10 ms·

What's going on here, with this human?

174 points by tlb 6y ago

exmadscientist 6y ago
This one is worth reading. I have already learned a few of the things in this article the hard way. If anything else here is half so useful, any time spent reading the rest of this will pay for itself many times over.
mcbishop 6y ago
> One of the greatest gifts we have for each other, for our children and spouses, for our teammates, is the positive feedback loop we can put someone into purely by believing in them, by seeing their genius and their dysfunction clearly and then helping them construct conditions for the former to flourish. Beautiful.
- RGamma 5y ago
  You better enter that positive feedback loop, because if not you will be let go of. The surface sentiment is enablement but there's always a component of "if you don't perform you're screwed" lurking in the background.
- flpq 5y ago
  "He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches." In general, I think a teacher classifying genius and dysfunction is putting people into boxes and may harm his students more than helping them. I've never encountered a great teacher who talks like that. I've met many people justifying their existence and positions who do talk like that.
  - tall 5y ago
    Agreed this article is pedantic without saying much. (Not to insult the author, I write in similar fashion and so do lots of other people)
  - watwut 5y ago
    > He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches. And the one who cant teach, complains about teachers. In my experience people who say the above are unable to teach anybody anything.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    we're all contextually geniuses or dysfunctional - I think the thing the writer is advocating for is trying to find the right context based on an attempt at an accurate assessment of the person, and how you might go about assessing people.
  - d0mine 5y ago
    It reminds me of an experiment where genius were assigned at random among schoolchildren and how it affected their results (only because teachers thought they geniuses). https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/09/18/161159263/teachers-expectations-can-influence-how-students-perform https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/09/18/1611592...
- bhrgunatha 5y ago
  I used to teach children whose internal state is generally easier to assess than adults. I remember watching as one kid said to another "I believe in you" to help out in some moment of crisis. It struck me as odd - something cheesy they'd (probably) heard in a movie or cartoon. But if they are saying that to each other then I could probably use it to communicate better with them as long as it was sincere. I'd say it sparingly when I thought it might be appropriate or helpful. The reactions were surprising to me, not at the time I said it, but later on. I'm not suggesting I was a major influence that sets kids on the right track, but I think it helped out somewhat and for some reason that specific phrase seemed much more powerful than other forms of encouragement.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- intergalplan 5y ago
  This is pretty much what the show Ted Lasso is all about. I think it's the key reason people find it so wholesome and charming.
jancsika 6y ago
> Absent negative externalities or monopoly effects, a man receives from the free market what he gives to it, his material worth is a running tally of the net benefit that he has provided to his fellow man. Reminds me of a line from a movie, something like this: "If everyone played poker the way they're supposed to, I would win 100% of the time."
- nyanpasu64 6y ago
  Wrong article, did you mean to comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26986675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26986675 ?
- dxdm 5y ago
  That original quote about the free market seems tautological to me: "In a perfectly fair system, the outcomes would be fair". I can see why that's an attractive ideal, but it doesn't seem very useful to me.
ksm1717 6y ago
This was like a what you need to know tour through all of the LinkedIn-pro-sponsored, pseudo-quantitative approaches to evaluating personality guided by self fulfilling anecdotes and a glut of paraphrases/quotes from people I’ve never heard of. In other words, a lot of ideas clicked if somewhat reductive and Machiavellian. And certainly well researched and written.
networkimprov 6y ago
This is a relatively deep look into the bottomless task of considering a candiate for a role in an organization. It bears multiple readings. It suggests that you may not learn much from interviews with the candidate, and may learn much more from face to face interviews with their references. It encourages the reader to seek both the genius and dysfunction of every person (candidates and references), for each context they've worked in. (Altho I'd refer to these as their inherent irrationality and ingenuity; dysfunction and genius are the extremes.)
blondin 6y ago
thanks for sharing. i like how the author prefaces this essay with the fact that it's all a game. otherwise, i would think it's (the personality assessment part, which is half of it) a bit too reductionist. the fact that some firms out there are going after people with some "personality type" isn't surprising to me, but seeing it clearly stated is... "seeing the water" is very profound. it's something that has got me thinking a lot lately. what good is a feedback loop if nobody in your circle sees the water?
galaxyLogic 6y ago
I'm not sure I got much of value out of this on a quick reading. Could someone summarize the lessons of this article? I think it's too psyche-oriented. Trying to psycho-analyze the candidates? Trying to find a person from whom you can get the maximum benefit? I've always had the feeling that people who are very interested in psychology are really trying to gain an edge over the others who they now "understand better" than the person him or herself. Think of playing poker. If you understand your opponents it will give you a a benefit. And it's an interesting exercise. But on the other hand you could spend more time mastering the probabilities and counting cards, and gain an advantage by simply being a better player yourself.
