5 ms·

Ask HN: How to assess low ego personality during an engineering interview?

9 points by quantisan 5y ago

quantisan 5y ago
OP here. I ask the candidate to describe a time that they inconvenienced others. Describe the situation, what happened, what happened afterward. Basically poking at the situation to identify humility and accountability. I'm not entirely convinced of this approach because it bias towards people who are good at interviewing or telling a story. So I'm wondering is there other method you found useful?
- throwawaysleep 5y ago
  I will inconvenience others for my own gain fairly regularly. I know to give a very apologetic answer here and repeatedly be willing to admit I was wrong. Your problem is that you too clearly telegraph the answer you want. It is too obvious that this is a “no jerks” test question. You want a question like this, that I nearly screwed up recently for a team I am on now. “How do you feel about members of the team who you believe is not pulling their weight and how would you address that as their co-worker? How do you ensure that team member doesn’t drag the team down?” Plenty of people answer this question by immediately jumping to termination, complaining to the manager, or some version of “reading the riot act.” You will find little introspection in their answers or interrogation of why that person is underperforming. It seems like a behavioural question on an underperforming colleague. But how they answer says a lot about themselves. Do they trust their immediate judgement that their colleague is underperforming? Do they take the initiative to get them fired? Is there compassion? Do they try to collect evidence and specific details before taking action? My winning answer to this question was a story about how the best engineer I ever knew was fired unfairly because he spent his time helping others and thus was not truly underperforming.
draw_down 5y ago
gregjor 5y ago
Have a professional psychologist participate. Personality profiling is a moral and legal slippery slope, and not something random interviewers should be doing. Good luck with the ADA and discrimination lawsuits. It’s bad enough that the nonsense Myers-Brigg profiling “test” is used seriously in professional settings. Can you even define “low ego personality?” Seems like a subjective assessment, as colored by your perceptions as the candidate’s performance. Can you show with data that “low ego” correlates significantly to job performance? That the people you hire are clearly lower in ego than those you don’t? If you’re not referring to clinical categories from the DSM you’re just judging people with no objective or scientific criteria in an artificial and stressful situation.
- throwawaysleep 5y ago
  I took to mean how to avoid jerks that are difficult to work with as they think they are always right.
  - gregjor 5y ago
    I would probably interpret an amateur psychologist trying to analyze my level of ego in an interview as a jerk. The best way to filter out jerks is to look at their job history and talk to references, learn to read between the lines of a resume rather than focusing solely on programming languages and tools and “stacks.” Engineers with such poor people skills that they can’t pick up clues from a resume, references, and interviews should not be trying to come up with probing questions to measure “low ego,” any more than psychologists should be writing code. My practical advice is to get people who aren’t engineers to participate in interviews. Ask a sales or marketing person, or an effective non-technical manager who is good with people to sit in and get their take. Make sure your interviewers are more diverse than a typical programming team. I don’t think the OP was referring to “ego” the way a psychologist would. Ego has a specific meaning in psychology. It doesn’t mean “capacity for jerk-like behavior.” This particular problem — ego and investment in work among programmers — was explored decades ago by Gerald Weinberg in The Psychology of Computer Programming. Tom Demarco wrote a good practical book called Peopleware. Study of this topic dates back to the ‘60s and ‘70s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egoless_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egoless_programming
catsarebetter 5y ago
I think low ego people attract low ego people. Some are naturally better at detecting this than others. The problem is that high ego people have a really bad radar for this stuff and attract high ego people, and for some reason they think that they're also low ego. I adopted some ideas from Ray Dalio, but essentially, pain -> fear -> empowerment -> confidence -> ego (-> = creates). It's actual work to keep yourself from having a high ego, esp. as you naturally advance in life. Maybe I have a naturally high ego, but I have to do things like: - Practice self awareness through journaling and introspection - Medidate, think rationally, respond but don't react - Assume that there's always a lesson in pain - Assume that if I'm mad at someone, I'm missing some piece of info about them or the situation (~90% accurate) - Read books - Talk to people who have achieved more and are generally just nicer to be around than me. - When I'm wrong, verbally admit it to myself and anyone else involved. - Constantly be open to learning how imperfect I am. So then I would just ask them: "What do you do to manage your own ego?" It's principally the same question as what do you do to manage your emotions such as fear and happiness, etc. But unless you can deeply answer these yourself, as I claim above, you probably won't be able to assess whether they're giving you a high or low ego answer. ^ These are my thoughts, I'm not claiming that I'm 100% right.
faangiq 5y ago
What are you interviewing for? A perfect human or someone who can fulfill a job function?

