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It's hard to gauge te quality of advice in general in this article. These are the things that he thinks are important but in the end it's his intuition that pro
by fsloth 12y ago
It's hard to gauge te quality of advice in general in this article. These are the things that he thinks are important but in the end it's his intuition that probably drives most of his decision making process. Thus things that within his context might feed his subconsciousness with valid data end up being worthless to anyone else. You can't teach hard skills piecemeal. I'm sure getting mentored by this guy would improve ones skill in hiring but an arbitrary collection of probing questions are quite worthless. Unless one is being interviewed by him, of course :)
Taken out of context most of the advice sound questionable as rules of thumb -Especially "The right candidate owns the content of their job. If they're talking about a current project, you should be able to ask them any question related to it and get an answer. If their response is, “Oh someone else works on that part,”
... that's a huge red flag, Ciancutti says. You want to hire people who are so passionate about their work that they know and understand everything about it"
I could interpret that you only want to hire people whos current job is technically so undemanding that they have the time to figure out everything else in the system - or, even worse, who think they understand the whole system and gloss over the important details - these sort of guys can cause real damage in long term profitability as they gloss over important technical details.
- mahyarm 12y agoThere is a bunch of other 'only hire the hot people' type advice. Like “Are they enthusiastic? Excited? If they're unhappy where they are, that's a bad sign. They should be happy where they are.". But these people are also looking for another job, and part of that reason is probably because they don't like where they are. If they are happy where they are, then why would they move? You also filter out low affect / foreign / shy type people when you do this, when they can be some of the best engineers you can have. With happy people, if your going offer them something market rate and they already make market rate, then moving is even less attractive. If they've worked at a start up for a few years, they probably know how the entire equity compensation game works and will probably ask for something more than your company is willing to part with. And the reason why is because it has to beat the EV of working at Google.
- fsloth 12y agoActually, hiring people who are 'passionate' about the field would be a one way hire them with lower costs rather than people who are just very good in their chosen career. As a pathological example game programmers generally are not well paid because they are so eager to work in games that employers can use this as a leverage for lower pay.
- mahyarm 12y agoAn employee can still be very passionate about their career, but don't like specific things about their workplace. Like I can like living in a city, but not like the surprise loud noises that happen at 4am in my new apartment, and I cannot get the police to stop them. I still really hate where I live and want to move as a result, and it was a surprise, but I don't want to move out of my town.