6 ms·

I've heard somewhere that companies like Stripe would rather have false negatives than false positives in hiring.

avip 8y ago
That's the logical tradeoff for any company. Bad hires create an incredible amount of damage that can sink a whole team. It is x10 better to have no hire than a bad one.
- ppeetteerr 8y ago
  I've worked in companies that struggle to hire any candidate, let alone top candidates. Stripe is amongst the top employers. The vast majority of smaller shops (banks, b2b software companies, agencies) just need to staff up and would rather hire and fire than miss out on a good candidate.
  - rizzom5000 8y ago
    Maybe, but hire and fire is also a great way to show the team that you don't know what you're doing as a hiring manager; not to mention how firing a team member, who may be incompetent but still well-liked, affects morale. Then, there is the problem where you fail to fire when you should. To me, this is just not a good way to build an effective team.
    - ppeetteerr 8y ago
      No one is saying you should hire and fire a ton of people, only that rejecting good candidates for most companies is not possible given how difficult it is to find them. Talk to any recruiter and they will tell you that finding good (not great, just good) candidates is often a struggle.
    - inimino 8y ago
      > hire and fire is also a great way to show the team that you don't know what you're doing It's an expensive (painful) signal that you actually do know what you need to do and are capable of it.
- devonkim 8y ago
  I wouldn’t say ANY company necessarily. A lot of companies even in IT are body farms and low wage, expendable (but still necessary) labor is their lifeblood where they trade off quality for more volume. Employee turnover doesn’t matter much besides in the highest ranks in that case either. A “bad” hire in such companies is one that causes such irreparable harm that it costs the company more in reputation / brand than the paid out wages (this is the case with most large scale employers in the US like retail, sales, etc). FAANGS may have the funds together to hire out probably the rest of the entire software developer market but it doesn’t do them as much good to have laggards that can’t pass a FizzBuzz test. Sure works for a lot of defense contractors’ business models though, especially if the candidates are cleared.
  - ppeetteerr 8y ago
    You don't have to be a body farm to justify someone considered a "false positive" at a large employer. Most companies outside of the top employers have a hard time staffing up. They might just want someone to fix their bugs, not someone aspiring to invent the next Kubernetes.
    - alexhutcheson 8y ago
      Unless you have clearly defined separate roles, titles, career ladders, etc. for the "bug fixers", this isn't a recipe for success. You would end up with an underclass of employees that are unhappy that they don't have the same career opportunities as others in their role, and a bunch of unhappy managers who are given the difficult task of enforcing this division. If you just need someone for narrowly-scoped tasks like fixing specific bugs, it might be better to hire a contractor, so the role expectations can be well-defined and agreed to up front.
    - devonkim 8y ago
      Every company I’ve seen that needed people dedicated just to fix bugs was in a downward spiral with maintenance mode software. Those organizations outside really slow moving but well financed bureaucracies are disappearing rapidly as investors pull money by divesting or selling to larger companies that wind up casting off the unprofitable / non-growing lines of businesses they acquired. It’s pretty evil IMO to hire people as FTEs into such organizations when you are probably better off with consultants that are at least used to short term gigs.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  This is repeated so much but it’s just wrong. Companies are usually very socially toxic places, and the definition of “bad hire” is usually subverted to mean “does not capitulate to our bad monoculture.” It has nothing to do with hiring positive people, skilled people, etc.
- lawn 8y ago
  It's missing nuance. For most companies missing out on an excellent hire is worse than hiring someone subpar.
- jhpriestley 8y ago
  Why are bad hires so damaging? I've encountered very unskilled coworkers, they didn't do any serious damage, just wasted some people's time and money. I'd actually say the opposite: standout engineers can be very valuable, I'd rather work on a team with a couple lemons and one really good engineer than 3 middle of the road engineers. So I think that false negatives can be damaging, especially because it's probably the best people with the most options who won't bother with an excessive interview gauntlet.
  - avip 8y ago
    Not sure your 'lemons' qualify as 'bad hires'. I've refrained from defining, as it requires context, but the 2 pillars of badhirism are negative productivity and negative attitude. Being "unskilled", by itself and in void, does not imply a bad hire IMO. We are all "unskilled" occasionally.
