6 ms·

It depends on the role you're hiring for. I suspect a lot of comments in this thread, echoing your sentiment, will be written from the perspective of sharp-end-

It depends on the role you're hiring for. I suspect a lot of comments in this thread, echoing your sentiment, will be written from the perspective of sharp-end-of-the-stick engineers for whom the idea of working on ambiguous organizational problems is an abstract concept, far from their day to day. Not saying that's you per se, but this is HN after all. This crowd loves for things to be clear-cut, especially when they absolutely can't be. For roles that require discontinuous improvement to company process or culture, it's necessary to get a glimpse into how someone thinks, and the elements that went into building their worldview. You need to know how they will react under pressure to an extent that I think is largely irrelevant for a lot of engineering roles. In other words, the difference between a psychological evaluation of an individual and that individual's potential to do this sort of work becomes very muddy and indistinct. You want to have a picture of their psychology, because the problems you're hiring them for are often psychological in nature. This is not a popular opinion among engineering types; we like things arrayed in black and white, passing tests and failing tests. But that's naive.

finnthehuman 3y ago
I don’t think “oh haha aren’t engineers robotic personalities” applies here. Fucking nobody I know gives too much of their real personality at work, let alone when interviewing. But “haha aren’t all engineers only friends with other nerds and barely live in the real word” so what do I know?
- em-bee 3y ago
  nobody I know gives too much of their real personality at work i don't believe that. are you claiming that they are all faking it? i would not want to work in a place where people fake their personality just to fit in. my experience from working on FOSS projects suggests that the stereotypical behavior we see in some engineers is in fact real. not as exaggerated as people claim, but the signs are there. more importantly however is that among engineers i feel there is less expectation to conform to some kind of normalized behavior or personality. at best, certain aspects of someones personality don't get an opportunity to show. say for example how someone cares for their family or animals, or volunteers in non-tech areas. an alternative interpretation of your statement would be that people do not show all of their personality at work, but only those aspects that are relevant for the work. and that is just what is needed. showing someones full personality at work is not what is expected here. a more negative side of this is that in some places certain aspects of a personality are being actively suppressed. say, calling out problems that hurt the company, or trying to be helpful to others (and possibly hurting your own performance because of it)
  - the_mar 3y ago
    It's not really faking it, but it is surface level. My coworkers don't really need to know about my childhood trauma, my struggles or my hopes and dreams.
    - em-bee 3y ago
      ok, yes, putting it this way does make more sense. reality however is that at least for me, my childhood experience affects how i work. although i acknowledge that this is more about self reflection and not about actually sharing this with anyone at work. but it does deeply affect how i interact with them. for example as a team leader i can become very protective of those under me.
      - the_mar 3y ago
        Completely agree, it is very important to reflect on how your experiences shaped you and become self-aware. You may choose to share some of the deeper reasoning as to why you act one way or another, with certain people under certain circumstances. But it is a choice and not a requirement. "I tend to be very protective of my team" should be sufficient, especially in an an interview setting
  - finnthehuman 3y ago
    > i would not want to work in a place where people fake their personality just to fit in. You know that statistically some number of the people you work and collaborate productively with, and get along with. They would, if given the option, never interact with you again for the rest of their lives. You know this, right? I am a boring robot engineer because it’s easy to do. The “how was your weekend” conversations are about tech hobbies because I’m not sharing the occasions I got drunk, took mushrooms and hung out in a pool full of naked people for most of a day.
    - em-bee 3y ago
