4 ms·

If you are convinced that someone is the perfect fit for you based on a few interviews, then you've either discovered a bullshit artist or haven't dug deep enou

by j_baker 17y ago

If you are convinced that someone is the perfect fit for you based on a few interviews, then you've either discovered a bullshit artist or haven't dug deep enough. Interviewing is a terrible way to make a hiring decision. We just haven't discovered a better way to do it.

jacquesm 17y ago
Interviewing can definitely give you an idea about a person, bull shit artists exist (in vast numbers), but they're not that hard to ferret out at the interview stage, presuming the interviewer knows his stuff and is not some HR flunky. The trick is that during an interview you can choose to concentrate on the person or you can concentrate on their technical skills. If you manage to concentrate on the person instead then you'll find out soon enough whether they'll be 'good' for your company. The technical stuff is the easy part. I've never had to resort to 'trick questions' or 'test assignemnts' to find out whether or not someone is capable. Discussing their past has been much more fruitful in spotting trouble early on. Interviewing is an art, not a science. There has been a whole lot of fuss about google and other companies getting on the 'metrics' bandwagon. I think that only works because they can datamine tens of thousands of applications and spot interesting trends. If you're in charge of a start-up or a mid-sized company with maybe 10 to 50 employees the number of people you will be hiring will be much lower and the hiring process itself will consume a disproportionate amount of time. Keeping your turnover low (as in: hire the right people right away) has an immediate pay-off both in time spent as well as in keeping the peace within your organization, and not investing months of time in to the wrong people only to fire them.
- kls 17y ago
  You hit the nail in the head, in my career I have fired 3 people (managed thousands). In the interview game to many people focus on the how long have you used X technology instead of the person themselves. It is real easy people, interview the person and look for passion, seriously it overcomes all else. As long as the person has no obvious glaring personality flaws and passion, the rest will fall into place. People in tech careers are for the most part self driven and want to do what they do. If you (anyone in general) have had a problem with more than 5% of the people who have worked for you, then you may be the problem. Trust me I have meet far more incompetent tech managers than I ever have tech employees. Who by the way are generally skeptical people who don't follow leaders that they do not respect. Given the grandparents cavalier attitude about firing tech people and the authors I would suspect that they are failing to position themselves as a leader in their technical talents eyes, and loosing their trust with every termination. Seriously firing people does psychological damage to those that remain, it shows a lack of investment in people that resounds in their mind, it should be reserved for those that refuse to work for whatever reason.
  - hga 17y ago
    How do you figure out if purported programmers can "program their way out of a paper bag"? As long as you have a good (enough) method for doing that I agree with everything you say above.
    - jacquesm 17y ago
      My way of addressing that part was to simply ask what the most complicated thing was they ever programmed, and then to ask one or two follow up questions about that. I've got enough field experience that just by asking that one question I'd be able to come up with a follow up question that would nail a 'poser' in one go, if the answer was satisfactory I'd let it go at that and assume they're telling the truth, if not then I would ask one or two more follow up questions and by then I'd usually know for sure if someone is fibbing or just nervous (people can be very nervous during interviews, the bigger problem to me always was to not discard 'good' people that are simply nervous and botch answers to questions rather than the fear of hiring the wrong person because they manage to bamboozle me). Another thing I did was to take as much time as I wanted during an interview, I would schedule at most one interview per half day just to make sure that I didn't have to cut an interview short. This made the interview process more relaxed and on the whole gave me enough time to figure out what made someone tick. Most interviews were over very quickly anyway, but every now and then it took a long time to get a feeling for whether or not someone would fit. One of my biggest discoveries was that when hiring someone good that they would refer their friends, and they would be pretty critical about who they'd refer, screening out a lot of potential duds for me without any effort on my part. In the Toronto office we ended up hiring four guys that already knew each other previous to joining the company. This can also work against you, another 'group of friends' applied and I would have been happy to hire just one of them, he stuck with his friends instead. I once hired a guy that just wanted to learn how to program but did not yet have the ability. This was a risky move, because as a startup you don't really have the time to invest a lot of it in to a person that is not yet proven. But it worked out very well, and Jeffrey actually was one of our most reliably productive people, in part because we gave him a chance that probably nobody else would have. Sometimes having a will and a drive trumps technical ability.