  - Shaanie 8y ago
    Lemons can significantly impede a team's velocity and, more importantly, the team's overall happiness. It's difficult to enjoy and take pride in your work when the code base either looks like shit or require that you spend most of your time reviewing/cleaning up the mess the lemons create. Will your standout engineers enjoy working with the lemons?
    - vonmoltke 8y ago
      I could substitute "the business" for "lemons" above and describe many (most?) companies. In that case, what effect are these lemons really having?
  - louthy 8y ago
    Unskilled is a problem of course, but with an unskilled, but ambitious individual, they can be mentored. In my mind a bad hire is someone that has a negative drag effect on the psychology of the work environment or the project. I had one hire who was brought in as a junior dev, thought he was better than he was and that he didn't deserve to do the grunt work he'd been assigned, and then proceeded to constantly bitch about anything he could. He was so negative that when he finally moved on I was super relieved. That psychology of "why even bother" can just sink into people's subconcious and become problematic. It's hard to spot who's going to be like that at an interview though.
- ChrisCinelli 8y ago
  Intuitively I wanted to say "Yes 1000 times, unless you REALLY need to hire NOW, the effects of a bad hire are going to be a lot more negative than a no hire". But what about a very good hire that you end up missing that has been a very expensive mistake? I think we have a pretty high bias here. Organizations can see the effect of a bad hire and have more data on what went wrong during the hiring process, retrospect why that person passed and put more "tests" to prevent to repeat the mistake. But organizations can never measure the differential between the impact on the company of a candidate that was not hired and the present condition. There is simply no data about the impact that that person could have had. I heard a few detailed stories on "the guy that should not have been hired" and I can add my own stories. But the stories on the cool people that should have been hired are brief and rarely go beyond "I thought that guy was very smart." So I think we should make sure we check our hiring processes against negative positives. How? To be continued...
beagle3 8y ago
Most definitely. A false positive often has negative contribution to the overall training (at the very least taking time from current members without giving back, but often also creating new problems). A false negative has zero cost (and zero benefit). I think it's a no-brainer that false negatives are much preferred to false positives in the overall tradeoff (and ... there is always a tradeoff between false positive and false negative)
- wlll 8y ago
  While I agree with the sentiment, this isn't entirely true: > A false negative has zero cost (and zero benefit). False negatives means that your hiring process is longer, more difficult, more costly, and you therefore find it harder to grow, or to replace people who leave. It may well be that avoiding false positives in general is better for the business, but it's not as clear cut as you make out I believe, it's a balance.
  - sheepmullet 8y ago
    > False negatives means that your hiring process is longer, more difficult, more costly, and you therefore find it harder to grow, or to replace people who leave. Exactly! If a couple of people on my team of six leave and they can’t be replaced for 6-12 months then I’m going to quit as well. There will be more pressure on the remaining team to produce and most of the interesting long term work will be put on hold.
- jonathanoliver 8y ago
  A false negative has zero realized cost. I would say there's missed opportunity cost.
  - beagle3 8y ago
    Yes. But a false positive has negative realized cost AND missed opportunity cost; I was implicitly subtracting the missed opportunity cost as it appears in both, but it should be stated explicitly - Thanks.
mandeepj 8y ago
> Stripe would rather have false negatives than false positives in hiring That's the case with Amazon and Google also.
- ummonk 8y ago
  I was under the impression that for junior hires amazon has a low hiring bar but is aggressive in firing afterwards.
sheepmullet 8y ago
> I've heard somewhere that companies like Stripe would rather have false negatives than false positives in hiring. The top tech companies can reject 10 good candidates for every 1 that they hire because there is a massive surplus of engineers who want to work for these companies and so time to hire for them is actually reasonable. 99% of tech companies don’t have the overwhelming surplus of good applicants to make this work. So when they try they see time to hire jump from 4-8 weeks all the way up to 6-12 months without any real decrease in false positives.