- op03 6y ago
  It needs to be psych oriented. If you are in high pressure situations you need people who can handle pressure, stay focused etc i.e. not neurotics. Discovering that they cant, when shit hits the fan will have a big cost. On the other hand, if you are dealing with problems requiring curiosity, there is more tolerance for the neurotics and less tolerance for obedience trait holders who need to be told what to do. Psychology gives team managers that mental framework of what to look for, a vocabulary to think about the types of chimps in the population, where they fit, what they can handle, when they need a break, the spectrum of rewards and punishments that work depending on the personality type, needs, values etc. Without that knowledge, most good managers will spend a lot of time coming up with their own frameworks (usually to fit a very specific small problem domain) that will invariably resemble what already exists in psych text books. Yes some managers will take advantage of the knowledge but that is a separate issue to whether the knowledge is required to build good teams. It is.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  In my experience most psychology students are confused about themselves and trying to work out why they are the way they are and how they can deal with that. Less Machiavellian, more simple survival.
  - scotty79 5y ago
    My friend studying psychology told me that at the beginnig of their studies one professor told them: Some of you came here to help yourselves. It won't work.
danuker 6y ago
> I’m looking for the felt sense of a “hungry mind” based on the way their questions flow. That’s very hard to fake. As a candidate, just imagine you own the company. The questions will flow naturally once you think about what those clowns are doing with your money.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  What happens if the hungry mind is too hungry for your menial CRUD job, and you were actually better off with the unhungry mind that is content to do its job and go home at the end of the day?
  - rubatuga 5y ago
    Maybe they end up depressed and start looking for meaning in life.
    - wffurr 5y ago
      Make sure you don’t pay quite enough for the rapidly increasing cost of housing in the area and make them feel dependent on your employer-provided healthcare. Then they’ll buckle down and deal with it for the sake of some illusory stability.
  - danuker 5y ago
    To me, the CRUD menial job is what pays my bills. It may be boring at times, but "the obstacle is the way", given that the customers pay for it. But sometimes I get to automate some of the CRUD, which is fun.
- amelius 5y ago
  You might discover that being an employee is a bad deal anyway, and become a freelancer instead or start your own company.
  - danuker 5y ago
    You might still find it useful to imagine you own your clients' company, then.
lordnacho 6y ago
I liked the essay and certainly learned a few things. But how are you going to put the stuff about references to use? It's going to be limited how many people you know who also know a candidate you're interested in. References from the candidate will have a heavy positive bias because who on earth wants to spoil someone's chances of getting a job? I actually gave a very positive reference this week, an honest one for a friend I've worked with who really is a top guy, while thinking that the recruiter must hear this all the time.
- marcus_holmes 5y ago
  A friend of mine told me to get more endorsements on LinkedIn. I never bothered because I dismiss them out of hand when considering candidates - they're usually the result of trades with ex-colleagues, and not a heartfelt "wow this person was amazing to work with!". Like your opinion of references - they're rigged to be positive always, so kinda worthless. But I could be wrong. Other people are weird ;)
FeepingCreature 6y ago
Okay, but how do you know all this works?
- StavrosK 6y ago
  You have to rely on your decades-long confirmation bias. I doubt the author (or anyone) goes back to their interview notes a year after hiring the candidate to see how much they got right.
  - hiq 5y ago
    It's also hard to do unless you're hiring for several similar positions at the same time. If you hired only one guy, who's to say that the others you rejected would have performed better or worse? If you hired 3 for similar positions, you can start making guesses from interview performances and (in)validating them one year after. But as you said I don't think it's done in practice anyway.
    - StavrosK 5y ago
      It's too bad, because I think it's necessary to go back and check how your predictions were. tptacek had a good process that was consistent, quantified and checked afterwards, but the average interview process (mine included) is just random stuff that ultimately feed into my bias.
    - smnscu 5y ago
      I once hired two engineers for the same role on my team; they both seemed about the same level during the interview. After working with them for a while, one of them was perfectly adequate, the other turned out to be the best engineer I've ever worked with.
      - mdorazio 5y ago
        Did that help you reframe your hiring strategy for the future? Curious what qualities in the second engineer both made them better and could have been revealed in an interview.
callesgg 5y ago
Yet another person trying to teach what can’t be taught through verbal lessons. Or maybe it can and I have just never been able to find anyone that is able to. Basically you understand other people with reference to your understanding of yourself, to become better at understanding other people you need to change the way you understand yourself. Someone else will not be able to change your understanding of yourself. You must do that yourself.
- scotty79 5y ago