      You know that statistically some number of the people you work and collaborate productively with, and get along with. They would, if given the option, never interact with you again for the rest of their lives. You know this, right? i don't know that because i don't care. what i care about is that we can get along at work. at that point that is all that matters. chances are that the longer we work together the more we get to know each other and the more we learn to respect each other and the more likely we may enjoy interacting outside of work. i think this goes back to the difference between europeans and americans: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39006092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39006092 well, actually it is europeans and the rest of the world, because everywhere i have been to, north america, asia and africa, people are friendlier than in europe. but it can't possibly be true that the whole world except europe is faking being nice. it doesn't make sense. i rather think that people honestly believe that being nice is the right way how to interact with others, and that has absolutely nothing to do with being fake. it is the very thing that allows us to get along. whether i want to hang out with you after work is not a question of getting along or of our personality but one of having common interests or beliefs. and if someone doesn't want to hang out with me ever again, then it's not only because we really do not have any common interests or beliefs but also because that person is likely rather closed minded. (to be clear, not wanting to hang out is not a sign of being closed minded. they may simply have other priorities. not wanting to interact ever again for the rest of their lives however does look quite closed minded to me) people didn't join linus torvalds to develop the kernel because of his friendly personality or richard stallman for that matter. for sure, a friendly personality does make that easier, and a hostile one will put of some people for whom the personality does matter more, likely due to their own past experiences.
- throwaway98797 3y ago
  i’m weird as hell at work i slowly show more and more of my personality not right for everyone but i prefer being me even if it costs $$$
slibhb 3y ago
It's unclear to me how "non-engineering types" can make use of stories about e.g. "caring for a dying parent" in the context of a job interview. I mean, can anyone (layperson or not) actually "psychologically evaluate" someone based on anecdotes from their life? I also worry that this stuff can be gamed. If an applicant gains an advantage by telling a story about how he "cared for his dying aunt while finishing a degree and thereby learned what's really important in life," then you're just encouraging a confessional (and potentionally dishonest) style of approaching an interview.
- the_mar 3y ago
  I have a ton of stories of a "cared for his dying aunt..." variety, 99% of the time when asked about personal stuff in the interview I am forced to lie, because otherwise the interviewer is coming out of that deeply scarred. So my perspective is that anyone who tells you a "cared for his dying aunt..." story is full of shit and definitely is playing you.
  - hnfong 3y ago
    I agree probing into the candidate's childhood is probably a bad idea as an interview topic. However, for sake of argument, given that your story is true, shouldn't it also be evidence that those _not_ talking about "caring for dying aunt" is lying too? I mean, you told a story that didn't involve caring for a dying aunt, and that was a lie. We actually don't have evidence (either within your story, or in general I suppose?) that anyone would make up a story about a dying aunt to an interviewer...?
    - the_mar 3y ago
      Yes, I have a whole palatable origin story prepared, that lines up with what people want to hear and isn't traumatizing. So it is entirely useless as a signal. Not my fault that my life experiences aren't made for a casual conversation starter. Which is why I say this line of questioning isn't going to produce good outcomes. And of course we don't have evidence that people make up dying aunt stories necessarily. But if anyone tells me this is the kind of experience that made them realize what's important is at the very least embellishing the truth. When I was caring for my dying father, I learned how to function on autopilot, perpetually sleep deprived, in an emotional fog. I was also writing my master thesis and struggling to pay rent with shitty student jobs. Did it make me "realize what is truly important", hell no, but it did make me be ok with cutting corners, doing the bare minimum at work/school and striving for mediocrity because I didn't have physical or mental capacity for anything else. This isn't exactly the kind of thing employers want to hear, so I'd never bring this story up unless specifically asked. And then I'll tell you how it taught me about "what is truly important in life" which is disingenuous
iamacyborg 3y ago
> In other words, the difference between a psychological evaluation of an individual and that individual's potential to do this sort of work becomes very muddy and indistinct. You want to have a picture of their psychology, because the problems you're hiring them for are often psychological in nature. That might be true but if it’s important then it should be conducted by a trained psychologist, not some random hiring manager.
verticalscaler 3y ago
> You want to have a picture of their psychology, because the problems you're hiring them for are often psychological in nature. This reminds me of a blind date I went on in Korea. We somehow ended up kidding around about how some women really take astrology way too seriously only for her to demand my blood type later on in the evening. I never knew this, turns out in Korea your blood type is very important as it determines your personality traits.
