
My hiring experience as a submarine sonar operator in the Norwegian Navy - drtse4
https://www.brautaset.org/articles/2018/submarine-sonar-hiring.html
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toomanybeersies
Hearing ability and having an "ear" for sounds are two orthogonal skills.

My hearing is, for lack of a better word, fucked. I'm in my 20's and I have
quite bad tinnitus from years of shooting rifles without proper hearing
protection [1], using power tools without any hearing protection, and standing
next to large speakers at nightclubs for 16 hours every weekend.

Recently I have actually started looking after my ears. I wear high quality
earplugs any time I'm somewhere with loud noises.

Anyway, my hearing isn't exactly great, especially in higher frequencies. But
I've still got an ear for sounds. Back when I was shooting I'd be able to tell
different calibers apart. When listening to a song I'll be able to pick the
different samples and instruments apart. I'm also fairly sensitive to how
speakers or headphones have been EQed.

It's a bit of a curse really. I really struggle in nightclubs and at raves
with poor quality speaker systems. I was at a nightclub a few weeks ago and I
spent the whole night being bugged by how off the EQ was. If a club hasn't got
its acoustics right and has sound bouncing off the back wall it really bugs me
too.

[1] Even for a .22 you need hearing protection, even if your ears don't hurt,
the high frequency impact will still damage your hearing. And for shooting
hundreds of rounds with AR-15s, foam earplugs are not suitable.

~~~
cm2187
And I am in the opposite position. I can’t hear a voice in any noisy
environment, even when everyone else seems to hear it fine. So I went to do
some test and was told by the doctor that my hearing was absolutely fine, that
it has to do with the ability of my brain to process sounds...

~~~
fouc
I bet you can re-train the brain on how to hear for that. Could be you've
trained the brain one way (maybe too much white noise exposure) and now you
need to train it back.

~~~
iscrewyou
Exactly. I learned to find different instruments in songs by watching YouTube
videos of producers putting a song together. Now it’s much easier for me to
pick up that mellow instrument way way in the background of a hook.

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johan_larson
From the hiree perspective, it's clear that many companies are over-listing
requirements and it makes sense to apply if you approximately match the
position but don't tick every last box in the formal requirements.

I'm not sure why companies over-list. Some think it's so they'll have a
defensible reason for saying no in subjective cases, others think they are
just being lazy and listing every possible thing they would like to see in the
candidate.

~~~
lb1lf
Also, in some jurisdictions, you are required to hire whoever has the best
qualifications for the job (makes sense), but maybe you as an employer already
have your sights on someone particular and wants to ensure the chosen
candidate is the winner in the end.

Fresh out of university, I applied for a job as a lab rat/hardware designer at
another university. The list of qualifications mostly made sense - electronics
engineering, PCB design, SMT soldering skills, some assembly and C skills,
swahili...

Swahili?

When coming to the interview, I walked past the door to a postgrad office
liberally decorated with photos from East Africa. Bingo. They had already
decided on who to hire; they just needed to make sure the hiring was legit,
too.

It did make for an entertaining interview, though - at first they were more
than a little embarrassed that their sham hiring process was outed, but once
they realised I was OK with it, the mood lightened considerably and I was
given a grand tour of their research facilities.

(I already had two other interviews for more relevant positions lined up, so I
could appreciate the humour in failing a HW design interview due to deficient
Swahili skills...)

~~~
Izmaki
When companies list many seemingly silly requirements (example, why do I need
experience with database x, when I can pick it up in less than a week?), at
least two types of candidates will be likely to apply: those that know all of
it and possibly more, and those that don't check off all boxes but had the
guts to attempt to convince them to pick them anyway.

The one type is going to fit right in and be ready to contribute quickly. The
other has the drive to get up to speed and further. Both are much desired
people.

~~~
Aeolun
I can tell you right now that I do _not_ want to hire the people that show up
to my interview without checking at least some of the boxes, guts or no.

It’s a (senior) programming job, why are you here if you have barely 2 months
of experience...?

~~~
penagwin
For sure you need them to for sure meet certain requirements.

My current job was listed as full time (Entry/mid level) but I'm a student and
in my phone interview told them that - guess they wanted me anyway. My biggest
value IMO is that I've dabbled with a lot of stuff. Okay I haven't worked on a
personal project in Django, but I'm at the point where the exact
language/framework is semi-irrelavant. I was confident I could, and was able
to be semi-fluent with Django for example in a few weeks (only 25 hours a
week).

My point is that what GP is trying to say is more about "Oh we listed postgres
but they've only used mysql" if the person is motivated they should have no
issues picking up postgres

~~~
heavenlyblue
They shouldn’t have listed a database if they don’t require a specific vendor
of DB for operation.

Jusging by what you are saying you’d probably have a problem telling the two
apart, while they will have many differences when run at scale.

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vmlinuz
See headline... Think "hmm, I knew a guy in London ages ago who had famously
served on a sub in the Norwegian Navy"... Check blog.

Yup, same guy. Guess there aren't that many former Norwegian submariners in
the tech world!

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sytelus
There are 3 major things that matter in hiring great people: passion,
curiosity and drive. If these 3 things exist then rest typically falls in
place. For example, if you are hiring a mechanical engineer, do your initial
basic tech vetting but the most important thing in your interview would be to
understand why this candidate is interested in mechanical engineering
(passion)? What does s/he do to learn things in mechanical engineer that are
not related to job (curiosity)? How hard this candidate worked when faced with
extremely difficult problems (drive)?

If you can frame these questions right and practice this skill over time, you
can minimize passing up great candidates who don't look good on paper but are
jackpots in disguise.

~~~
austincheney
In isolation I agree, but that great person may not be a good fit to the
hiring organization entirely due to that greatness. A person with sufficient
drive and passion will see one way of doing things that isn't necessarily
observable or appreciated to a team of people absent of greatness. In fact
this could result in conflict.

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i_am_proteus
Militaries are massive bureaucracies whose management-by-numbers methods often
fail to accurately capture individual talents. Glad you found a way through
the cracks!

And from a fellow submariner: pound a few at the Periscope Hut for me, and
keep a zero bubble.

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ghostly_s
Site is timing out for me. Archive link:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20181121181539/https://www.braut...](https://web.archive.org/web/20181121181539/https://www.brautaset.org/articles/2018/submarine-
sonar-hiring.html)

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turtlecloud
Isn’t it so the recruiters can have “plausible deniability” for when they
discriminate based on age, gender, race etc?

If the feds look into some of these startup hiring practices, they have an
excuse that the candidate didn’t meet all requirements. But that kind of
defeats the spirit of the law.

~~~
ghostly_s
Only if they were discriminating in favor of a different candidate who _did_
possess their unrealistic laundry list of requirements...

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stcredzero
I wonder how many proxy requirements are pre-optimizations with no empirical
support?

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sunsure
Welcome to the Brothers of the Phin.