  > Someone else will not be able to change your understanding of yourself. You must do that yourself. But people can make you think the thoughts and feel the feelings that you wouldn't have otherwise. And those new things can improve your understanding of yourself. I recently understood that I need to avoid people with fragile ego, that get hurt when their opinion is challenged or proven wrong and people that assign to other people the responsibility not only for their speech and actions, but also for the emotions those things invoked in them. I also need to build up my emotional resistance to being misjudged and cut off without chance of defending myself, because it turned out I'm quite sensitive to that.
  - callesgg 5y ago
    That is a good realization! Damaged/broken people are dangerous to be around. > But people can make you think the thoughts and feel the feelings that you wouldn't have otherwise. And those new things can improve your understanding of yourself. True. However those insights can’t be reached from learning about them through a verbal description on the meta level like they are in this article. If I tell you it is good to be happy does that realization make you happy? No. To make you happy I must “manipulate” you (or to use terminology from the article your elephant) into being happy. Just telling you “be happy” does not work.
- h2odragon 5y ago
  "How do we become better at understanding others" is an eternal question. The answer that works for you wont work for others, and vice versa likewise, as well. I can speak to most mammals and many reptiles, but that "body language" sense interferes severely with understanding people. They're almost always unaware of and fighting those layers of themselves, and my guesses as to the mental states causing that are no better than random. Their inner demons and happy ponies are totally different from the ones leading me astray.
ekianjo 5y ago
> As the gaming company Valve puts it: “Hiring well is the most important thing in the universe.” Nope, Hiring is basically almost random no matter how much energy or tests you put in it, you can never know someone well until you actually work with them on a daily basis.
- tall 5y ago
  Bingo
- mdorazio 5y ago
  Partially agree. A good hiring process can boost your odds of finding the “right” people, but my personal experience has been that firing well is at least as important as hiring well. Firing well is also something that most companies do very poorly.
  - whatever_dude 5y ago
    This. It's extremely difficult to hire well, because no one knows what that even is. Firing well is somewhat easier because almost everybody knows who must be fired, but taking action is the difficult part.
    - ItsMonkk 5y ago
      It seems rather obvious to me that most hiring should be done at the intern/contractor level, where the interview process is extremely basic and let's most people through. Can you do a single basic level hackerrank question? Welcome aboard. Pushing for harder and harder questions simply doesn't accomplish anything real. Once proven that a candidate is able to learn and adapt to the job, they should be moved to a full-time position, with pay above what is currently being given to that role. If they aren't excellent, let them go. As a company you want to advertise this promotion experience so that people who know they will pass this test will feel more comfortable signing up for a "lowly" temp position. The top 5% or so of candidates might not take that offer, but you can leave a hole for exceptional candidates based on past experiences and proven success.
- 5y ago
tall 5y ago
“Start with an opener that makes it safe to convey private information: “Thanks for taking the time. I’m trying to find the right seat for Jane and I’m investing the time in speaking to people who know her. Everything you say will be off the record, and I don’t plan on conveying any of it back to Jane.”” 1. This is deceptive you’re pretending to want to help someone to further your own goals. I.e. immoral. 2. This encourages Bad actors to script their references. Its easy to send a script to people who act as professional references it’s a cheap service. All this does is catch anyone who doesn’t.
samvher 5y ago
A lot of this seems like pretty typical consulting/business wisdom - be a mastermind of people, build carefully designed teams where all the personalities complement each other, ask people hard and somewhat unexpected questions during interviews (catch them off guard, intimidate them a bit, establish your dominance, see if they get shaken). What I'm never quite sure about is whether this actually works: it always looks a bit like a confidence game. As long as you can convince people that you're able to design great teams they will give you leadership positions and pay you a lot, and until something happens that breaks the spell, you get away with it (and you get to keep believing in it yourself, as well, which makes the sell easier). I am sure that personalities matter, but given the complexity and unpredictability of social dynamics I'm skeptical about this really working the way it's presented.
mpermar 5y ago
This post and the Leetcode post both today in HN are in the totally different extremes at hiring. Try to get to dissect the person's psyche or try to find the best algorithm-maker? Totally different ways of hiring. Is the right formula in between?
afpx 5y ago
Do new hires really matter all that much?
nickthemagicman 5y ago
Was this written by GPT3? It feels super vague and abstract.
as_i_fall 5y ago
Wow this is atrocious. All of the fairly meager advice in this is either bad or totally unactionable. The references to outmoded concepts from pop-psych and generic aphorisms also really aren't convincing me that this person has any idea what they're talking about.
- rramadass 5y ago
  Yep, it almost seems like a "Gish Gallop" of a lot of terms none of which have any sound standing.
comfyinnernet 5y ago
I read the description of a "self-authoring" mind. Can someone ELI5 how it differs from the description of a "psychopath"?
- bsedlm 5y ago
  It's not very easy to explain like you're five (it's like he says, to understand this requries more "up-front investment"). Maybe look in Kegan's wikipedia to have a better overview of what they mean by self-authoring mind (stage four in the big table) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kegan#The_Evolving_Self https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kegan#The_Evolving_Self