PaulHoule 3y ago
Sometimes I think some people in business have a pathological need for things to be poorly defined. They dread a visit to the ontologist even more than they do to the orthodontist. I think some people just don't feel like things are in control unless they have a large arbitrary structure that confounds everybody else and lets them do whatever they hell they want. (Meanwhile, Steven Covey would say you should be proactive, begin with the end in mind, "Seek first to understand, then to be understood", and "Sharpen the Saw" all things that seem to make bad businesspeople melt the way the wicked witch melted when splashed by water in The Wizard of Oz)
- tuatoru 3y ago
  It's just that the real world is fractal. With apologies to Jonathan Swift, the exceptions have smaller exceptions that upon them prey, and they have smaller yet to bite 'em.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    It's a subject (reasoning with defaults) that I've thought about a lot because it's a core part of commonsense reasoning. Back when production rules were a thing people never standardized a way of dealing w/ defaults and one of very few default-oriented programming languages is https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/ https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/ default-oriented programming might well resolve some of the conflicts involving object-orientation and its discontents. (e.g. defaults could be a better model for "inheritance" that works in more complex relationship graphs.)
- chefandy 3y ago
  Conversely, some in the engineering mindset have a pathological need to nail down ambiguous things to a definition because it fits their style of reasoning. Nobody thinks it's easier to work with poorly-defined things-- even with a well-defined overall goal, when the specific goals and risks in achieving it are a bit ambiguous, you're pretty likely to get it wrong if you try to stuff the problem into a neat little box, and in some cases-- e.g. teams with tight budgets-- getting it wrong is a huge problem. That sort of flexibility is what many developers lack when they get "promoted" to a managerial position because they're skilled developers rather than competent managers.
giantg2 3y ago
"But that's naive." Or perhaps we realize that company "culture" or "fit" are often used to discriminate.
- notpachet 3y ago
  The verb "discriminate" has been (perhaps rightfully) saddled with negative connotations, but discrimination is exactly what any hiring manager is doing. You're discriminating between candidates on the basis of non-protected attributes. Obviously we don't want to discriminate on the basis of protected attributes, and it gets messy when there are areas of strong (often causal) overlap between protected classes of people and the non-protected characteristics that employers are looking for in candidates. But that doesn't obviate the need for discrimination along some axis or other. (Hard technical skills being the example that is probably most salient for the HN crowd.) In an ideal world, anyone could do anything they wanted without impediment. But to quote Mr Lightyear, we're not on that planet. In this world, if I'm hiring you for a role where you're responsible for safeguarding the wellbeing of others (teacher, manager, doctor, whatever), then of course it's going to put downward pressure on my ability to hire you if you have a super fucked up background that makes you snap at people, attack them without provocation, jump at shadows, have traumatic flashbacks mid-sentence, whatever. I'm sorry, but that's just how it is. There are other jobs that are better suited for people in those situations. Regarding "culture fit": While we should try very hard to avoid promoting monocultures when hiring (for a whole lot of different reasons, particularly because diversity is crucial for organizational resilience and adaptability), the truth is that it remains a very subjective determination. It depends on your criteria for what constitutes a monoculture. You could say that we live in a monoculture with regard to our expectations for treating everyone in the workplace with a baseline amount of respect. But not everyone agrees where that baseline should be drawn. If you come into an interview and it's immediately clear to me that you're the kind of employee who's going to be disrespectful of your coworkers, and I reject your application accordingly -- well, I'm promoting a sort of company monoculture in that sense. Then you can walk back from that into varying shades of grey regarding different individual's varying ways of signaling respect, or deemphasis of candor in certain situations, unwillingness to openly address issues, etc, and it gets very messy very quickly. Where is the line between avoiding hiring rude people and discriminating against people from backgrounds or cultures that have patterns of communication that others may perceive as rude? And so on. It requires great care. This is the sort of ambiguity I'm talking about. To think that this ambiguity doesn't exist, or believe that we can simply wish it out of existence -- that's why I reached for the word "naive" in my original post. I think a lot of engineers are fortunate to work in positions where they don't need to wrestle with this sort of ambiguity in their day-to-day.