avip 8y ago

That's the logical tradeoff for any company. Bad hires create an incredible amount of damage that can sink a whole team. It is x10 better to have no hire than a bad one.

ppeetteerr 8y ago
I've worked in companies that struggle to hire any candidate, let alone top candidates. Stripe is amongst the top employers. The vast majority of smaller shops (banks, b2b software companies, agencies) just need to staff up and would rather hire and fire than miss out on a good candidate.
- rizzom5000 8y ago
  Maybe, but hire and fire is also a great way to show the team that you don't know what you're doing as a hiring manager; not to mention how firing a team member, who may be incompetent but still well-liked, affects morale. Then, there is the problem where you fail to fire when you should. To me, this is just not a good way to build an effective team.
  - ppeetteerr 8y ago
    No one is saying you should hire and fire a ton of people, only that rejecting good candidates for most companies is not possible given how difficult it is to find them. Talk to any recruiter and they will tell you that finding good (not great, just good) candidates is often a struggle.
  - inimino 8y ago
    > hire and fire is also a great way to show the team that you don't know what you're doing It's an expensive (painful) signal that you actually do know what you need to do and are capable of it.
devonkim 8y ago
I wouldn’t say ANY company necessarily. A lot of companies even in IT are body farms and low wage, expendable (but still necessary) labor is their lifeblood where they trade off quality for more volume. Employee turnover doesn’t matter much besides in the highest ranks in that case either. A “bad” hire in such companies is one that causes such irreparable harm that it costs the company more in reputation / brand than the paid out wages (this is the case with most large scale employers in the US like retail, sales, etc). FAANGS may have the funds together to hire out probably the rest of the entire software developer market but it doesn’t do them as much good to have laggards that can’t pass a FizzBuzz test. Sure works for a lot of defense contractors’ business models though, especially if the candidates are cleared.
- ppeetteerr 8y ago
  You don't have to be a body farm to justify someone considered a "false positive" at a large employer. Most companies outside of the top employers have a hard time staffing up. They might just want someone to fix their bugs, not someone aspiring to invent the next Kubernetes.
  - alexhutcheson 8y ago
    Unless you have clearly defined separate roles, titles, career ladders, etc. for the "bug fixers", this isn't a recipe for success. You would end up with an underclass of employees that are unhappy that they don't have the same career opportunities as others in their role, and a bunch of unhappy managers who are given the difficult task of enforcing this division. If you just need someone for narrowly-scoped tasks like fixing specific bugs, it might be better to hire a contractor, so the role expectations can be well-defined and agreed to up front.
  - devonkim 8y ago
    Every company I’ve seen that needed people dedicated just to fix bugs was in a downward spiral with maintenance mode software. Those organizations outside really slow moving but well financed bureaucracies are disappearing rapidly as investors pull money by divesting or selling to larger companies that wind up casting off the unprofitable / non-growing lines of businesses they acquired. It’s pretty evil IMO to hire people as FTEs into such organizations when you are probably better off with consultants that are at least used to short term gigs.
mlthoughts2018 8y ago
This is repeated so much but it’s just wrong. Companies are usually very socially toxic places, and the definition of “bad hire” is usually subverted to mean “does not capitulate to our bad monoculture.” It has nothing to do with hiring positive people, skilled people, etc.
lawn 8y ago
It's missing nuance. For most companies missing out on an excellent hire is worse than hiring someone subpar.
jhpriestley 8y ago
Why are bad hires so damaging? I've encountered very unskilled coworkers, they didn't do any serious damage, just wasted some people's time and money. I'd actually say the opposite: standout engineers can be very valuable, I'd rather work on a team with a couple lemons and one really good engineer than 3 middle of the road engineers. So I think that false negatives can be damaging, especially because it's probably the best people with the most options who won't bother with an excessive interview gauntlet.
- avip 8y ago
  Not sure your 'lemons' qualify as 'bad hires'. I've refrained from defining, as it requires context, but the 2 pillars of badhirism are negative productivity and negative attitude. Being "unskilled", by itself and in void, does not imply a bad hire IMO. We are all "unskilled" occasionally.
- Shaanie 8y ago
  Lemons can significantly impede a team's velocity and, more importantly, the team's overall happiness. It's difficult to enjoy and take pride in your work when the code base either looks like shit or require that you spend most of your time reviewing/cleaning up the mess the lemons create. Will your standout engineers enjoy working with the lemons?
  - vonmoltke 8y ago
    I could substitute "the business" for "lemons" above and describe many (most?) companies. In that case, what effect are these lemons really having?
- louthy 8y ago
  Unskilled is a problem of course, but with an unskilled, but ambitious individual, they can be mentored. In my mind a bad hire is someone that has a negative drag effect on the psychology of the work environment or the project. I had one hire who was brought in as a junior dev, thought he was better than he was and that he didn't deserve to do the grunt work he'd been assigned, and then proceeded to constantly bitch about anything he could. He was so negative that when he finally moved on I was super relieved. That psychology of "why even bother" can just sink into people's subconcious and become problematic. It's hard to spot who's going to be like that at an interview though.
ChrisCinelli 8y ago
Intuitively I wanted to say "Yes 1000 times, unless you REALLY need to hire NOW, the effects of a bad hire are going to be a lot more negative than a no hire". But what about a very good hire that you end up missing that has been a very expensive mistake? I think we have a pretty high bias here. Organizations can see the effect of a bad hire and have more data on what went wrong during the hiring process, retrospect why that person passed and put more "tests" to prevent to repeat the mistake. But organizations can never measure the differential between the impact on the company of a candidate that was not hired and the present condition. There is simply no data about the impact that that person could have had. I heard a few detailed stories on "the guy that should not have been hired" and I can add my own stories. But the stories on the cool people that should have been hired are brief and rarely go beyond "I thought that guy was very smart." So I think we should make sure we check our hiring processes against negative positives. How? To be continued...