- n4r9 5y ago
  Just read the description as well. "Self-authoring" seems to mean simply having an agenda that informs your behaviour. This could be interpreted as manipulative, but not psychopathic. Psychopathy requires a cluster of other traits such as deficient emotional responses and lack of empathy or control.
- anonfornoreason 5y ago
  Do you want to go through life on a whim, at the mercy of your subconscious self, with no real insight into why you do the things you do, think the things you think, like the things you like? It's not psychopathic to want to tease out what you are, what you want, and once you do that, how to play the game of life such that you build your world to match what makes you happy? This can be at a macro/life level, but it can also be at a much smaller scale. There was an example in the article on it, but to add another one that I think is similar: student submits an essay to the teacher, it's a good essay with better grammar, fact checking, etc than their friend's essay. Their friend's essay gets a higher score. Upon reflection, the friend's essay, while being lower quality, plays to the obvious preferences/biases the teacher has displayed throughout the term. For your next essay, you both do the high quality work, but you work in some aspects of what you now know the teacher wants to hear. Is it manipulative or dishonest to do the latter? Some might think so. Other might think you are hacking the system to your advantage and hurting no one in the process.
macawfish 5y ago
The title should be something more like "an essay about why it doesn't make sense to trust HR"
- ARandomerDude 5y ago
  Amazingly, HR even advertises that you shouldn't trust them in the name Human Resources. I've thought about referring to my coworkers as "Resource <Last Name>" so many times...
iandanforth 5y ago
This seems like a load of crap. More specifically it seems like a pre-scientific mindset. You use analogy and metaphor to describe phenomena and structures that are only half-understood to try to rationalize them and fit them into some sort of consistent narrative. Wisdom is knowledge you can't describe. This seems like wisdom but just as it's really hard for a professional tennis player to describe exactly how they know where an opponent is going to hit a ball this guy seems to be grasping at straws to describe something he can't quite see and so can't quite describe to the rest of us. If you think personality assessments have significant predictive power, or that using more than one of them increases predictive power, you don't know how they were made, how they are commonly applied, or the realities of psychometric assessment. It's exactly the kind of straw people grasp for when they want to, but do not understand a phenomenon of behavior. If you follow this advice you will be participating in a cargo cult.
- tux1968 5y ago
  > it's really hard for a professional tennis player to describe exactly how they know where an opponent is going to hit a ball Andre Agassi explains one exact way in just under three minutes: https://youtu.be/57BMzCM6hQI https://youtu.be/57BMzCM6hQI
  - d0mine 5y ago
    It is rather specific. How many tennis players have such explicit ticks?
- yeahnah22 5y ago
  He literally discusses the origins and problems of various personality tests in his article
  - iandanforth 5y ago
    "he knew the Big Five was solid as science" His discussion is neither critical nor credible.
yeahnah22 5y ago
It’s become a trope that the news written about topics we know is woeful and unreliable, yet we trust the news written about anything else. Now I feel the same about HN. I know a decent amount about this topic - and the comments on this article are a dumpster fire so far. Hot take after hot take from people who didn’t understand the article, but act as if they did. Is the rest of HN like this, too?
- eigenket 5y ago
  A lot of comments on anything about quantum information/computation/foundations are definitely nonsense. Thats the only field I'm really qualified to make such judgements about.
- as_i_fall 5y ago
  So you're going to complain that nobody is getting the point of the article and then not explain yourself? Awesome
- petercooper 5y ago
  Is the rest of HN like this, too? There are certainly topics where the median level of discourse on HN doesn't approach the professional level of understanding (advertising is the one I notice) but that's true of any broad community. The overall level of discourse and knowledge on here is high regardless.
- mleonhard 5y ago
  The articles on software engineering are often high quality. The HN comments on such articles are usually better than the articles. I check https://news.ycombinator.com/classic https://news.ycombinator.com/classic rather than the front page. I have noticed that, in the last 6 months or so, more low-quality comments get voted to the first page on HN posts than before. It feels like a new Eternal September. I spend more of my downvotes on distracting reddit-style comments than on incorrect posts. Is my change in downvoting behavior contributing to the decline?
  - colpabar 5y ago
johnnybaptist 5y ago
Graham Duncan seems like he's had some real illuminating acid trips in his life. Good for him
jackbravo 5y ago
I loved this part, and it is something we try to do in my current company when interviewing. Interview for potential. What are they good for, even if not for us, and with the purpose of keep the door open if they decide to come back later. > I also try to stick to the default assumption that “everyone is an A player at something.” It’s a more effective and more dynamic way to approach an interview—a live, fascinating puzzle to discover what the elephant and the rider do well—rather than going in with the purpose of determining whether someone is an A player in a binary, Manichean way. I prefer to imagine that I’m trying to find the candidate the best possible job for them; it may be the job I had in mind, or something else altogether.

