
Hire characters, not skill sets. My most important questions in interviews - _ak
http://voss.world/hire-characters-not-skill-sets-my-most-important-questions-in-interviews/
======
partycoder
The problem is how to determine how someone is smart.

In my company we had this very eloquent, outgoing person who implemented many
features very fast. To the eyes of management he was a champ, the king of
"shipping".

But a little bit later things started to seem weird. Noone was productive
except for this person. Only he could understand the code organization because
the system wasn't well structured. Then bug reports started coming in, later
on the customer complaints started coming in, and incidents were declared. The
guy failed to fix the incidents and got fired.

Later on, I got hired. By auditing the code base I identified multiple issues
that suggested the person did not understand what he was doing.

So the eloquent, passionate, cool, outgoing guy turned to be productive
because he was only doing 20% of the job. All non-functional requirements were
neglected. Non-functional requirements are often implicit and taken for
granted. Nobody tells you "I want to not be hacked" or "I want our system to
not slow down and go over capacity". Those are implicit requirements that you
as an engineer need to identify, specify and implement.

The non-technical leadership realized this only 2 years down the road when a
huge damage was already done.

So, I am going to say NO to this article. Skills are important.

~~~
humanrebar
> To the eyes of management he was a champ, the king of "shipping".

So management also was bad at their jobs. They probably didn't get canned,
though they deserved it as much as the King of Shipping.

But, congratulations, you know the "What's Bad About Working Here". Maybe
there's a way to train management what _their_ implicit job responsibilities
are. I've never seen it happen in the wild, but maybe it's possible.

~~~
PaulHoule
That's the problem, management is bad at their jobs. Management is so bad in
the U.S. that everybody imagines they can hire their way out of situations
rather than manage their way out of them.

For instance, when you tell people that you went to a Burger King and it took
them 30 minutes to serve you a cup of coffee, the conventional answer is "it's
hard to find good help these days."

That's a loser attitude on the part of management. Management hires employees,
fires employees, trains employees, supervises employees, etc. If management
does not take responsibility for your experience as a customer it is
definitely the fault of management that you have a bad experience.

The problem has many facets but one of them is that few people are cut out to
manage other people and our illusions about "meritocracy" contribute to an
American culture that creates excellent foot soldiers but mediocre to terrible
officers.

~~~
nommm-nommm
This is the reason why I find "tipping" food servers for "good service" so
perverse. the quality of the service you get is almost always a function of
how well the place is managed.

Was your hard working server set up for failure by someone making 4 times her
wage? A good manager can take a terrible team and make them a great team.

~~~
humanrebar
I usually tip well and complain to management when I get bad service for this
reason. Unless business is slow and the server is obviously goofing off in the
back or something.

------
ajuc
> It surprised me that people define theirselves via their CV: “Who are you?”
> -> “Here is what I have done in my professional life!”. Anything weird about
> that?

I wouldn't expect my potential employer to be interested in my family, hobbies
or beliefs. So I would respond with job-related stuff as well.

~~~
halviti
This is largely a regional/cultural thing..

In Europe people tend to care more about these things because they're
interested in creating a good healthy workplace. If you only wrote about your
professional achievements, it would be a sign that your lack of a personality
could cause problems within the workplace.

Everyone is different and there is no one-size-fits-all thing here that works
for every country / job opportunity.

~~~
ajuc
I'm from Europe :) Poland to be exact. And I care about healthy workspcae, but
I don't think anything said on interview can be an accurate indicator. It's
inherently misleading situation, like a first date almost.

I was only asked similar question once on an interview for a foreign
(Lithuanian FWIW) company ("do you have wife, children?"). It was jarring to
me, I assumed they wanted to know if I'll be OK with crunch time. Maybe it's
the way they asked (like another thing from a checklist).

------
reflexorozy
This sounds like a cool idea, but I've seen where hiring for personality often
leads towards hiring discrimination. I think it's more likely to reinforce the
lack of diversity in tech than to combat it as people unlike the interviewer
tend to be viewed less favorably and would be less likely to be viewed as a
person who could pick up the specific knowledge he/she doesn't already know.

~~~
humanrebar
> I think it's more likely to reinforce the lack of diversity in tech than to
> combat it...

I have mixed feelings about this. I have a hard time valuing diversity for its
own sake, especially since there are so many qualities to have diversity in,
and especially since the ones that actually affect the organization (like
diversity of perspective) are so hard to measure and quantify.

That being said, it's hard for me to sit in an interview and think, "Hmmmm...
this is a diversity candidate, so I should ___________." I'm not even sure
what to put in that blank. And I feel like I'm already discriminating since
I'm already treating this person like a demographic.

So what's the answer? Don't get to know any personalities? Treat everyone like
a demographic? I'm not sure that's an improvement.

