

Hiring and The Sixth Sense of Experience - grinich
http://dustincurtis.com/hiring.html

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timr
The anecdote is a bit unfortunate (it's easy to confidently declare that
someone is incompetent _after_ they've made a huge mistake), but the point is
basically valid: a small percentage of people have good taste that should be
trusted above all else.

The problem is that most people _don't_ have good taste, and those people
nearly always have an inflated estimation of their own discriminatory ability.
So at the end of the day, knowing that some teeny-tiny percentage of people is
exceptionally gifted with good taste doesn't really help you much, because you
can't reliably select for them in a group environment. And in my experience,
the people with _bad_ taste are almost certain to dominate any discussion,
just by virtue of their overwhelming number.

I think the real lesson here is just one of those sad facts of life: if you
work on a team that you haven't hand-selected, some of the people you work
with are going to seem (or be) incompetent. Traditionally unspoken corollary:
even if you selected the team, _you_ might be incompetent.

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imack
I think half the people meeting with him giving him a "no-hire" should have
been a big flag. One of the takeaways should be that if half you team doesn't
want to hire someone, you should have the guts to tell the person they didn't
get the job.

I've seen many programmer interview processes where only half the interviewers
want to hire, but everyone found the person "likable", so there was trouble
getting to the necessary "no-hire". I'm not sure of this case's specifics are
like that, but one of the first things I learned to do in interviewing is how
to say "no-hire" to cool, interesting, nice, marginally-competent people.

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paul
This "sixth sense" exists to some extent, but it's a little dangerous to
believe in it because a lot people will pretend to have it, meaning that
you'll need a sixth sense about sixth senses in order to actually rely on it
without getting duped.

If a function is critical to your company, then you or a cofounder need to
understand it a lot better than the guy who asked about "lines of code".

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vinutheraj
I don't understand how this story is a good anecdote for what this guy is
trying to say ie, that some people have a sixth sense about hiring

How is it sixth sense that he fired a guy who obviously made such a grave
mistake ?!

If the guy was fired before the mistake and he went to a new company where he
committed a big mistake, then that would have better suited what he was trying
to convey !

Obviously he _shouldn't_ make up stories, but the one he uses doesn't suit the
message

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exit
> he accidentally committed a horrible piece of code that worked great on the
> staging server for a few days, but when it was auto-updated to the
> production hardware devices, it broke them all

this anecdote says more about their pipeline than some random engineer. it
shouldn't be possible for code to reach customers without multiple engineers
becoming accountable for it via reviews.

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collision
The point is valid, but what's the takeaway here? You're a two-man shop with a
growing product and you desperately need another coder, a designer and a
tester. Starting browsing for CEOs probably isn't the best path in this
situation.

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kyro
"After arguing for thirty minutes about about everyone’s reasoning..." - typo
there.