174 points by tlb 6y ago

This one is worth reading. I have already learned a few of the things in this article the hard way. If anything else here is half so useful, any time spent reading the rest of this will pay for itself many times over.

mcbishop 6y ago

> One of the greatest gifts we have for each other, for our children and spouses, for our teammates, is the positive feedback loop we can put someone into purely by believing in them, by seeing their genius and their dysfunction clearly and then helping them construct conditions for the former to flourish. Beautiful.

RGamma 5y ago
You better enter that positive feedback loop, because if not you will be let go of. The surface sentiment is enablement but there's always a component of "if you don't perform you're screwed" lurking in the background.
flpq 5y ago
"He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches." In general, I think a teacher classifying genius and dysfunction is putting people into boxes and may harm his students more than helping them. I've never encountered a great teacher who talks like that. I've met many people justifying their existence and positions who do talk like that.
- tall 5y ago
  Agreed this article is pedantic without saying much. (Not to insult the author, I write in similar fashion and so do lots of other people)
- watwut 5y ago
  > He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches. And the one who cant teach, complains about teachers. In my experience people who say the above are unable to teach anybody anything.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  we're all contextually geniuses or dysfunctional - I think the thing the writer is advocating for is trying to find the right context based on an attempt at an accurate assessment of the person, and how you might go about assessing people.
- d0mine 5y ago
  It reminds me of an experiment where genius were assigned at random among schoolchildren and how it affected their results (only because teachers thought they geniuses). https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/09/18/161159263/teachers-expectations-can-influence-how-students-perform https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/09/18/1611592...
bhrgunatha 5y ago
I used to teach children whose internal state is generally easier to assess than adults. I remember watching as one kid said to another "I believe in you" to help out in some moment of crisis. It struck me as odd - something cheesy they'd (probably) heard in a movie or cartoon. But if they are saying that to each other then I could probably use it to communicate better with them as long as it was sincere. I'd say it sparingly when I thought it might be appropriate or helpful. The reactions were surprising to me, not at the time I said it, but later on. I'm not suggesting I was a major influence that sets kids on the right track, but I think it helped out somewhat and for some reason that specific phrase seemed much more powerful than other forms of encouragement.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
intergalplan 5y ago
This is pretty much what the show Ted Lasso is all about. I think it's the key reason people find it so wholesome and charming.

jancsika 6y ago

> Absent negative externalities or monopoly effects, a man receives from the free market what he gives to it, his material worth is a running tally of the net benefit that he has provided to his fellow man. Reminds me of a line from a movie, something like this: "If everyone played poker the way they're supposed to, I would win 100% of the time."

nyanpasu64 6y ago
Wrong article, did you mean to comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26986675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26986675 ?
dxdm 5y ago
That original quote about the free market seems tautological to me: "In a perfectly fair system, the outcomes would be fair". I can see why that's an attractive ideal, but it doesn't seem very useful to me.

ksm1717 6y ago

This was like a what you need to know tour through all of the LinkedIn-pro-sponsored, pseudo-quantitative approaches to evaluating personality guided by self fulfilling anecdotes and a glut of paraphrases/quotes from people I’ve never heard of. In other words, a lot of ideas clicked if somewhat reductive and Machiavellian. And certainly well researched and written.

networkimprov 6y ago

This is a relatively deep look into the bottomless task of considering a candiate for a role in an organization. It bears multiple readings. It suggests that you may not learn much from interviews with the candidate, and may learn much more from face to face interviews with their references. It encourages the reader to seek both the genius and dysfunction of every person (candidates and references), for each context they've worked in. (Altho I'd refer to these as their inherent irrationality and ingenuity; dysfunction and genius are the extremes.)

blondin 6y ago

thanks for sharing. i like how the author prefaces this essay with the fact that it's all a game. otherwise, i would think it's (the personality assessment part, which is half of it) a bit too reductionist. the fact that some firms out there are going after people with some "personality type" isn't surprising to me, but seeing it clearly stated is... "seeing the water" is very profound. it's something that has got me thinking a lot lately. what good is a feedback loop if nobody in your circle sees the water?

galaxyLogic 6y ago

I'm not sure I got much of value out of this on a quick reading. Could someone summarize the lessons of this article? I think it's too psyche-oriented. Trying to psycho-analyze the candidates? Trying to find a person from whom you can get the maximum benefit? I've always had the feeling that people who are very interested in psychology are really trying to gain an edge over the others who they now "understand better" than the person him or herself. Think of playing poker. If you understand your opponents it will give you a a benefit. And it's an interesting exercise. But on the other hand you could spend more time mastering the probabilities and counting cards, and gain an advantage by simply being a better player yourself.