~~~
pessimizer
Not discriminating against people not like you has absolutely nothing to do
with "diversity for its own sake."

Honestly, if when I go in to interview with you, you're already having a
mental narrative and discussion with yourself about "diversity candidates",
I'd prefer you didn't get to know me. Just ask me technical questions, please;
I'm begging for a whiteboard to get out of that. Or a different face to wear
when I go to job interviews.

~~~
humanrebar
> I'd prefer you didn't get to know me

I'd prefer not think about it and just get to know people as well. That's what
I was trying to get at.

It's disappointing that my attempt to express the catch-22 from my end turns
you off to the point of ending the conversation. This is part of the problem
with 'diversity' qua 'diversity' IMO.

Culture blew past tolerance and on to something else a long time ago. I'm not
sure we want real diversity so much.

------
heisnotanalien
I sort of like the sentiment but this sort of interview, at least for me,
would feel a bit too personal. Look I'm not your friend so let's not pretend
that's what this or you just really want to get to know me. No. You just want
to know if I can do the job so just get me to do a task which meaningfully
reflects what I'd be doing day-to-day then ask me questions about it.

~~~
lexicality
Do you not try to be friends with your colleagues?

You spend about a third of your life at work, it seems to me that you should
try to make it as enjoyable as possible.

~~~
soft_dev_person
Being friends with colleagues can lead to less enjoyable work situations, not
to mention less focused work.

Being friendly should suffice, not all of us want to get too personal with the
same people we might need to have professional arguments with.

We're all different.

~~~
hvidgaard
I'll share a bit of wisdom my son shared when he was 4 or 5. In kindergarden
they talked about what a friend is, and he said after some thinking: "A friend
is a person you can disagree and fight with, and still play with later".

~~~
soft_dev_person
Getting that close to all my coworkers would be too daunting a task.

Edit: Not to belittle your son's wisdom, of course. I totally agree.

~~~
hvidgaard
It was merely that "it's okay to befriend a coworker, and if it doesn't work
out, was it really a friend anyway?" kinda thing.

I think he mostly got it from my wife and I sitting down with our children
after having a fight and telling them that we're still mom and dad, we've put
it behind us, and it's okay not to get along all the time.

------
InclinedPlane
So many people have these really bizarre and outdated (by not just years but
_centuries_ ) notions about how knowledge work gets done. They want to squish
it into the model of factory work, but it just doesn't work that way.
Knowledge work is typically creative, the right model is an art studio, a
movie set, or a band. This makes hiring very difficult, which is exacerbated
by the fact that engineers are innately bad at hiring other engineers without
a lot of training or carefully focused self-improvement.

Knowledge workers aren't cogs, they're part of a team. You shouldn't expect
that you can easily find replacement people with exactly the same skillset and
propensity as someone else to make up the gap that an absence makes in a team.
Nor should you expect that the proper way to grow a team is by cloning the
skills of some other existing member of the team. A team works cooperatively,
and their skills, talents, experience play off one another to gel together
into some sort of mechanism that is capable of doing stuff. But if you change
the parts, you get a different team that does different stuff, or maybe
doesn't even work at all. One of the big factors here is that if you think you
can replace one person with just another person you're often wrong. Best case
scenario you end up with something else (maybe better), worst case scenario is
you can't replace the unique factors that made the previous person successful
in that role (and realistically you need a team with a different breakdown of
skills, different mechanisms of interconnectedness, etc. in order to have
something functional).

The band analogy really helps here a lot. Realistically when you change
members of a team you don't end up with something like Steve Perry stepping
into the lead singer role of Journey. What you end up with is something more
like Fleetwood Mac being transformed by merging with Buckingham Nicks or
Genesis changing after Peter Gabriel left. You end up with a very different
thing doing very different stuff. And the higher caliber the people the bigger
the difference is.

