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Is it the case that you do not screen candidates based upon any other criteria than skills-based assessment in other fields? That assumes people are robots. I d

by gfodor 13y ago

Is it the case that you do not screen candidates based upon any other criteria than skills-based assessment in other fields? That assumes people are robots. I don't care what field you are talking about, people are always going to screen for "culture fit", since it can be defined to mean anything you want. It's "can I work with this person", "does this person seem trustworthy and honest", etc. The only difference is that it some places acknowledge this aspect of hiring, give it a name, and try to objectively assess it openly.

tptacek 13y ago
You can complete the sentence "people are always going to ________", especially as regards software hiring, with all sorts of crazy shit. Hiring is broadly and deeply fucked up. Very few organizations do it especially well. The median companies does it abysmally. But we don't notice, because we develop other systems to compensate for how bad we are at getting the right people in the door. That's my point, why I bring up how bad hiring is. "Widespread best practice" in hiring does not imply effectiveness. Most companies are terrible at hiring. They just get away with it because other aspects of those companies are good enough to compensate.
philwelch 13y ago
"Culture fit" is a terrible word for it. What you do is you explicitly lay out the principles you expect people to follow and conduct behavioral interviews to find times they've followed those principles in the past. Here's an example: let's say you're a typical startup, and you need to move fast. You need to think fast and you need to act fast. Let's say you've made the decision to hire people around that principle. You can ask someone about how they've coped with short deadlines, or to tell you about a time they had to get a lot done in a short period of time, and you judge them based on their responses to your questions. Generally there will be a number of different principles, and there are also ways you can overdo them, but you want to decide on the right balance and the right mix and then conduct behavioral interviews to measure candidates against that. The wrong way to do it is to make subjective judgments like, "I want to work with this person" or "I can really have a conversation with this person".
- bermanoid 13y ago
  If someone rubs you wrong personally, why in the world would that not be relevant, especially on a small team? Sure, you don't have to be besties or anything, but being able to at least converse with someone makes any work relationship go a lot smoother, and inability to do so can cause serious problems. I'd never let a good culture fit override a poor technical interview, but I've seen the consequences of hiring a brilliant programmer that happens to be an asshole, and it's not pretty. Am I misinterpreting what you're saying, or do you really think social skills should be entirely ignored when it comes to hiring?
  - philwelch 13y ago
    > If someone rubs you wrong personally, why in the world would that not be relevant, especially on a small team? Because business decisions should be made based upon facts and data, not based upon hunches and gut feelings. Going with your gut basically means throwing out the data and letting all of your personal biases decide the matter, consciously or unconsciously. If it's a question of being able to work with others, then you can develop principles and behavioral interview questions around what you want your coworkers to be like. That's a bit of a pain in the ass, but empiricism was always more of a chore than just following your gut instinct.
    - bermanoid 13y ago
      Ok, I can buy that - your point is that you should be attempting to get an unbiased estimate of how well someone works on a team, not that it shouldn't matter. Totally reasonable. Much more difficult, but a worthwhile goal. I feel like it might be almost impossible to remove gut feeling from the equation alogether, though, since a lot of the problems that wreck teams really do come down to "X really doesn't like Y's personality". At some level, isn't a negative gut feeling expressed by one of your team members as valid a data point as you can get to predict how well the person will work out on that team?
      - philwelch 13y ago

by gfodor 13y ago

tptacek 13y ago

You can complete the sentence "people are always going to ________", especially as regards software hiring, with all sorts of crazy shit. Hiring is broadly and deeply fucked up. Very few organizations do it especially well. The median companies does it abysmally. But we don't notice, because we develop other systems to compensate for how bad we are at getting the right people in the door. That's my point, why I bring up how bad hiring is. "Widespread best practice" in hiring does not imply effectiveness. Most companies are terrible at hiring. They just get away with it because other aspects of those companies are good enough to compensate.

philwelch 13y ago

"Culture fit" is a terrible word for it. What you do is you explicitly lay out the principles you expect people to follow and conduct behavioral interviews to find times they've followed those principles in the past. Here's an example: let's say you're a typical startup, and you need to move fast. You need to think fast and you need to act fast. Let's say you've made the decision to hire people around that principle. You can ask someone about how they've coped with short deadlines, or to tell you about a time they had to get a lot done in a short period of time, and you judge them based on their responses to your questions. Generally there will be a number of different principles, and there are also ways you can overdo them, but you want to decide on the right balance and the right mix and then conduct behavioral interviews to measure candidates against that. The wrong way to do it is to make subjective judgments like, "I want to work with this person" or "I can really have a conversation with this person".

bermanoid 13y ago
If someone rubs you wrong personally, why in the world would that not be relevant, especially on a small team? Sure, you don't have to be besties or anything, but being able to at least converse with someone makes any work relationship go a lot smoother, and inability to do so can cause serious problems. I'd never let a good culture fit override a poor technical interview, but I've seen the consequences of hiring a brilliant programmer that happens to be an asshole, and it's not pretty. Am I misinterpreting what you're saying, or do you really think social skills should be entirely ignored when it comes to hiring?
- philwelch 13y ago
  > If someone rubs you wrong personally, why in the world would that not be relevant, especially on a small team? Because business decisions should be made based upon facts and data, not based upon hunches and gut feelings. Going with your gut basically means throwing out the data and letting all of your personal biases decide the matter, consciously or unconsciously. If it's a question of being able to work with others, then you can develop principles and behavioral interview questions around what you want your coworkers to be like. That's a bit of a pain in the ass, but empiricism was always more of a chore than just following your gut instinct.
  - bermanoid 13y ago
    Ok, I can buy that - your point is that you should be attempting to get an unbiased estimate of how well someone works on a team, not that it shouldn't matter. Totally reasonable. Much more difficult, but a worthwhile goal. I feel like it might be almost impossible to remove gut feeling from the equation alogether, though, since a lot of the problems that wreck teams really do come down to "X really doesn't like Y's personality". At some level, isn't a negative gut feeling expressed by one of your team members as valid a data point as you can get to predict how well the person will work out on that team?
    - philwelch 13y ago