op03 6y ago
It needs to be psych oriented. If you are in high pressure situations you need people who can handle pressure, stay focused etc i.e. not neurotics. Discovering that they cant, when shit hits the fan will have a big cost. On the other hand, if you are dealing with problems requiring curiosity, there is more tolerance for the neurotics and less tolerance for obedience trait holders who need to be told what to do. Psychology gives team managers that mental framework of what to look for, a vocabulary to think about the types of chimps in the population, where they fit, what they can handle, when they need a break, the spectrum of rewards and punishments that work depending on the personality type, needs, values etc. Without that knowledge, most good managers will spend a lot of time coming up with their own frameworks (usually to fit a very specific small problem domain) that will invariably resemble what already exists in psych text books. Yes some managers will take advantage of the knowledge but that is a separate issue to whether the knowledge is required to build good teams. It is.
marcus_holmes 5y ago
In my experience most psychology students are confused about themselves and trying to work out why they are the way they are and how they can deal with that. Less Machiavellian, more simple survival.
- scotty79 5y ago
  My friend studying psychology told me that at the beginnig of their studies one professor told them: Some of you came here to help yourselves. It won't work.

danuker 6y ago

> I’m looking for the felt sense of a “hungry mind” based on the way their questions flow. That’s very hard to fake. As a candidate, just imagine you own the company. The questions will flow naturally once you think about what those clowns are doing with your money.

StavrosK 6y ago
What happens if the hungry mind is too hungry for your menial CRUD job, and you were actually better off with the unhungry mind that is content to do its job and go home at the end of the day?
- rubatuga 5y ago
  Maybe they end up depressed and start looking for meaning in life.
  - wffurr 5y ago
    Make sure you don’t pay quite enough for the rapidly increasing cost of housing in the area and make them feel dependent on your employer-provided healthcare. Then they’ll buckle down and deal with it for the sake of some illusory stability.
- danuker 5y ago
  To me, the CRUD menial job is what pays my bills. It may be boring at times, but "the obstacle is the way", given that the customers pay for it. But sometimes I get to automate some of the CRUD, which is fun.
amelius 5y ago
You might discover that being an employee is a bad deal anyway, and become a freelancer instead or start your own company.
- danuker 5y ago
  You might still find it useful to imagine you own your clients' company, then.

lordnacho 6y ago

I liked the essay and certainly learned a few things. But how are you going to put the stuff about references to use? It's going to be limited how many people you know who also know a candidate you're interested in. References from the candidate will have a heavy positive bias because who on earth wants to spoil someone's chances of getting a job? I actually gave a very positive reference this week, an honest one for a friend I've worked with who really is a top guy, while thinking that the recruiter must hear this all the time.

marcus_holmes 5y ago
A friend of mine told me to get more endorsements on LinkedIn. I never bothered because I dismiss them out of hand when considering candidates - they're usually the result of trades with ex-colleagues, and not a heartfelt "wow this person was amazing to work with!". Like your opinion of references - they're rigged to be positive always, so kinda worthless. But I could be wrong. Other people are weird ;)

FeepingCreature 6y ago

Okay, but how do you know all this works?

StavrosK 6y ago
You have to rely on your decades-long confirmation bias. I doubt the author (or anyone) goes back to their interview notes a year after hiring the candidate to see how much they got right.
- hiq 5y ago
  It's also hard to do unless you're hiring for several similar positions at the same time. If you hired only one guy, who's to say that the others you rejected would have performed better or worse? If you hired 3 for similar positions, you can start making guesses from interview performances and (in)validating them one year after. But as you said I don't think it's done in practice anyway.
  - StavrosK 5y ago
    It's too bad, because I think it's necessary to go back and check how your predictions were. tptacek had a good process that was consistent, quantified and checked afterwards, but the average interview process (mine included) is just random stuff that ultimately feed into my bias.
  - smnscu 5y ago
    I once hired two engineers for the same role on my team; they both seemed about the same level during the interview. After working with them for a while, one of them was perfectly adequate, the other turned out to be the best engineer I've ever worked with.
    - mdorazio 5y ago
      Did that help you reframe your hiring strategy for the future? Curious what qualities in the second engineer both made them better and could have been revealed in an interview.

callesgg 5y ago

Yet another person trying to teach what can’t be taught through verbal lessons. Or maybe it can and I have just never been able to find anyone that is able to. Basically you understand other people with reference to your understanding of yourself, to become better at understanding other people you need to change the way you understand yourself. Someone else will not be able to change your understanding of yourself. You must do that yourself.

