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There's a nauseating bias here against people who've had horrific childhoods. "Let me tell you about the years of physical/emotional/sexual abuse I've suffered

• the_mar 3y ago
  Thank you. I found the part where the author throws in "cared for a dying parent" particularly distasteful, it's like a benchmark for "palatable damage"
  • garciasn 3y ago
    I could only see that being relevant when there are resume gaps that may be explained by being a SAHM or caring for a dying parent. But as it relates to actual work? No.
    • the_mar 3y ago
      I was told that asking about resume gaps is a very biased question and a no-no, especially if it is a single gap, as opposed to a pattern. Usually the answer to a single resume gap is something personal and none of my business as an interviewer, it's not my place to pry if you were raising children, caring for dying relatives or battling severe depression
      • nineplay 3y ago
        That whole line of questioning is a HR nightmare and I don't think they'd get away with it in any large company. You are _not_ supposed to ask open ended questions that could reveal a candidate as a member of a protected group. They tell you that their parents kicked them out because they were gay, they don't get hired, and they file a lawsuit saying that there were forced to reveal their sexual orientation and they were discriminated against because of it. It'd be a pretty easy win.
        • bigtunacan 3y ago
          This scenario is unlikely to be an _easy_ win in court, but presents enough headache and just the risk of the company losing in court would most likely result in a settlement offer.
    • Foobar8568 3y ago
      I actually took care of a relative, it wasn't the reason of the gap but it gave me some bonus points when I started my career.
  • hdhdhsjsbdh 3y ago
    This interview style seems bound to create a psychologically enmeshed workplace with no healthy boundaries. Or a workplace full of people with charming, easily-shared backstories and nuclear families but no yucky problems. Would not want to work here, personally.
    • AlotOfReading 3y ago
      Any competent HR department would have a fit if they knew these kinds of questions were being asked. It's way too easy to wander into illegal discrimination when you're making hiring decisions based on people's backgrounds like this.
      • ryandrake 3y ago
        You'd think this was true, but I've seen some crazy shit in interviews, even at companies that were big enough and had a robust enough legal team, where you'd think they'd have their shit together. I once interviewed at a medium sized, name brand Silicon Valley darling everyone on HN has heard of, where an interviewer outright asked me if I was married and if I had kids! Like, holy shit, just read your interview training manual! The very first sentence is probably "Do not ask any questions where the answer would even imply information about things that would get us in trouble discrimination-wise." Yet this person overtly asked! Here I was in the stairwell walking down to the second floor and she hits me up with one of the few totally forbidden questions! I thought about saying "What would HR think of that question?" but the asker was the HR manager! Totally bonkers.
        • b112 3y ago
          And now, the company is filled with those willing, or not caring about HR abuse. An interesting strategy?
        • AlotOfReading 3y ago
          The way I understand it, you can legally ask the questions, you just can't consider protected status for hiring purposes. The interview guidelines prohibit asking because "we didn't ask" is a stronger defense than "our interviewers have mental firewalls". This case is strictly worse because the questions are explicitly being asked to evaluate eligibility for hiring.
  • testfoobar 3y ago
    The author appears young. I would give them the benefit of the doubt. It has been my experience that people who have lived a fortunate, trauma free life cannot really understand the trauma experienced by others. They might appear to understand, say all the right words, and so on. Then a few days later or weeks later be confused or upset because of how you react to something. A good friend once said to me, "Wow, that is still upsetting you?" He wasn't being a jerk, he was just surprised.
    • theonething 3y ago
      > "Wow, that is still upsetting you?" If not a jerk, then grossly lacking in sensitivity, empathy and tact.
      • wolverine876 3y ago
        At first I agreed with you, but then I remembered: Where is our sensitivity, empathy and tact for the person who said that, who may have their own trauma and own issues? The reality, the beauty of human relationships is that they are between people with all these issues and dimensions, all the nuance and detail that make up human beings. In the wild, there's no laboratory people - no clean, perfect specimens in simple environments. My rule is, I don't know what someone else has been through and is going through. Never, ever judge. If absolutely necessary (e.g., I need to decide to partner with them or not), make my best guess but don't judge.
        • bhattid 3y ago
          Well said. In addition to that, I think a speaker's intended meaning is also important to consider. imo, people often take what people say literally or default to a first-instinct interpretation, rather than trying to understand what the speaker is attempting to convey. I try to interpret what people say charitably (a few of my friends think much too charitably), but I really believe that the vast majority of people seldom intent any malice in their comments. In the example, it might have been intended in an empathetic way - "Damn, sorry, I didn't realize you were still hurting. I would have extended a shoulder to you if I realized". Or a pragmatic way - "I think the situation isn't as bad as you think, want to talk about it?" It could have been bluntly honest (personally, I typically appreciate honesty over politeness) or a totally aloof statement made on reflex. It could also just have been someone being a jerk, but I suppose the point of my rambling is that there's a myriad of ways to interpret a comment, and it's largely based on both the speaker's experiences and how they communicate.