the_mar 3y ago
"working on ambiguous organizational problems" is pretty much what I do. What's that gotta do with my childhood? I hate personal interview questions with passion, because I had an unusual upbringing, and I don't want to make it my entire personality. So with questions that personal you are either going to be forcing me to lie (and yes, I have had to make up a version of my life story that's not traumatizing to the listener) or you are coming out of that interview with an opinion about me that has very little to do with how I operate professionally. You can absolutely get a read on one's potential to do a job xyz without asking personal questions.
- dasil003 3y ago
  Yeah I've been interviewing and building engineering teams for teams for over 20 years at this point. Overall the article highlights a lot of valuable personality traits and signals you can pick up on. Asking about childhood is just weird though. I get that the target is low experience people, so there may not be sufficient work experience to fall back on, but at least keep achievement related (eg. tell me about something you worked on in a group lately...)
Xelbair 3y ago
>It depends on the role you're hiring for. I suspect a lot of comments in this thread, echoing your sentiment, will be written from the perspective of sharp-end-of-the-stick engineers for whom the idea of working on ambiguous organizational problems is an abstract concept, far from their day to day. Not saying that's you per se, but this is HN after all. This crowd loves for things to be clear-cut, especially when they absolutely can't be. That's not really the core issue. Those are possible things they could use to manipulate me. I won't be giving them ammo for free. I wouldn't share those things easily on a first date, why would i share them with potential employer? Especially as a "unconventional" hire, because finding job is hard in such state, so they will have me metaphorically by the balls. My perspective might be warped by working in post soviet country.
- chefandy 3y ago
  That probably makes perfect sense for you, and reflects most technical people's perspective, but it depends on the job. When I've interviewed developers and other technical people when I was in that business, I wanted to gauge if they'd be pleasant to work with, and vaguely "who they are," but that's about it. In a dev interview, I'd be suspicious of someone digging into what made me tick, if for no reason other than their lacking boundaries. But even in ambiguous green field coding projects, not having the most creative dev team could maybe result in longer design times, or overly prescriptive solutions, at worst, if they're technically competent. Edit: (That said, in one technical role I was in, a technically competent new hire (that I didn't interview) tried to bring a machete into work on their second day for reasons we never found out, despite our working in the secure block of a government building with metal detectors, man traps, etc. But I think that's probably a bit of an outlier. ;-) However, if I was applying for a job at a creative studio doing deep creative work on amorphous topics with comparatively ambiguous definitions of success, like making a movie, designing a large brand/visual identity from the ground up, or similar, I might not even accept a job if they weren't digging into what makes everybody on that team tick. The difference between mediocrity and excellence at that stage is almost entirely based on the creative capability of the team as an entity. Someone that doesn't jibe with it will be a drag on everyone at best, or unintentionally dousing the creative flames with an unhelpful attitude and momentum-killing diversions at worst.
SkyBelow 3y ago
>You need to know how they will react under pressure to an extent that I think is largely irrelevant for a lot of engineering roles. The problem is that not all pressure is considered acceptable. Others have mentioned examples of things that cause great pressure and trauma and can indicate a person is very resilient and able to recover and excel, but which would never be acceptable to bring up in an interview. While it isn't specifically the same thing as discriminating on a protected status, I see it as equally harmful form of discrimination (and a failing of law to discriminate between these groups).
ElFitz 3y ago
> This is not a popular opinion among engineering types; we like things arrayed in black and white, passing tests and failing tests. This, however, seems to be a popular opinion. And one that I particularly hate.
Cheezemansam 3y ago
>You want to have a picture of their psychology, because the problems you're hiring them for are often psychological in nature. You are abstracting the issue so far that you are misrepresenting the primary criticisms people are having. You are not a trained psychologist, and trying to get a psychological profile of someone to try to reverse engineer how good of an employee they are going to be is naive and, frankly, nauseating.

