4 ms·

It is my experience that caution during the hiring process means skipping on possibly excellent people to accidentally prevent hiring a dud. There are plenty of

by sqeaky 2y ago

It is my experience that caution during the hiring process means skipping on possibly excellent people to accidentally prevent hiring a dud. There are plenty of both on the job market most of the time. In practice firing people is hard at most companies, even if there are no laws protecting people in an individual situation. In principle it can be easy but generally a manager who is in a position to evaluate performance doesn't also usually have unilateral authority to fire someone. And a technical manager telling someone that this person can't code or is disruptive on a team often can't communicate that to the managers with firing authority. This can be out of hesitance, budget concerns, or legitimate communication skills on either parties count. So the hiring practices that most of the companies I have worked at tend to skip on possibly excellent candidates in preference of definitely excellent or at least definitely decent candidates. This is mostly about risk aversion then gain maximization.

lapcat 2y ago
> This is mostly about risk aversion then gain maximization. I think you meant to say organizational dysfunction. The inability to fire someone obviously incompetent is not risk aversion, it's risk accumulation.
- bluGill 2y ago
  I've seen very few people obviously incompetent. As such it takes a while to prove they are incompetent. They do write working code and get it through review. Often the only clear sign is nobody likes working with them - only after you get rid of them do you have concrete evidence that they weren't contributing (that is the team got as much done now since they no longer were stopping their own work to help the incompetent person on things that it is never clear if should have been figured out alone)
  - lapcat 2y ago
    How does your comment relate to the topic here, job interviews? squeaky said that companies are risk averse in their hiring process because it's hard to fire people. I said that companies are not risk averse if they can't fire incompetent people. You responded that it takes time to determine whether someone is incompetent. Ok, but that just shows job interviews are ineffective at weeding out incompetent candidates, so there's still no justification for the so-called "risk aversion" of the interviews. I guess I'm not sure why you responded to me rather than to squeaky.
    - sqeaky 2y ago
      No u ;) Just Sqeaky. I think the relationship between hiring and firing and interviewing is a little more subtle than a strict if/then statement. It can be impossible to know up front if it will be easy to fire someone. Some people can hide incompetence of certain kinds for months or even years. Maybe the person that needs to be fired is competent but just toxic. Maybe the person rides right up to the line of the rules and makes an otherwise functional organization seem dysfunctional. Interviews might not be able to tell you if someone is excellent but some terrible people will absolutely reveal their cards. Most of the time there is an unlimited pool of applicants so even if an excellent one is passed up there will be another decent one somewhere. Not every job needs excellence some just need a baseline competence and an ability to be a team player. These and other factors add subtle weight to risk aversion. Also, difficulty in firing people doesn't automatically mean organizational dysfunction, sometimes it's an attempt at preventing abusive management. With how swiftly you are advocating for firing I would love to be at such an organization that made firing difficult if you were my supervisor.
      - lapcat 2y ago
        > Interviews might not be able to tell you if someone is excellent but some terrible people will absolutely reveal their cards. You appear to be equivocating on the definition of "terrible". The type of programming interviews that people dread, and are the subject of the linked article, are technical coding quizzes. These audition-style interviews do little or nothing to identify people who are "toxic". And grinding leetcode doesn't make you a team player. > Also, difficulty in firing people doesn't automatically mean organizational dysfunction, sometimes it's an attempt at preventing abusive management. Organizational dysfunction and abuse management are one and the same. > With how swiftly you are advocating for firing I would love to be at such an organization that made firing difficult if you were my supervisor. I advocated firing "someone obviously incompetent". Why would you fear that?
        sqeaky 2y ago
        > You appear to be equivocating on the definition of "terrible" Such a thing defies singular definition. Every company, person, and project will use different metrics. We might agree that someone truly awful is terrible, but more people exist on the margins. So how could I cleanly define it when clearly there isn't a single definition that matters? I agree they don't find some kinds of toxic people, but I would argue that a system that does is magic. > I advocated firing "someone obviously incompetent". Why would you fear that? Because I don't know you and do not YET trust that "obviously incompetent" isn't a synonym for "politely disagreed one time", "didn't suck up enough", or "black". That last one is super important, somehow the places I have worked that fired very quickly, fired people that looked different very fast. And having a longer harder vetting process during might let a company see a red flag and avoid someone who might make such decisions and allow some time and process to review firing because the rate of terrible hires is likely lessened so firing rapidly is perceived to be less important.