What knowledge workers _actually do_ day to day and what it says on their job
description they do are often very different things, and you ignore that at
your peril. Hiring based on the idea that knowledge workers are automatons
with certain functionality modules installed is one of the easiest and most
common ways to completely sabotage productivity and execution.

~~~
quanticle

        Knowledge work is typically creative, the right model is an art studio, a
        movie set, or a band.
    
        Knowledge workers aren't cogs, they're part of a team.
    
    

And if you look at how bands, movie studios, art studios or professional teams
hire, it bears little to no resemblance to the hiring process described in the
OP's article. All of the professions you describe hire through some kind of
auditioning process. No sports manager would hire a star player on the basis
of, "Do I think this person is a cool person?" No movie director would hire an
actor on that basis. No art studio would hire a painter based upon a
description of their personality. All of those places would judge a person on
their portfolio, or an audition.

And that's exactly what those "silly" whiteboard puzzle problems are. They're
an audition. Just like actors who have to say silly phrases with emotional
inflection, just like bands that require new members to play some random short
pieces, and just like football players who have to post their times on 40-yard
sprints. Now you can argue that the auditioning process should be improved;
that right now the skills exercised with the audition aren't the same ones
used by a working programmer and I'd agree with you. I do feel like the
process of auditioning for a software development role can be improved. But
the way to do that is not to abandon the process entirely and just go with
some kind of ill-considered gut feeling about "how much do I like this
person?" The way to do it is to make it such that the interview more closely
resembles the job the person will be asked to perform.

~~~
humanrebar
> "Do I think this person is a cool person?" No movie director would hire an
> actor on that basis.

Well, considering the amount of work Mel Gibson gets these days (more or less
zero), this does factor in a bit. I also gather that studios hire actors for
reasons beyond their acting skill quite often. Consider also how many
actresses fall off the face of the earth when they hit a certain age. Where's
Mira Sorvino? Halle Berry? Jennifer Garner? Jessica Alba? Did they suddenly
forget how to audition?

Considering all the TV shows where the actors are cast by the 8x10 glossies,
it might even be the default to undervalue auditions.

~~~
heisnotanalien
Oh give me a break. Those actresses are just taking time off to have children.
Nothing wrong with that. There are plenty of successful middle-age actresses.

~~~
humanrebar
> There are plenty of successful middle-age actresses.

Mel Gibson took time off? Or he can't find good projects anymore?

Middle age actresses that aren't getting the parts they used to, fairly or
not: Elizabeth Shue, Elizabeth Hurley, Catherine Zeta Jones, Nicole Kidman.
It's plausible that many just left the business, but they all still act, just
in much smaller projects.

There's some of that on the actor side as well. Michael Keaton has had a hard
time of it for the most part. I just picked actresses because it's more
apparent to me non-acting qualities carry more weight when it comes to
actresses.

------
wimagguc
There is always a good debate on HN about hiring, but it feels like we really
are comparing apples to oranges here.

Hiring tactics depend heavily on the size of the organisation. They have to:
for a 3-people startup you want someone who will break walls and get stuff
done, for a thousand-people-heavy dev team you need people who can do one job
_very precisely_. Those tasks require very different personalities, so
naturally, very different hiring questions.

~~~
danieltillett
This applies to almost everything. The really hard problem is recognising when
the heuristics that worked in the past are now broken.

------
lazyant
So candidates where preparing for "what's your biggest weakness" and now they
have to prepare for a twist of the also common "tell me about yourself"? again
this question filters for people who practiced the question and are
enthusiastic (or fake it).

~~~
pc86
I'm not sure what your complaint is. You will have a better time passing
interviews if you are comfortable talking about yourself - strengths,
weaknesses, experiences, goals, etc.

Enthusiasm is good. Faking enthusiasm is still better than crossing your arms
and demanding you be judged on your GitHub profile alone and not have to
answer questions about yourself.

~~~
lazyant
Not complaining, only stating that common questions can be trained and faked,
diluting their value. Of course letting you explain yourself about what you
are good at etc is better than narrow tricky questions, at the end there's
only so much you can learn from a person you just met in one hour. Asking a
candidate about themselves is good, is just no silver bullet.

------
aegisxlii
Agree 100%. Too much focus on happening to have encountered the particular
skills you ask about in the technical grilling. Rather, hire smart people
you'd like to work with (and who have demonstrated a capacity for learning).

~~~
quanticle
The problem with that strategy is that all too often, "smart people you'd like
to work with" equates to male, white, upper-middle-class, with a fondness for
beer.

~~~
ewar-woowar
Or "plays golf/football, comes from a similar background to us", where gender
doesn't play a role, not even in the much-reported IT industry where there is
a paucity of women .

As a Brit in central Europe I have come up against this, not to the same
extent as someone who isn't white, or comes from a markedly different culture,
but the differences in culture even between some European nations can be
enough that employers do not perceive me as "one of them".

What happened to hiring people who _are not_ like us, because that's where the
challenge lies and life is better when we are forced to evaluate our own
misgivings?

A lot of IT people are so similar in personality, skills, hobbies etc that
they all fail in the same areas, not just succeed in those areas. My own work
place could be better, and produce a better product, if everyone wasn't so
like-minded, imo.

~~~
slgeorge
> What happened to hiring people who are not like us, because that's where the
> challenge lies and life is better when we are forced to evaluate our own
> misgivings?