finnthehuman 3y ago

I don’t think “oh haha aren’t engineers robotic personalities” applies here. Fucking nobody I know gives too much of their real personality at work, let alone when interviewing. But “haha aren’t all engineers only friends with other nerds and barely live in the real word” so what do I know?

em-bee 3y ago
nobody I know gives too much of their real personality at work i don't believe that. are you claiming that they are all faking it? i would not want to work in a place where people fake their personality just to fit in. my experience from working on FOSS projects suggests that the stereotypical behavior we see in some engineers is in fact real. not as exaggerated as people claim, but the signs are there. more importantly however is that among engineers i feel there is less expectation to conform to some kind of normalized behavior or personality. at best, certain aspects of someones personality don't get an opportunity to show. say for example how someone cares for their family or animals, or volunteers in non-tech areas. an alternative interpretation of your statement would be that people do not show all of their personality at work, but only those aspects that are relevant for the work. and that is just what is needed. showing someones full personality at work is not what is expected here. a more negative side of this is that in some places certain aspects of a personality are being actively suppressed. say, calling out problems that hurt the company, or trying to be helpful to others (and possibly hurting your own performance because of it)
- the_mar 3y ago
  It's not really faking it, but it is surface level. My coworkers don't really need to know about my childhood trauma, my struggles or my hopes and dreams.
  - em-bee 3y ago
    ok, yes, putting it this way does make more sense. reality however is that at least for me, my childhood experience affects how i work. although i acknowledge that this is more about self reflection and not about actually sharing this with anyone at work. but it does deeply affect how i interact with them. for example as a team leader i can become very protective of those under me.
    - the_mar 3y ago
      Completely agree, it is very important to reflect on how your experiences shaped you and become self-aware. You may choose to share some of the deeper reasoning as to why you act one way or another, with certain people under certain circumstances. But it is a choice and not a requirement. "I tend to be very protective of my team" should be sufficient, especially in an an interview setting
- finnthehuman 3y ago
  > i would not want to work in a place where people fake their personality just to fit in. You know that statistically some number of the people you work and collaborate productively with, and get along with. They would, if given the option, never interact with you again for the rest of their lives. You know this, right? I am a boring robot engineer because it’s easy to do. The “how was your weekend” conversations are about tech hobbies because I’m not sharing the occasions I got drunk, took mushrooms and hung out in a pool full of naked people for most of a day.
  - em-bee 3y ago
    You know that statistically some number of the people you work and collaborate productively with, and get along with. They would, if given the option, never interact with you again for the rest of their lives. You know this, right? i don't know that because i don't care. what i care about is that we can get along at work. at that point that is all that matters. chances are that the longer we work together the more we get to know each other and the more we learn to respect each other and the more likely we may enjoy interacting outside of work. i think this goes back to the difference between europeans and americans: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39006092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39006092 well, actually it is europeans and the rest of the world, because everywhere i have been to, north america, asia and africa, people are friendlier than in europe. but it can't possibly be true that the whole world except europe is faking being nice. it doesn't make sense. i rather think that people honestly believe that being nice is the right way how to interact with others, and that has absolutely nothing to do with being fake. it is the very thing that allows us to get along. whether i want to hang out with you after work is not a question of getting along or of our personality but one of having common interests or beliefs. and if someone doesn't want to hang out with me ever again, then it's not only because we really do not have any common interests or beliefs but also because that person is likely rather closed minded. (to be clear, not wanting to hang out is not a sign of being closed minded. they may simply have other priorities. not wanting to interact ever again for the rest of their lives however does look quite closed minded to me) people didn't join linus torvalds to develop the kernel because of his friendly personality or richard stallman for that matter. for sure, a friendly personality does make that easier, and a hostile one will put of some people for whom the personality does matter more, likely due to their own past experiences.
throwaway98797 3y ago
i’m weird as hell at work i slowly show more and more of my personality not right for everyone but i prefer being me even if it costs $$$

slibhb 3y ago

It's unclear to me how "non-engineering types" can make use of stories about e.g. "caring for a dying parent" in the context of a job interview. I mean, can anyone (layperson or not) actually "psychologically evaluate" someone based on anecdotes from their life? I also worry that this stuff can be gamed. If an applicant gains an advantage by telling a story about how he "cared for his dying aunt while finishing a degree and thereby learned what's really important in life," then you're just encouraging a confessional (and potentionally dishonest) style of approaching an interview.

the_mar 3y ago
I have a ton of stories of a "cared for his dying aunt..." variety, 99% of the time when asked about personal stuff in the interview I am forced to lie, because otherwise the interviewer is coming out of that deeply scarred. So my perspective is that anyone who tells you a "cared for his dying aunt..." story is full of shit and definitely is playing you.
- hnfong 3y ago
  I agree probing into the candidate's childhood is probably a bad idea as an interview topic. However, for sake of argument, given that your story is true, shouldn't it also be evidence that those _not_ talking about "caring for dying aunt" is lying too? I mean, you told a story that didn't involve caring for a dying aunt, and that was a lie. We actually don't have evidence (either within your story, or in general I suppose?) that anyone would make up a story about a dying aunt to an interviewer...?
  - the_mar 3y ago
    Yes, I have a whole palatable origin story prepared, that lines up with what people want to hear and isn't traumatizing. So it is entirely useless as a signal. Not my fault that my life experiences aren't made for a casual conversation starter. Which is why I say this line of questioning isn't going to produce good outcomes. And of course we don't have evidence that people make up dying aunt stories necessarily. But if anyone tells me this is the kind of experience that made them realize what's important is at the very least embellishing the truth. When I was caring for my dying father, I learned how to function on autopilot, perpetually sleep deprived, in an emotional fog. I was also writing my master thesis and struggling to pay rent with shitty student jobs. Did it make me "realize what is truly important", hell no, but it did make me be ok with cutting corners, doing the bare minimum at work/school and striving for mediocrity because I didn't have physical or mental capacity for anything else. This isn't exactly the kind of thing employers want to hear, so I'd never bring this story up unless specifically asked. And then I'll tell you how it taught me about "what is truly important in life" which is disingenuous

iamacyborg 3y ago

> In other words, the difference between a psychological evaluation of an individual and that individual's potential to do this sort of work becomes very muddy and indistinct. You want to have a picture of their psychology, because the problems you're hiring them for are often psychological in nature. That might be true but if it’s important then it should be conducted by a trained psychologist, not some random hiring manager.