beagle3 8y ago

Most definitely. A false positive often has negative contribution to the overall training (at the very least taking time from current members without giving back, but often also creating new problems). A false negative has zero cost (and zero benefit). I think it's a no-brainer that false negatives are much preferred to false positives in the overall tradeoff (and ... there is always a tradeoff between false positive and false negative)

wlll 8y ago
While I agree with the sentiment, this isn't entirely true: > A false negative has zero cost (and zero benefit). False negatives means that your hiring process is longer, more difficult, more costly, and you therefore find it harder to grow, or to replace people who leave. It may well be that avoiding false positives in general is better for the business, but it's not as clear cut as you make out I believe, it's a balance.
- sheepmullet 8y ago
  > False negatives means that your hiring process is longer, more difficult, more costly, and you therefore find it harder to grow, or to replace people who leave. Exactly! If a couple of people on my team of six leave and they can’t be replaced for 6-12 months then I’m going to quit as well. There will be more pressure on the remaining team to produce and most of the interesting long term work will be put on hold.
jonathanoliver 8y ago
A false negative has zero realized cost. I would say there's missed opportunity cost.
- beagle3 8y ago
  Yes. But a false positive has negative realized cost AND missed opportunity cost; I was implicitly subtracting the missed opportunity cost as it appears in both, but it should be stated explicitly - Thanks.

mandeepj 8y ago

> Stripe would rather have false negatives than false positives in hiring That's the case with Amazon and Google also.

ummonk 8y ago
I was under the impression that for junior hires amazon has a low hiring bar but is aggressive in firing afterwards.

sheepmullet 8y ago

> I've heard somewhere that companies like Stripe would rather have false negatives than false positives in hiring. The top tech companies can reject 10 good candidates for every 1 that they hire because there is a massive surplus of engineers who want to work for these companies and so time to hire for them is actually reasonable. 99% of tech companies don’t have the overwhelming surplus of good applicants to make this work. So when they try they see time to hire jump from 4-8 weeks all the way up to 6-12 months without any real decrease in false positives.