by j_baker 17y ago

jacquesm 17y ago

Interviewing can definitely give you an idea about a person, bull shit artists exist (in vast numbers), but they're not that hard to ferret out at the interview stage, presuming the interviewer knows his stuff and is not some HR flunky. The trick is that during an interview you can choose to concentrate on the person or you can concentrate on their technical skills. If you manage to concentrate on the person instead then you'll find out soon enough whether they'll be 'good' for your company. The technical stuff is the easy part. I've never had to resort to 'trick questions' or 'test assignemnts' to find out whether or not someone is capable. Discussing their past has been much more fruitful in spotting trouble early on. Interviewing is an art, not a science. There has been a whole lot of fuss about google and other companies getting on the 'metrics' bandwagon. I think that only works because they can datamine tens of thousands of applications and spot interesting trends. If you're in charge of a start-up or a mid-sized company with maybe 10 to 50 employees the number of people you will be hiring will be much lower and the hiring process itself will consume a disproportionate amount of time. Keeping your turnover low (as in: hire the right people right away) has an immediate pay-off both in time spent as well as in keeping the peace within your organization, and not investing months of time in to the wrong people only to fire them.

kls 17y ago
You hit the nail in the head, in my career I have fired 3 people (managed thousands). In the interview game to many people focus on the how long have you used X technology instead of the person themselves. It is real easy people, interview the person and look for passion, seriously it overcomes all else. As long as the person has no obvious glaring personality flaws and passion, the rest will fall into place. People in tech careers are for the most part self driven and want to do what they do. If you (anyone in general) have had a problem with more than 5% of the people who have worked for you, then you may be the problem. Trust me I have meet far more incompetent tech managers than I ever have tech employees. Who by the way are generally skeptical people who don't follow leaders that they do not respect. Given the grandparents cavalier attitude about firing tech people and the authors I would suspect that they are failing to position themselves as a leader in their technical talents eyes, and loosing their trust with every termination. Seriously firing people does psychological damage to those that remain, it shows a lack of investment in people that resounds in their mind, it should be reserved for those that refuse to work for whatever reason.
- hga 17y ago
  How do you figure out if purported programmers can "program their way out of a paper bag"? As long as you have a good (enough) method for doing that I agree with everything you say above.
  - jacquesm 17y ago
    My way of addressing that part was to simply ask what the most complicated thing was they ever programmed, and then to ask one or two follow up questions about that. I've got enough field experience that just by asking that one question I'd be able to come up with a follow up question that would nail a 'poser' in one go, if the answer was satisfactory I'd let it go at that and assume they're telling the truth, if not then I would ask one or two more follow up questions and by then I'd usually know for sure if someone is fibbing or just nervous (people can be very nervous during interviews, the bigger problem to me always was to not discard 'good' people that are simply nervous and botch answers to questions rather than the fear of hiring the wrong person because they manage to bamboozle me). Another thing I did was to take as much time as I wanted during an interview, I would schedule at most one interview per half day just to make sure that I didn't have to cut an interview short. This made the interview process more relaxed and on the whole gave me enough time to figure out what made someone tick. Most interviews were over very quickly anyway, but every now and then it took a long time to get a feeling for whether or not someone would fit. One of my biggest discoveries was that when hiring someone good that they would refer their friends, and they would be pretty critical about who they'd refer, screening out a lot of potential duds for me without any effort on my part. In the Toronto office we ended up hiring four guys that already knew each other previous to joining the company. This can also work against you, another 'group of friends' applied and I would have been happy to hire just one of them, he stuck with his friends instead. I once hired a guy that just wanted to learn how to program but did not yet have the ability. This was a risky move, because as a startup you don't really have the time to invest a lot of it in to a person that is not yet proven. But it worked out very well, and Jeffrey actually was one of our most reliably productive people, in part because we gave him a chance that probably nobody else would have. Sometimes having a will and a drive trumps technical ability.