scotty79 5y ago
> Someone else will not be able to change your understanding of yourself. You must do that yourself. But people can make you think the thoughts and feel the feelings that you wouldn't have otherwise. And those new things can improve your understanding of yourself. I recently understood that I need to avoid people with fragile ego, that get hurt when their opinion is challenged or proven wrong and people that assign to other people the responsibility not only for their speech and actions, but also for the emotions those things invoked in them. I also need to build up my emotional resistance to being misjudged and cut off without chance of defending myself, because it turned out I'm quite sensitive to that.
- callesgg 5y ago
  That is a good realization! Damaged/broken people are dangerous to be around. > But people can make you think the thoughts and feel the feelings that you wouldn't have otherwise. And those new things can improve your understanding of yourself. True. However those insights can’t be reached from learning about them through a verbal description on the meta level like they are in this article. If I tell you it is good to be happy does that realization make you happy? No. To make you happy I must “manipulate” you (or to use terminology from the article your elephant) into being happy. Just telling you “be happy” does not work.
h2odragon 5y ago
"How do we become better at understanding others" is an eternal question. The answer that works for you wont work for others, and vice versa likewise, as well. I can speak to most mammals and many reptiles, but that "body language" sense interferes severely with understanding people. They're almost always unaware of and fighting those layers of themselves, and my guesses as to the mental states causing that are no better than random. Their inner demons and happy ponies are totally different from the ones leading me astray.

ekianjo 5y ago

> As the gaming company Valve puts it: “Hiring well is the most important thing in the universe.” Nope, Hiring is basically almost random no matter how much energy or tests you put in it, you can never know someone well until you actually work with them on a daily basis.

tall 5y ago
Bingo
mdorazio 5y ago
Partially agree. A good hiring process can boost your odds of finding the “right” people, but my personal experience has been that firing well is at least as important as hiring well. Firing well is also something that most companies do very poorly.
- whatever_dude 5y ago
  This. It's extremely difficult to hire well, because no one knows what that even is. Firing well is somewhat easier because almost everybody knows who must be fired, but taking action is the difficult part.
  - ItsMonkk 5y ago
    It seems rather obvious to me that most hiring should be done at the intern/contractor level, where the interview process is extremely basic and let's most people through. Can you do a single basic level hackerrank question? Welcome aboard. Pushing for harder and harder questions simply doesn't accomplish anything real. Once proven that a candidate is able to learn and adapt to the job, they should be moved to a full-time position, with pay above what is currently being given to that role. If they aren't excellent, let them go. As a company you want to advertise this promotion experience so that people who know they will pass this test will feel more comfortable signing up for a "lowly" temp position. The top 5% or so of candidates might not take that offer, but you can leave a hole for exceptional candidates based on past experiences and proven success.
5y ago

tall 5y ago

“Start with an opener that makes it safe to convey private information: “Thanks for taking the time. I’m trying to find the right seat for Jane and I’m investing the time in speaking to people who know her. Everything you say will be off the record, and I don’t plan on conveying any of it back to Jane.”” 1. This is deceptive you’re pretending to want to help someone to further your own goals. I.e. immoral. 2. This encourages Bad actors to script their references. Its easy to send a script to people who act as professional references it’s a cheap service. All this does is catch anyone who doesn’t.

samvher 5y ago

A lot of this seems like pretty typical consulting/business wisdom - be a mastermind of people, build carefully designed teams where all the personalities complement each other, ask people hard and somewhat unexpected questions during interviews (catch them off guard, intimidate them a bit, establish your dominance, see if they get shaken). What I'm never quite sure about is whether this actually works: it always looks a bit like a confidence game. As long as you can convince people that you're able to design great teams they will give you leadership positions and pay you a lot, and until something happens that breaks the spell, you get away with it (and you get to keep believing in it yourself, as well, which makes the sell easier). I am sure that personalities matter, but given the complexity and unpredictability of social dynamics I'm skeptical about this really working the way it's presented.

mpermar 5y ago

This post and the Leetcode post both today in HN are in the totally different extremes at hiring. Try to get to dissect the person's psyche or try to find the best algorithm-maker? Totally different ways of hiring. Is the right formula in between?

afpx 5y ago

Do new hires really matter all that much?

nickthemagicman 5y ago

Was this written by GPT3? It feels super vague and abstract.

as_i_fall 5y ago

Wow this is atrocious. All of the fairly meager advice in this is either bad or totally unactionable. The references to outmoded concepts from pop-psych and generic aphorisms also really aren't convincing me that this person has any idea what they're talking about.

rramadass 5y ago
Yep, it almost seems like a "Gish Gallop" of a lot of terms none of which have any sound standing.

comfyinnernet 5y ago

I read the description of a "self-authoring" mind. Can someone ELI5 how it differs from the description of a "psychopath"?