by sqeaky 2y ago

lapcat 2y ago

> This is mostly about risk aversion then gain maximization. I think you meant to say organizational dysfunction. The inability to fire someone obviously incompetent is not risk aversion, it's risk accumulation.

bluGill 2y ago
I've seen very few people obviously incompetent. As such it takes a while to prove they are incompetent. They do write working code and get it through review. Often the only clear sign is nobody likes working with them - only after you get rid of them do you have concrete evidence that they weren't contributing (that is the team got as much done now since they no longer were stopping their own work to help the incompetent person on things that it is never clear if should have been figured out alone)
- lapcat 2y ago
  How does your comment relate to the topic here, job interviews? squeaky said that companies are risk averse in their hiring process because it's hard to fire people. I said that companies are not risk averse if they can't fire incompetent people. You responded that it takes time to determine whether someone is incompetent. Ok, but that just shows job interviews are ineffective at weeding out incompetent candidates, so there's still no justification for the so-called "risk aversion" of the interviews. I guess I'm not sure why you responded to me rather than to squeaky.
  - sqeaky 2y ago
    No u ;) Just Sqeaky. I think the relationship between hiring and firing and interviewing is a little more subtle than a strict if/then statement. It can be impossible to know up front if it will be easy to fire someone. Some people can hide incompetence of certain kinds for months or even years. Maybe the person that needs to be fired is competent but just toxic. Maybe the person rides right up to the line of the rules and makes an otherwise functional organization seem dysfunctional. Interviews might not be able to tell you if someone is excellent but some terrible people will absolutely reveal their cards. Most of the time there is an unlimited pool of applicants so even if an excellent one is passed up there will be another decent one somewhere. Not every job needs excellence some just need a baseline competence and an ability to be a team player. These and other factors add subtle weight to risk aversion. Also, difficulty in firing people doesn't automatically mean organizational dysfunction, sometimes it's an attempt at preventing abusive management. With how swiftly you are advocating for firing I would love to be at such an organization that made firing difficult if you were my supervisor.
    - lapcat 2y ago
      > Interviews might not be able to tell you if someone is excellent but some terrible people will absolutely reveal their cards. You appear to be equivocating on the definition of "terrible". The type of programming interviews that people dread, and are the subject of the linked article, are technical coding quizzes. These audition-style interviews do little or nothing to identify people who are "toxic". And grinding leetcode doesn't make you a team player. > Also, difficulty in firing people doesn't automatically mean organizational dysfunction, sometimes it's an attempt at preventing abusive management. Organizational dysfunction and abuse management are one and the same. > With how swiftly you are advocating for firing I would love to be at such an organization that made firing difficult if you were my supervisor. I advocated firing "someone obviously incompetent". Why would you fear that?
      - sqeaky 2y ago
        > You appear to be equivocating on the definition of "terrible" Such a thing defies singular definition. Every company, person, and project will use different metrics. We might agree that someone truly awful is terrible, but more people exist on the margins. So how could I cleanly define it when clearly there isn't a single definition that matters? I agree they don't find some kinds of toxic people, but I would argue that a system that does is magic. > I advocated firing "someone obviously incompetent". Why would you fear that? Because I don't know you and do not YET trust that "obviously incompetent" isn't a synonym for "politely disagreed one time", "didn't suck up enough", or "black". That last one is super important, somehow the places I have worked that fired very quickly, fired people that looked different very fast. And having a longer harder vetting process during might let a company see a red flag and avoid someone who might make such decisions and allow some time and process to review firing because the rate of terrible hires is likely lessened so firing rapidly is perceived to be less important.