afforded by your current privileged status, whether you earned it or not.

I guess the question tests a person's ability to craft positive, attractive narratives about themselves. Maybe we're returning to a time when being outwardly happy is treated as a universal social obligation, like in the 1950s and 1960s. My parents' generation rebelled against the oppressive conformity of the post-WW2 era, and the tendency to value acceptance and emotional transparency continued through my generation (Gen X), but it could easily swing back the other way. Especially since all the stubborn problems in this country (resistance to awareness of racism, resistance to awareness of historic injustice, resistance to action on global warming, etc.) are seen as stemming from the unearned unhappiness of privileged people, I can see cheerfulness becoming obligatory, and lack of cheerfulness being openly stigmatized, instead of just passively and subconsciously discriminated against.

Edit: The rise of social media influencers as role models would obviously be a huge factor in this, and in the increasing pressure on people who struggle with something (whether it's a societal issue like racism or poverty, or a mental illness) to live up to the "positive representation" of the influencers who earn the power to define the public's expectations by presenting themselves in a charismatic, consumable way.

This, and the general level of mysticism throughout (really? "Spike potential" WTF), causes me to dismiss the whole article.

Personally, I'm really glad I didn't "get up and walk out of the interview" when they asked me to talk about my youth, it ended up being one of my favorite internships and helped position me towards a career in big tech :)

[1] https://www.shopify.com/partners/blog/interview-candidate

None of that sounds like the actual stories about childhood. It's totally appropriate to discuss past work experiences, aspirations and passions as a "Life Story".

Moreover the “Tell me a little about yourself” suggested interview opener is open-eded enough that the candidate can decide what they want to discuss and highlight. Majority of people do not answer that question with "my first memory was when father left when I was 3 years old..."

"If he hasn't struggled, then what does he really know about anything at all?"

Not to mention the minefield of discrimination avenues present here, conscious ones and otherwise. Hell, even a positive feel-good story about a happy life could lead to a negative reaction depending on who's hearing it, these sort of things are inherently perilous to talk about in professional settings.

I didn't read this as a bias against significant prior challenges, in childhood or after. I certainly had such challenges and I've always thought most people have. Since the author's stated goal is identifying high potential, early career candidates in the absence of prior success or obvious metrics, it seems essential to look for resilience.

To me, understanding how a person has contextualized and integrated prior challenges into who they are today is a key personality trait. So much of attitude is "the stories we tell ourselves to explain what happened to us." In my case, I've always felt my childhood had "some pretty rough patches" but in total "it wasn't too terrible." Yet, the few people I've shared the details with are usually aghast at how institutionally abusive it was. I don't deny the severity of it but it's pretty revealing about my personality that I don't now feel emotionally wounded by what happened. Perhaps it was just my coping mechanism but I've always felt "that's just shit that happened to me, it doesn't define me."

I want to hold it as far from my heart as corporately possible. I don't want to think about it after work, I don't want to work on it after work. I don't want it to know my secrets nor do I need to know its.

I want to be able to say peace bro and walk away whenever I want with no thought of a sad feeling. Which unfortunately does happen but it's always coworkers or cool tech.

The most famous example that I can think of is Henry Kissinger, who fled Nazi Germany with his family, at age 15, to escape persecution as a Jew. He claimed, to his dying day, that he was not heavily impacted by the experience. Maybe he wasn't. But I wonder if any of the genocides laid at his feet were in part caused by his refusal to accept any impact his teenage experiences might have had on him.

Demanding that people tell an interesting/engaging story about why they have C/PTSD, just to get a job, totally tracks for the late-stage-capitalism narrative though.

Plus “looking for grit” really means “looking for someone to work long hours (typically without good odds of realizing fair equity)”… super unethical to even attempt to be selecting for people with trauatic and toxic Pasts.

If they wanted to select candidates for learning quickly, being adaptive, whatever… just test for that.

This person is out of touch in such a bad way. Why would you put someone through such a cringeworthy exercise?

You're probably still going to get a lot of irrelevant dreamy passion bullshit with that question though when in reality 95% of candidates are just looking for exchanging skills for income and you as an employer need to accept that that's how the world works.

Would you choose to leave and walk out of an interview if you objected to something? how would you feel? Would you feel like you were walking away from an opportunity maybe? What if your situation was less than ideal?

I think you would find that many people don't feel the same independence or freedom that you and I seem to. Especially if they're not already comfortable financially.

Would you consider an accurate answer to that to be a traumadump? How quickly do you think people can make up happy childhood stories when put on the spot like this?

It is a completely inappropriate question in a job interview.

You can change the subject or answer very surface-level and be labeled "unengaged" or "socially inept"

You can answer truthfully and be judged for traumadumping

You can make up a fake origin story that fits the interviewer's criteria and be disingenuous

I've learned that the majority of people just don't want to hear anything negative or anything that makes them feel sad. If I want to have social, casual friends, I have to wall off parts of my life story.

Thankfully, I have a couple of close friends and family who know the reality and that is enough for me.

what's not replaceable is deep friendships with people that do care and are open to listen.

Between the need to have a job to survive, and the need to appease some self-important middle manager who took it upon them to perform a psych eval, with zero credentials, while controlling the future of the candidates, and their ability to put food on the table.

