Misidentifying Talent (2022)

I feel like a lot of the tech industry misses the forest for the trees. They try to hire based on signals unrelated to the actual work - which is due to a combination of poor incentives, wrong skills and poor leadership that defines a hire&#x2F;employee.<p>Here are all the poor incentive systems in tech companies:<p>1. Technical sourcers look for keywords in resumes - they are already biased towards prestige such as top schools or past employers. Root Cause: Recruiters are incentivized to meet a hiring number. They don&#x27;t want to take chances. They just want to meet their quarterly quota. Poor incentive system. No ownership among anyone in management to improve this.<p>2. Hiring process looks for leetcode ability - biased towards people who have time to practice these problems. These problems are completely unrelated to the actual work. Hiring managers have no incentive to do any better. Heck, managers are not skilled enough to do any better. Poor incentives. No ownership of this among hiring managers.<p>3. Performance reviews based on poor definition of performance - biased towards whatever garbage management is measuring, often secretly. Management is not skilled enough to understand projects, so they rely on proxies such as lines of code, number of commits. Engineers know these are poor proxies.<p>Companies try to take biases out of this process by inserting hiring committees - who use these same properties to identify a new hire, or make a promotion decision. All they did was add a layer of bureaucracy by removing the power of hire&#x2F;promo away from the actual manager.<p>Ultimately, this industry is so delusional that they forget to ask simple questions such as &quot;Is this person the hire we need? Will they be able to contribute? Do they have the potential to contribute?&quot;<p>And for performance reviews, asking questions such as, &quot;Are our projects going to yield the right outcomes for the company? Have we staffed people into working towards these outcomes? Are they on track to achieving these outcomes? If they achieve it, can they be promoted for performing well?&quot;<p>That&#x27;s all there is. But it requires good &quot;leadership&quot; that I have found to be missing in tech companies.

The best summer intern that I ever hired did not have any programming experience. He was a Berkeley student who had recently decided to change his major but hadn&#x27;t started taking any programming classes.<p>When we interviewed him, it was clear that he was a serious student, he was very smart, and that he would work very hard if we gave him the internship. As the hiring manager, I turned him down because of the lack of programming experience.<p>I was overruled by our CTO. Apparently, the candidate was a family friend of the CTO and the CTO had strong confidence that he would learn programming very quickly.<p>The Berkeley student was given the paid internship. In an 8 week period over summer, the candidate learned ios programming, identified a problem that was impacting customers, proposed a fix, and was able to release the fix to customers. When he demonstrated the issue and his fix to the engineering team, it was clear that he had spent long hours working with the app.<p>My lesson from this is that the best candidate may not be the one who appears the best on paper. More important is a very smart candidate who is willing to work very hard.

I made a switch to the Jon Taffer Approach:<p>1. Figure out which personality traits work in the job and select for them in the first set of interviews 2. Then refine those candidates per skill sets as if they have the right personality sets than training can fill the skill gaps but if personality does not match the job no amount of training will change that bad fit into a good one.

One of my best employees, ever, was &quot;B-team.&quot; He was my second choice, after #1 turned us down.<p>I now think that he was <i>much</i> more qualified, on many levels, than #1.<p>He was not particularly qualified, on paper, but his extracurricular stuff showed great initiative (or &quot;agency&quot; as the article likes to mention). Choice #1 had all the right qualifications, but they probably thought they could do better, elsewhere. They were probably right.<p>My company didn&#x27;t pay particularly well, so I spent a lot of time, looking for &quot;raw material,&quot; and my management style was one that was geared towards keeping people for a long time.<p>It seemed to work.<p>I think a big &quot;blocker,&quot; in misaligning talent, is &quot;gatekeepers with a template.&quot; These could be HR, middle management, and, quite often, other team members, who are often asked &quot;Could you work with them?&quot;.<p>We have a &quot;template,&quot; and reject anything that falls outside that.<p>Here&#x27;s an example, from me:<p>I&#x27;m retired, and was looking to find ways to help others, coming into the field. There&#x27;s a fairly well-known, and successful NPO that helps disadvantaged folks to become techhies. I really liked that, and thought it would be a perfect fit.<p>I&#x27;m probably one of the better Swift programmers, around these parts, and have also had many years of experience doing seminars and short-form training exercises. People seem to like the way I teach. I don&#x27;t really have any ego wrapped in it, and I&#x27;m not the world&#x27;s best public speaker, but I also go to fairly extreme lengths, to ensure that my training is complete, well-supported, leveled to the student, understandable, and scoped.<p>They wanted me to proctor JavaScript LeetCode tests.<p>I was disappointed, and said &quot;Thanks, but no thanks.&quot; It&#x27;s not an ego thing. I would be a lousy JS proctor. That&#x27;s not my area of expertise. There are, literally, tens of thousands of local folks that are better than me at that.<p>It’s not a job. I’m not going to fight for it. If they don’t want me, they won’t get me. Simple.<p>We&#x27;d just make each other unhappy.<p>I can understand if JS was all they taught, but I already knew they would have definitely been able to use what I had.<p>As it turned out, not doing that, cleared the decks for something much better. As a bonus, I’m actually able to mentor a couple of younger folks through the ins and outs of releasing software.<p>It’s all good.

(2022)<p>Previous discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30423442">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30423442</a>