• kapp_in_life 3y ago
  Yes, I think I'd be fine weeding out people who can't read a social situation and decide to traumadump to their future coworkers.
  • TehCorwiz 3y ago
    Like the interviewer probing private traumatic experiences in a largely one-sided interrogation?
    • joenot443 3y ago
      Surely you can understand the difference between a voluntary interview and an involuntary interrogation? This is a pretty poor comparison, I think.
      • TehCorwiz 3y ago
        I agree, and personally would have no qualms about walking away from an interview I didn't like. Would you choose to leave and walk out of an interview if you objected to something? how would you feel? Would you feel like you were walking away from an opportunity maybe? What if your situation was less than ideal? I think you would find that many people don't feel the same independence or freedom that you and I seem to. Especially if they're not already comfortable financially.
  • PartiallyTyped 3y ago
    So the interviewee is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Between the need to have a job to survive, and the need to appease some self-important middle manager who took it upon them to perform a psych eval, with zero credentials, while controlling the future of the candidates, and their ability to put food on the table. Kindly, make your self as visible as possible so that I know to avoid you.
    • rectang 3y ago
      Exactly. I felt intense revulsion reading GP’s comment. Collaborating in a team where there’s zero concern for people’s life circumstances is a no-go. It’s impossible to maintain work-life balance when life can’t even be acknowledged.
• lysecret 3y ago
  Or weeded out honest people.
  • losteric 3y ago
    It’s literally selecting for people who can tell the best stories. Not great for any company dependent on moving fast with autonomy, with a genuine mission. Plus “looking for grit” really means “looking for someone to work long hours (typically without good odds of realizing fair equity)”… super unethical to even attempt to be selecting for people with trauatic and toxic Pasts. If they wanted to select candidates for learning quickly, being adaptive, whatever… just test for that.
    • njbooher 3y ago
      This whole thing read like a sociopath selecting for people they can exploit.
      • cutemonster 3y ago
        While I was, on the contrary, thinking the questions were at risk of finding sociopaths who said the right things, made up the right stories, and then went on exploiting the company and people there Maybe it's a combination of both
        • cutemonster 3y ago
          (Just to avoid misunderstandings: I think the article author seems like a good-intentions person, just that the _interview questions_ look partly risky to me)
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• benreesman 3y ago
  My youth was by no means exceptionally traumatic, but it was no fucking fun, and cumulatively amounted in me being a “from the wrong side of the tracks” figure in software, which was eminently doable when I was getting started and is still doable, but one works awfully fucking hard for the privilege as the ambient level of bad behavior well-concealed, cronyism, insularity, and utterly obliviousness about the public’s feelings hits 88mph. I apologize to the author in advance if this assumption is off base, but the biopic at the beginning reads like the kind of life no one from my neighborhood had. What I will say to the author is: be a lot more careful with the power over people’s lives afforded by your current privileged status, whether you earned it or not.
• chazu 3y ago
  Absolutely - anyone who focuses this much on personal life during an interview is almost assuredly clueless as to how to manage people.
• mrandish 3y ago
  > bias here against people who've had horrific childhoods. I didn't read this as a bias against significant prior challenges, in childhood or after. I certainly had such challenges and I've always thought most people have. Since the author's stated goal is identifying high potential, early career candidates in the absence of prior success or obvious metrics, it seems essential to look for resilience. To me, understanding how a person has contextualized and integrated prior challenges into who they are today is a key personality trait. So much of attitude is "the stories we tell ourselves to explain what happened to us." In my case, I've always felt my childhood had "some pretty rough patches" but in total "it wasn't too terrible." Yet, the few people I've shared the details with are usually aghast at how institutionally abusive it was. I don't deny the severity of it but it's pretty revealing about my personality that I don't now feel emotionally wounded by what happened. Perhaps it was just my coping mechanism but I've always felt "that's just shit that happened to me, it doesn't define me."
  • fragmede 3y ago
    I mean, sure, but for a job interview?
  • _a_a_a_ 3y ago
    > I certainly had such challenges and I've always thought most people have Just what the hell do you think emotional and physical abuse is? An overly strict parent? Perhaps you'd like to hear about what me and my siblings went through. It wasn't 'a challenge', it was a fucking deliberate attempt to destroy us as people and it succeeded. You want details? [Edit: don't ask for details]
    • petsfed 3y ago
      To sort of echo and expand on what you're saying here, there's a fair argument that if you do go through capital-A abuse, and don't think it effects you, you might just have made yourself blind to the damage as a coping mechanism. The most famous example that I can think of is Henry Kissinger, who fled Nazi Germany with his family, at age 15, to escape persecution as a Jew. He claimed, to his dying day, that he was not heavily impacted by the experience. Maybe he wasn't. But I wonder if any of the genocides laid at his feet were in part caused by his refusal to accept any impact his teenage experiences might have had on him. Demanding that people tell an interesting/engaging story about why they have C/PTSD, just to get a job, totally tracks for the late-stage-capitalism narrative though.