bsedlm 5y ago
It's not very easy to explain like you're five (it's like he says, to understand this requries more "up-front investment"). Maybe look in Kegan's wikipedia to have a better overview of what they mean by self-authoring mind (stage four in the big table) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kegan#The_Evolving_Self https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kegan#The_Evolving_Self
n4r9 5y ago
Just read the description as well. "Self-authoring" seems to mean simply having an agenda that informs your behaviour. This could be interpreted as manipulative, but not psychopathic. Psychopathy requires a cluster of other traits such as deficient emotional responses and lack of empathy or control.
anonfornoreason 5y ago
Do you want to go through life on a whim, at the mercy of your subconscious self, with no real insight into why you do the things you do, think the things you think, like the things you like? It's not psychopathic to want to tease out what you are, what you want, and once you do that, how to play the game of life such that you build your world to match what makes you happy? This can be at a macro/life level, but it can also be at a much smaller scale. There was an example in the article on it, but to add another one that I think is similar: student submits an essay to the teacher, it's a good essay with better grammar, fact checking, etc than their friend's essay. Their friend's essay gets a higher score. Upon reflection, the friend's essay, while being lower quality, plays to the obvious preferences/biases the teacher has displayed throughout the term. For your next essay, you both do the high quality work, but you work in some aspects of what you now know the teacher wants to hear. Is it manipulative or dishonest to do the latter? Some might think so. Other might think you are hacking the system to your advantage and hurting no one in the process.

macawfish 5y ago

The title should be something more like "an essay about why it doesn't make sense to trust HR"

ARandomerDude 5y ago
Amazingly, HR even advertises that you shouldn't trust them in the name Human Resources. I've thought about referring to my coworkers as "Resource <Last Name>" so many times...

iandanforth 5y ago

This seems like a load of crap. More specifically it seems like a pre-scientific mindset. You use analogy and metaphor to describe phenomena and structures that are only half-understood to try to rationalize them and fit them into some sort of consistent narrative. Wisdom is knowledge you can't describe. This seems like wisdom but just as it's really hard for a professional tennis player to describe exactly how they know where an opponent is going to hit a ball this guy seems to be grasping at straws to describe something he can't quite see and so can't quite describe to the rest of us. If you think personality assessments have significant predictive power, or that using more than one of them increases predictive power, you don't know how they were made, how they are commonly applied, or the realities of psychometric assessment. It's exactly the kind of straw people grasp for when they want to, but do not understand a phenomenon of behavior. If you follow this advice you will be participating in a cargo cult.

tux1968 5y ago
> it's really hard for a professional tennis player to describe exactly how they know where an opponent is going to hit a ball Andre Agassi explains one exact way in just under three minutes: https://youtu.be/57BMzCM6hQI https://youtu.be/57BMzCM6hQI
- d0mine 5y ago
  It is rather specific. How many tennis players have such explicit ticks?
yeahnah22 5y ago
He literally discusses the origins and problems of various personality tests in his article
- iandanforth 5y ago
  "he knew the Big Five was solid as science" His discussion is neither critical nor credible.

yeahnah22 5y ago

It’s become a trope that the news written about topics we know is woeful and unreliable, yet we trust the news written about anything else. Now I feel the same about HN. I know a decent amount about this topic - and the comments on this article are a dumpster fire so far. Hot take after hot take from people who didn’t understand the article, but act as if they did. Is the rest of HN like this, too?

eigenket 5y ago
A lot of comments on anything about quantum information/computation/foundations are definitely nonsense. Thats the only field I'm really qualified to make such judgements about.
as_i_fall 5y ago
So you're going to complain that nobody is getting the point of the article and then not explain yourself? Awesome
petercooper 5y ago
Is the rest of HN like this, too? There are certainly topics where the median level of discourse on HN doesn't approach the professional level of understanding (advertising is the one I notice) but that's true of any broad community. The overall level of discourse and knowledge on here is high regardless.
mleonhard 5y ago
The articles on software engineering are often high quality. The HN comments on such articles are usually better than the articles. I check https://news.ycombinator.com/classic https://news.ycombinator.com/classic rather than the front page. I have noticed that, in the last 6 months or so, more low-quality comments get voted to the first page on HN posts than before. It feels like a new Eternal September. I spend more of my downvotes on distracting reddit-style comments than on incorrect posts. Is my change in downvoting behavior contributing to the decline?
- colpabar 5y ago

johnnybaptist 5y ago

Graham Duncan seems like he's had some real illuminating acid trips in his life. Good for him

jackbravo 5y ago

I loved this part, and it is something we try to do in my current company when interviewing. Interview for potential. What are they good for, even if not for us, and with the purpose of keep the door open if they decide to come back later. > I also try to stick to the default assumption that “everyone is an A player at something.” It’s a more effective and more dynamic way to approach an interview—a live, fascinating puzzle to discover what the elephant and the rider do well—rather than going in with the purpose of determining whether someone is an A player in a binary, Manichean way. I prefer to imagine that I’m trying to find the candidate the best possible job for them; it may be the job I had in mind, or something else altogether.