Kindly, make your self as visible as possible so that I know to avoid you.

How would you handle this?

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 questions was a huge list of various types of people - a priest, a school teacher, a police officer, etc. There were like 50 of them. I had to rank them by how "moral" I considered them to be. Aside from that, there were a bunch of other pseudo-psychological questions that tried to gauge my personality.

All for a job paying $8/hr at a fucking fast food restaurant.

You definitely dodged a bullet, btw! That job was my first lesson in corporate hell

That's kind of ignoring OP's point: people that are desperate for income will put up with abuse to get work. Of course they don't want to work there and the working conditions are often stink.

For roles that require discontinuous improvement to company process or culture, it's necessary to get a glimpse into how someone thinks, and the elements that went into building their worldview. You need to know how they will react under pressure to an extent that I think is largely irrelevant for a lot of engineering roles.

In other words, the difference between a psychological evaluation of an individual and that individual's potential to do this sort of work becomes very muddy and indistinct. You want to have a picture of their psychology, because the problems you're hiring them for are often psychological in nature.

This is not a popular opinion among engineering types; we like things arrayed in black and white, passing tests and failing tests. But that's naive.

I hate personal interview questions with passion, because I had an unusual upbringing, and I don't want to make it my entire personality. So with questions that personal you are either going to be forcing me to lie (and yes, I have had to make up a version of my life story that's not traumatizing to the listener) or you are coming out of that interview with an opinion about me that has very little to do with how I operate professionally.

You can absolutely get a read on one's potential to do a job xyz without asking personal questions.

That's not really the core issue. Those are possible things they could use to manipulate me. I won't be giving them ammo for free. I wouldn't share those things easily on a first date, why would i share them with potential employer?

Especially as a "unconventional" hire, because finding job is hard in such state, so they will have me metaphorically by the balls.

My perspective might be warped by working in post soviet country.

When I've interviewed developers and other technical people when I was in that business, I wanted to gauge if they'd be pleasant to work with, and vaguely "who they are," but that's about it. In a dev interview, I'd be suspicious of someone digging into what made me tick, if for no reason other than their lacking boundaries. But even in ambiguous green field coding projects, not having the most creative dev team could maybe result in longer design times, or overly prescriptive solutions, at worst, if they're technically competent.

Edit: (That said, in one technical role I was in, a technically competent new hire (that I didn't interview) tried to bring a machete into work on their second day for reasons we never found out, despite our working in the secure block of a government building with metal detectors, man traps, etc. But I think that's probably a bit of an outlier. ;-)

However, if I was applying for a job at a creative studio doing deep creative work on amorphous topics with comparatively ambiguous definitions of success, like making a movie, designing a large brand/visual identity from the ground up, or similar, I might not even accept a job if they weren't digging into what makes everybody on that team tick. The difference between mediocrity and excellence at that stage is almost entirely based on the creative capability of the team as an entity. Someone that doesn't jibe with it will be a drag on everyone at best, or unintentionally dousing the creative flames with an unhelpful attitude and momentum-killing diversions at worst.

It might make sense from employer perspective, but why i should put myself at risk? It is similar to prisoners dilemma.

I also have to say that the shittiest, most toxic and manipulative job I've ever had didn't have a particularly robust hiring practice. It was my first white collar tech job so I was already used to shitty manipulative employers in lower-level support jobs and didn't catch it. They were perfectly content to figure out how to exploit people after they were hired.

I also worry that this stuff can be gamed. If an applicant gains an advantage by telling a story about how he "cared for his dying aunt while finishing a degree and thereby learned what's really important in life," then you're just encouraging a confessional (and potentionally dishonest) style of approaching an interview.

Doubtful indeed. They're more likely to just open themselves up to unconscious bias and prefer to hire candidates with similar backgrounds to them. 'Ohh this person started tinkering with technology in grade 8 in the basement like I did'. While passing up qualified candidates with backgrounds different than theirs.

So my perspective is that anyone who tells you a "cared for his dying aunt..." story is full of shit and definitely is playing you.

However, for sake of argument, given that your story is true, shouldn't it also be evidence that those _not_ talking about "caring for dying aunt" is lying too? I mean, you told a story that didn't involve caring for a dying aunt, and that was a lie. We actually don't have evidence (either within your story, or in general I suppose?) that anyone would make up a story about a dying aunt to an interviewer...?

Not my fault that my life experiences aren't made for a casual conversation starter. Which is why I say this line of questioning isn't going to produce good outcomes.

And of course we don't have evidence that people make up dying aunt stories necessarily. But if anyone tells me this is the kind of experience that made them realize what's important is at the very least embellishing the truth.

When I was caring for my dying father, I learned how to function on autopilot, perpetually sleep deprived, in an emotional fog. I was also writing my master thesis and struggling to pay rent with shitty student jobs. Did it make me "realize what is truly important", hell no, but it did make me be ok with cutting corners, doing the bare minimum at work/school and striving for mediocrity because I didn't have physical or mental capacity for anything else. This isn't exactly the kind of thing employers want to hear, so I'd never bring this story up unless specifically asked. And then I'll tell you how it taught me about "what is truly important in life" which is disingenuous

Why is that the alternative? All of the above sounds awful to me. Are you looking for an employer or signing up for a cult?