• _a_a_a_ 3y ago
  Word. Mine was nightmarish (siblings didn't have it any better either). Sounds like the Disneyfication of interviewing.
• mc32 3y ago
  I agree. This is very off putting. There should be boundaries btwn people we don’t know. I’m not going to share personal experiences for a stranger and be their little zoo monkey they want to evaluate for the circus. This person is out of touch in such a bad way. Why would you put someone through such a cringeworthy exercise?
• ravenstine 3y ago
  There can also be a bias against people who haven't had horrific childhoods or particularly interesting ones, depending on the background or attitude of the interviewer. "If he hasn't struggled, then what does he really know about anything at all?"
  • the_mar 3y ago
    All in all shit question to ask. And it's pretty obvious what sort of answers people are looking for.
• ryandrake 3y ago
  Even if the candidate doesn't have a horrific childhood, the question is totally inappropriate and irrelevant. Like "get up and walk out of the interview" inappropriate. This, and the general level of mysticism throughout (really? "Spike potential" WTF), causes me to dismiss the whole article.
  • RogerL 3y ago
    Oh, but you just rely on your 'intuition' when interviewing. I'm sure that'll lead to no bias.
  • joenot443 3y ago
    Shopify's made the Life Story a major part of their interview process for over a decade now, it doesn't as if they'd ever had problems attracting talent. [1] I think you might be in the minority if you feel that highlights from someone's past are irrelevant predictors in their future performance and that asking about them in an interview is inappropriate. Personally, I'm really glad I didn't "get up and walk out of the interview" when they asked me to talk about my youth, it ended up being one of my favorite internships and helped position me towards a career in big tech :) [1] https://www.shopify.com/partners/blog/interview-candidate https://www.shopify.com/partners/blog/interview-candidate
    • the_mar 3y ago
      "At Shopify, all candidates begin the interview process with something called the Life Story, an interview in which the candidate sits down and discusses their work history, passions, and aspirations." None of that sounds like the actual stories about childhood. It's totally appropriate to discuss past work experiences, aspirations and passions as a "Life Story". Moreover the “Tell me a little about yourself” suggested interview opener is open-eded enough that the candidate can decide what they want to discuss and highlight. Majority of people do not answer that question with "my first memory was when father left when I was 3 years old..."
• dheera 3y ago
  Yeah I was about to say this. "Tell me the story of your career" is a lot more appropriate. You're probably still going to get a lot of irrelevant dreamy passion bullshit with that question though when in reality 95% of candidates are just looking for exchanging skills for income and you as an employer need to accept that that's how the world works.
• dkarl 3y ago
  I didn't have a particularly horrific childhood, but every chapter title would be about social struggles, anxiety, and depression. The positive stuff was random events, and the organizing themes were negative. Isn't that true for most people? I guess the question tests a person's ability to craft positive, attractive narratives about themselves. Maybe we're returning to a time when being outwardly happy is treated as a universal social obligation, like in the 1950s and 1960s. My parents' generation rebelled against the oppressive conformity of the post-WW2 era, and the tendency to value acceptance and emotional transparency continued through my generation (Gen X), but it could easily swing back the other way. Especially since all the stubborn problems in this country (resistance to awareness of racism, resistance to awareness of historic injustice, resistance to action on global warming, etc.) are seen as stemming from the unearned unhappiness of privileged people, I can see cheerfulness becoming obligatory, and lack of cheerfulness being openly stigmatized, instead of just passively and subconsciously discriminated against. Edit: The rise of social media influencers as role models would obviously be a huge factor in this, and in the increasing pressure on people who struggle with something (whether it's a societal issue like racism or poverty, or a mental illness) to live up to the "positive representation" of the influencers who earn the power to define the public's expectations by presenting themselves in a charismatic, consumable way.
• sensanaty 3y ago
  I've by any and all accounts had an extremely privileged, happy and stress-free childhood/life, and I'd still balk at this kind of interrogation. It's just plain inappropriate to ask something like this of anyone in a professional setting, people's life stories are simply of no relevance to the job and more importantly, nobody else's business. Not to mention the minefield of discrimination avenues present here, conscious ones and otherwise. Hell, even a positive feel-good story about a happy life could lead to a negative reaction depending on who's hearing it, these sort of things are inherently perilous to talk about in professional settings.