verticalscaler 3y ago

> You want to have a picture of their psychology, because the problems you're hiring them for are often psychological in nature. This reminds me of a blind date I went on in Korea. We somehow ended up kidding around about how some women really take astrology way too seriously only for her to demand my blood type later on in the evening. I never knew this, turns out in Korea your blood type is very important as it determines your personality traits.

PaulHoule 3y ago

Sometimes I think some people in business have a pathological need for things to be poorly defined. They dread a visit to the ontologist even more than they do to the orthodontist. I think some people just don't feel like things are in control unless they have a large arbitrary structure that confounds everybody else and lets them do whatever they hell they want. (Meanwhile, Steven Covey would say you should be proactive, begin with the end in mind, "Seek first to understand, then to be understood", and "Sharpen the Saw" all things that seem to make bad businesspeople melt the way the wicked witch melted when splashed by water in The Wizard of Oz)

tuatoru 3y ago
It's just that the real world is fractal. With apologies to Jonathan Swift, the exceptions have smaller exceptions that upon them prey, and they have smaller yet to bite 'em.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  It's a subject (reasoning with defaults) that I've thought about a lot because it's a core part of commonsense reasoning. Back when production rules were a thing people never standardized a way of dealing w/ defaults and one of very few default-oriented programming languages is https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/ https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/ default-oriented programming might well resolve some of the conflicts involving object-orientation and its discontents. (e.g. defaults could be a better model for "inheritance" that works in more complex relationship graphs.)
chefandy 3y ago
Conversely, some in the engineering mindset have a pathological need to nail down ambiguous things to a definition because it fits their style of reasoning. Nobody thinks it's easier to work with poorly-defined things-- even with a well-defined overall goal, when the specific goals and risks in achieving it are a bit ambiguous, you're pretty likely to get it wrong if you try to stuff the problem into a neat little box, and in some cases-- e.g. teams with tight budgets-- getting it wrong is a huge problem. That sort of flexibility is what many developers lack when they get "promoted" to a managerial position because they're skilled developers rather than competent managers.

giantg2 3y ago

"But that's naive." Or perhaps we realize that company "culture" or "fit" are often used to discriminate.

notpachet 3y ago
The verb "discriminate" has been (perhaps rightfully) saddled with negative connotations, but discrimination is exactly what any hiring manager is doing. You're discriminating between candidates on the basis of non-protected attributes. Obviously we don't want to discriminate on the basis of protected attributes, and it gets messy when there are areas of strong (often causal) overlap between protected classes of people and the non-protected characteristics that employers are looking for in candidates. But that doesn't obviate the need for discrimination along some axis or other. (Hard technical skills being the example that is probably most salient for the HN crowd.) In an ideal world, anyone could do anything they wanted without impediment. But to quote Mr Lightyear, we're not on that planet. In this world, if I'm hiring you for a role where you're responsible for safeguarding the wellbeing of others (teacher, manager, doctor, whatever), then of course it's going to put downward pressure on my ability to hire you if you have a super fucked up background that makes you snap at people, attack them without provocation, jump at shadows, have traumatic flashbacks mid-sentence, whatever. I'm sorry, but that's just how it is. There are other jobs that are better suited for people in those situations. Regarding "culture fit": While we should try very hard to avoid promoting monocultures when hiring (for a whole lot of different reasons, particularly because diversity is crucial for organizational resilience and adaptability), the truth is that it remains a very subjective determination. It depends on your criteria for what constitutes a monoculture. You could say that we live in a monoculture with regard to our expectations for treating everyone in the workplace with a baseline amount of respect. But not everyone agrees where that baseline should be drawn. If you come into an interview and it's immediately clear to me that you're the kind of employee who's going to be disrespectful of your coworkers, and I reject your application accordingly -- well, I'm promoting a sort of company monoculture in that sense. Then you can walk back from that into varying shades of grey regarding different individual's varying ways of signaling respect, or deemphasis of candor in certain situations, unwillingness to openly address issues, etc, and it gets very messy very quickly. Where is the line between avoiding hiring rude people and discriminating against people from backgrounds or cultures that have patterns of communication that others may perceive as rude? And so on. It requires great care. This is the sort of ambiguity I'm talking about. To think that this ambiguity doesn't exist, or believe that we can simply wish it out of existence -- that's why I reached for the word "naive" in my original post. I think a lot of engineers are fortunate to work in positions where they don't need to wrestle with this sort of ambiguity in their day-to-day.

