6 ms·
Asking about home labs/home networking runs the risk of being a very discriminatory question if you take the negative as a mark against the question. I highly r
by cthalupa 9y ago
Asking about home labs/home networking runs the risk of being a very discriminatory question if you take the negative as a mark against the question. I highly recommend not asking about it.
Particularly, it is discriminatory in that it penalizes people based on their home situation, both from a time and financial perspective. People with children, especially single parents, are often not in positions to actively maintain a home lab or complex home network, due to time constraints.
Others just might not have the inclination, and it doesn't say anything at all about their ability to perform the job.
Even if you're not going to take the lack of a home lab as a negative, it can throw a candidate off - candidates are very conditioned to feel that a hard no to an interview questions is going to be taken as a mark against them, and this is going to effect their ability to answer other questions as effectively.
A much better question is to ask how someone approaches learning new technologies or keeping up with the changes in technology in general. For some people that will be work related, for some it will be home labs, and is an important skill regardless of how much time you have available. People with home labs will almost universally talk about it, and you can get the same discussion with them, without risking discriminating against people that have to keep their skills sharp through other methods. It's also more likely to be directly relevant to the skills related to the job, rather than random projects that might be tech related but not relevant to the position being interviewed for.
- dvdgsng 9y agoThis statement is so generic, you could replace "home labs/home networking" with literally anything.
- cthalupa 9y agoNot literally anything - but things outside of work. In which case, yes, it still all applies. You should focus on the things required for the job. Not what people do in their free time.
- ericd 9y agoThe reality is that spending your free time on job-related stuff is likely correlated with improved job-related skills, though. It's not a correlation of 1 obviously, but it's probably not 0 either, so it is relevant.
- tptacek 9y agoWhy psychoanalyze when you can simply test?
- ericd 9y agoGood point, I agree.
- cthalupa 9y agoExcept that studies show reduced capacity to work after a certain number of hours. Does doing the equivalent activity to "work" at home count against those hours? I don't know the answer there. We do know that diversity increases the effectiveness and problem solving ability of a team - at worst, getting a bunch of people that have home labs is actively detrimental to this, and at best does nothing to improve it. There's limited time available in interviews, and you're probably better suited asking relevant questions. (And from a personal perspective, asking about home lab details would benefit me. I've got ten gig fiber throughout the house and close to a terabyte of RAM consumed by my VMs... But none of that is realistically making me a better employee)
- ericd 9y agoInteresting, I'm not sure if it counts against one's ability to work, but it seems like it might, since it's a similar activity. And you're right that other activities can also yield helpful skills. I agree that competency testing, especially project based, is better. The only reason I'd ask about their off time is to get a sense of what they like and better getting to know what kinds of projects they might gravitate to, given the choice.
- cdubzzz 9y agoWhat are some example replacements that would make the statement less applicable?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- KaiserPro 9y agoI was interviewing someone who one their CV had no real qualifications for the role they were applying for (sysadmin, this was back in 2012) Basically they were a social worker for both young and old in spain (this was a UK position) However they were reasonably promising on the test, so as part of the "getting to know you" part of the interview we went over where they got their knowledge. Home labs, ebay, second had stuff. Do I expect _everyone_ to have a home lab? fuck no. Do I explicitly ask about them? no. I must take issue with discriminatory, the whole point of an interview is to discriminate against people who are not capable of the job role. What you are talking about is social bias, and that frankly has nothing really to do with home labs, and a lot to do with people being arseholes.
- extra88 9y agoI'm not taking a side on whether asking about home labs in an interview is a good idea or bad idea but it's not discriminatory in a legal sense.