9 points by quantisan 5y ago

OP here. I ask the candidate to describe a time that they inconvenienced others. Describe the situation, what happened, what happened afterward. Basically poking at the situation to identify humility and accountability. I'm not entirely convinced of this approach because it bias towards people who are good at interviewing or telling a story. So I'm wondering is there other method you found useful?

throwawaysleep 5y ago
I will inconvenience others for my own gain fairly regularly. I know to give a very apologetic answer here and repeatedly be willing to admit I was wrong. Your problem is that you too clearly telegraph the answer you want. It is too obvious that this is a “no jerks” test question. You want a question like this, that I nearly screwed up recently for a team I am on now. “How do you feel about members of the team who you believe is not pulling their weight and how would you address that as their co-worker? How do you ensure that team member doesn’t drag the team down?” Plenty of people answer this question by immediately jumping to termination, complaining to the manager, or some version of “reading the riot act.” You will find little introspection in their answers or interrogation of why that person is underperforming. It seems like a behavioural question on an underperforming colleague. But how they answer says a lot about themselves. Do they trust their immediate judgement that their colleague is underperforming? Do they take the initiative to get them fired? Is there compassion? Do they try to collect evidence and specific details before taking action? My winning answer to this question was a story about how the best engineer I ever knew was fired unfairly because he spent his time helping others and thus was not truly underperforming.

draw_down 5y ago

gregjor 5y ago

Have a professional psychologist participate. Personality profiling is a moral and legal slippery slope, and not something random interviewers should be doing. Good luck with the ADA and discrimination lawsuits. It’s bad enough that the nonsense Myers-Brigg profiling “test” is used seriously in professional settings. Can you even define “low ego personality?” Seems like a subjective assessment, as colored by your perceptions as the candidate’s performance. Can you show with data that “low ego” correlates significantly to job performance? That the people you hire are clearly lower in ego than those you don’t? If you’re not referring to clinical categories from the DSM you’re just judging people with no objective or scientific criteria in an artificial and stressful situation.

throwawaysleep 5y ago
I took to mean how to avoid jerks that are difficult to work with as they think they are always right.
- gregjor 5y ago
  I would probably interpret an amateur psychologist trying to analyze my level of ego in an interview as a jerk. The best way to filter out jerks is to look at their job history and talk to references, learn to read between the lines of a resume rather than focusing solely on programming languages and tools and “stacks.” Engineers with such poor people skills that they can’t pick up clues from a resume, references, and interviews should not be trying to come up with probing questions to measure “low ego,” any more than psychologists should be writing code. My practical advice is to get people who aren’t engineers to participate in interviews. Ask a sales or marketing person, or an effective non-technical manager who is good with people to sit in and get their take. Make sure your interviewers are more diverse than a typical programming team. I don’t think the OP was referring to “ego” the way a psychologist would. Ego has a specific meaning in psychology. It doesn’t mean “capacity for jerk-like behavior.” This particular problem — ego and investment in work among programmers — was explored decades ago by Gerald Weinberg in The Psychology of Computer Programming. Tom Demarco wrote a good practical book called Peopleware. Study of this topic dates back to the ‘60s and ‘70s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egoless_programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egoless_programming

catsarebetter 5y ago

I think low ego people attract low ego people. Some are naturally better at detecting this than others. The problem is that high ego people have a really bad radar for this stuff and attract high ego people, and for some reason they think that they're also low ego. I adopted some ideas from Ray Dalio, but essentially, pain -> fear -> empowerment -> confidence -> ego (-> = creates). It's actual work to keep yourself from having a high ego, esp. as you naturally advance in life. Maybe I have a naturally high ego, but I have to do things like: - Practice self awareness through journaling and introspection - Medidate, think rationally, respond but don't react - Assume that there's always a lesson in pain - Assume that if I'm mad at someone, I'm missing some piece of info about them or the situation (~90% accurate) - Read books - Talk to people who have achieved more and are generally just nicer to be around than me. - When I'm wrong, verbally admit it to myself and anyone else involved. - Constantly be open to learning how imperfect I am. So then I would just ask them: "What do you do to manage your own ego?" It's principally the same question as what do you do to manage your emotions such as fear and happiness, etc. But unless you can deeply answer these yourself, as I claim above, you probably won't be able to assess whether they're giving you a high or low ego answer. ^ These are my thoughts, I'm not claiming that I'm 100% right.

faangiq 5y ago

What are you interviewing for? A perfect human or someone who can fulfill a job function?