the_mar 3y ago

"working on ambiguous organizational problems" is pretty much what I do. What's that gotta do with my childhood? I hate personal interview questions with passion, because I had an unusual upbringing, and I don't want to make it my entire personality. So with questions that personal you are either going to be forcing me to lie (and yes, I have had to make up a version of my life story that's not traumatizing to the listener) or you are coming out of that interview with an opinion about me that has very little to do with how I operate professionally. You can absolutely get a read on one's potential to do a job xyz without asking personal questions.

dasil003 3y ago
Yeah I've been interviewing and building engineering teams for teams for over 20 years at this point. Overall the article highlights a lot of valuable personality traits and signals you can pick up on. Asking about childhood is just weird though. I get that the target is low experience people, so there may not be sufficient work experience to fall back on, but at least keep achievement related (eg. tell me about something you worked on in a group lately...)

Xelbair 3y ago

>It depends on the role you're hiring for. I suspect a lot of comments in this thread, echoing your sentiment, will be written from the perspective of sharp-end-of-the-stick engineers for whom the idea of working on ambiguous organizational problems is an abstract concept, far from their day to day. Not saying that's you per se, but this is HN after all. This crowd loves for things to be clear-cut, especially when they absolutely can't be. That's not really the core issue. Those are possible things they could use to manipulate me. I won't be giving them ammo for free. I wouldn't share those things easily on a first date, why would i share them with potential employer? Especially as a "unconventional" hire, because finding job is hard in such state, so they will have me metaphorically by the balls. My perspective might be warped by working in post soviet country.

chefandy 3y ago
That probably makes perfect sense for you, and reflects most technical people's perspective, but it depends on the job. When I've interviewed developers and other technical people when I was in that business, I wanted to gauge if they'd be pleasant to work with, and vaguely "who they are," but that's about it. In a dev interview, I'd be suspicious of someone digging into what made me tick, if for no reason other than their lacking boundaries. But even in ambiguous green field coding projects, not having the most creative dev team could maybe result in longer design times, or overly prescriptive solutions, at worst, if they're technically competent. Edit: (That said, in one technical role I was in, a technically competent new hire (that I didn't interview) tried to bring a machete into work on their second day for reasons we never found out, despite our working in the secure block of a government building with metal detectors, man traps, etc. But I think that's probably a bit of an outlier. ;-) However, if I was applying for a job at a creative studio doing deep creative work on amorphous topics with comparatively ambiguous definitions of success, like making a movie, designing a large brand/visual identity from the ground up, or similar, I might not even accept a job if they weren't digging into what makes everybody on that team tick. The difference between mediocrity and excellence at that stage is almost entirely based on the creative capability of the team as an entity. Someone that doesn't jibe with it will be a drag on everyone at best, or unintentionally dousing the creative flames with an unhelpful attitude and momentum-killing diversions at worst.

SkyBelow 3y ago

>You need to know how they will react under pressure to an extent that I think is largely irrelevant for a lot of engineering roles. The problem is that not all pressure is considered acceptable. Others have mentioned examples of things that cause great pressure and trauma and can indicate a person is very resilient and able to recover and excel, but which would never be acceptable to bring up in an interview. While it isn't specifically the same thing as discriminating on a protected status, I see it as equally harmful form of discrimination (and a failing of law to discriminate between these groups).

ElFitz 3y ago

> This is not a popular opinion among engineering types; we like things arrayed in black and white, passing tests and failing tests. This, however, seems to be a popular opinion. And one that I particularly hate.

Cheezemansam 3y ago

>You want to have a picture of their psychology, because the problems you're hiring them for are often psychological in nature. You are abstracting the issue so far that you are misrepresenting the primary criticisms people are having. You are not a trained psychologist, and trying to get a psychological profile of someone to try to reverse engineer how good of an employee they are going to be is naive and, frankly, nauseating.