I think for many situations that comes down to three things:

a. People who don't agree that hiring for diversity is good.

While every manager knows that diversity is important (as demonstrated by
their responses to HR and while on a training course) I don't believe it's as
internalised as people say. Most people subconsciously have strong beliefs of
how "people like us" will work together.

b. Risk aversion amongst hiring managers

Commonly teams have more work to be done than people available: ever known a
hiring manager not in a hurry to get a new person in? Taking a perceived risk
to hire someone different - whatever that difference is from skillset, gender
or background - may not be rewarded when higher management want specific
objectives achieved. While in principle it might be nice, pragmatism often
dictates that managers go with what they know.

c. Inability to measure hiring outcomes

How do you measure whether more diverse teams, or occasions when you took a
risk worked out? If an individual is successful is that down to good hiring,
or is it just random as that particular team happens to be doing well at that
moment. It's very difficult to be evidence based in hiring. Consequently,
everyone has heuristics for what they think is useful, but there's not much
backing it up except gut feel. For example, what evidence is there that people
having a "passion" outside work and doing side-projects is inherently better
... none that I know of ... but something that lots of developers and
technical managers ask about and a key reason candidates build-up profiles on
Github.

~~~
humanrebar
> While every manager knows that diversity is important I don't believe it's
> as internalised as people say.

I don't think demographic diversity is a value (1), and I don't think many
people treat it as a value to itself. The fact that people have to explain why
it's valuable is telling. I think most of what you wrote supports the
sentiment that diversity is a (purported) means to an end and not an end to
itself.

For example, in many cultures, integration of diverse types of people (vaguely
defined) is not valued at all. Are we interested in making sure we have
proportional leadership positions for these sorts of people? Seems like we're
being ethnocentric even by valuing diversity.

1) There is a lot of explanation I could go through there that would detract
from my point. Please assume I'm not a bigot to save me the typing and you the
reading. Though I could write it all out if people care that much.

------
eric001
Wow.. I feel super provoked by the question "What's cool about you?". I wonder
why..

~~~
clavalle
Probably because being 'cool' is highly subjective and of marginal, perhaps
even negative, relevance to doing valuable work.

It is presumptuous and pretentious: 'Are you good enough by my own arbitrary
and vague standards to be around me' is the underlying question.

------
pinaceae
big grain of salt with this one.

mr. voss has only ever worked for one company, maxed out as head of IT, team
of 35.

so his sample size is rather limited.

~~~
janvoss
well, you are right. I built up and worked only for one company. Why exactly
do I need a bigger sample size in order to write down how I recruit, how and
what I learned about interviews and what has worked for me and what has not? I
am not stating that I have a solution for every situation or every company on
the planet. Take it as what it is meant to be: a possibility to reflect your
own interviewing behaviour and perhaps taking one or two new ideas with you
:-)

------
mingodad
In my experience interviews are not the main place to evaluate technical
skills, people get nervous and asking too specific technical questions is not
good also, some people can be good at remembering then but can not do anything
with then. I came to the idea that to interview/hire/select a software
engineer he/she should show at least three bug fixes on any opensource project
and if the fixes are way back the interview/job advert the better. So one can
at least have a concrete idea of the candidate skills/interest when confronted
with a third party code base and how she/he understood/solved the problem.

This way the interview can be used to access other important aspects of the
candidate.

I interviewed several people that seem to have paid someone to write their
C.V. very well but when in person was a lost of time.

~~~
Cthulhu_
Bug fixes and such don't really tell much either though. We do hiring via an
assessment, where people need to implement (parts of) an application similar
to a real-life thing; involves things like creating a REST / JSON api, etc.
The trick is we don't tell them exactly how to implement it (language,
environment, secondary requirements are all left up to the applicant).

This really weeds out the candidates; better than fizzbuzz, better than live
coding. Of course there's a chance that someone copies stuff off the internet,
but that's what the actual interview(s) are for, just ask some questions about
the implementations and the why and such.

We've hired people that did it in python, node, ruby, even J2EE. Language
doesn't matter, it's the thought and reasonings behind it that count.

------
Raesan
Whenever I see posts about hiring, the comments here tend to land at the "this
is bad advice" end of the spectrum. Does anyone have any resources that give
good advice? Or is hiring such an unsolved problem that we don't even have
generally applicable guidelines, however vague they may be?

~~~
rndmize
Here's some of the better advice on hiring I've seen after bring on HN for a
while.

One of tokenadult's posts on hiring -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8232963](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8232963)

tptacek - [http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-
post/](http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/)

------
joyeuse6701
Aptitude over skill set. Interview for that.

