There's nothing scientific in this case - quite the opposite: pure cargo cult. Hence my choice of the word: monkey puts candidate in, a number comes out, monkey checks if number exceeds another number. No science - not even thought - nothing, just blind obedience to whatever process the monkey was trained to follow.
That's my point -- the HR monkey was a social scientist, and the fact that they were administering a test and getting a number out gave them the illusion that they were actually doing something scientific.
An actual scientist would have asked questions -- Do the test results correlate with performance? Is the test biased? What is the margin of error on the test? etc. -- and would very likely have come to the conclusion that the test should not be trusted as a reliable indicator.
> The problem here is that we didn't have the final say.
Yup ...
There is going to be a real big shift in the next twenty years. We look at things like Developer Anarchy and say "what let the programmers run the company?" - but that's the wrong idea. It's let those with software literacy run the company - just as 500 years ago those who were literate took over running companies
For a while we shall see parallel organisations within one company - the illiterate traditional management model, and a more productive, clearly vital org that consists of all those who "get it" - whatever their job title
I wasted too many years trying to join the well renumerated traditional side - and regret the half attention I found I could pay to programming. But I have seen the light
Stop working for companies that are not dedicated to software literacy. Schumpter will be round soon enough to have a word with them.
I recently spent a year working for an "elite" Silicon Valley startup company. The VP engineering had read enough Joel Spolsky to get through the door.. but he didn't practice software literacy.
I would love to work for a shop, even in an underling capacity, that really gets software dev right. It would be worth delaying my startup dreams just so I can do it right at scale.
Count the number of people in senior mgmt and in all positions who can do fizzbuzz. Greater than 50% in all cases - great. Greater than 50 % for all but less than 20% in senior positions - get out. Anything less - run for the hills.
It's not saying its important - everyone in Hollywood says the story is the thing - but only Pixar seems to live by it. See any talk by Ed Catmull
Why do people say "doing fizzbuzz" rather than just programming? Fizzbuzz is just a trick question to see if new programmers know how to use the modulo operator or not.
Fizzbuzz is a test for programming-ability. It's easy to explain, easy to grade, easy to run. If you wanna check if someone can programme, then someone else has already come up with a good test (fizzbuzz) to give them.
Knowing how to fizzbuzz doesn't make you a good programmer.
But not being able to do it is a very strong signal that someone can't program in any professional setting, no matter what they pretend. It's a very simple and effective test to rule out people who think/pretend they can program, but really can't.
I have been to student recruitment events at universities hiring software engineers for quite advanced level jobs. We give out a programming quiz (with a nice prize) at these events and we include the fizzbuzz puzzle. We allow solutions in any language and give out style points for nice solutions.
Our experience is that the answers to fizzbuzz are a good classification criteria in vetting who has got programming abilities and who has not. Most people who actually try can solve it, but the ones who are talented give out either a perfect and simple solution or do something elegant and go for the style points. The ones who don't give out a fumbling solution that is too long or shows signs of not being comfortable with the task at hand, even if they manage to write a computer program that produces the correct results.
As silly as it may sound, the fizzbuzz test is a good classifier for programmers. I didn't believe it until I saw the evidence from the quality of candidates we got.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but wouldn't that always return true? (a/b)*b just cancels out the b right? Unless there is weird floating point stuff going on.
Or even if you don't know anything about integer math, you can use repeated subtraction. Or ask for help on finding a multiple and do the rest of the structure yourself. Or keep a counter to 3 and a counter to 5 and reset them when they fill up.
Definitely not a gimmick question about whether you know about modulus.
The role or the person performing it in most cases generally does nothing even remotely close to engineering. If you sit down and seriously grill the guy, he will have no clue what he is doing, why he is doing it or if he is even necessary.
There are a few good people who become VP's but such people are exceedingly rare. Most of the times, VP's are made and hired through politics, strong friend network, god fathers or sometimes sheer luck.
A person I know who has done a few successful start ups once told me, he purposefully avoids hiring anyone with 'director' or 'VP' titles from big companies. Often, they are the ones which take the highest compensation, while actually being the most useless people on the team.
This isn't just about developers and hiring practices. This is about systemisation and bullshit metrics being used to make opaque and life-changing decisions.
This is about the same kind of shitty thinking that results in surveillance states.
"We can't employ/feed you/let you travel/let you have a mortgage/let you open a bank account, you are Invalid."
"Invalid, what do you mean?"
"We are not allowed to tell invalids why they are invalid. Report for reprocessing."
Edit: Oh, and psych tests are bull. It's pretty obvious what the "right" answers are - so all you actually succeed in doing is filtering the psychopaths in.
Which by the way is the same process you go through for college admissions.
"We're sorry, we can't admit you"
"Why?"
"This email was sent by an automated system. For questions, please send an email to admissions@uni.edu"
OR
"Congratulations, you've been admitted"
"Nice, but I'd like to know for what"
"Well, we decided that way. You're in, why do you care?"
"Stop working for companies that are not dedicated to software literacy. Schumpter will be round soon enough to have a word with them."
You wish. Once a company is a certain size, it can ignore market pressure by colluding with government (the company I work for should have been obliterated long ago, but there are artificial barriers to entry).
Where do you work that psychometric tests are required of candidates? It's the first I've heard of something like this (outside of various gov't/military jobs).
What would be awesome would be taking a variety of (cheap, painless, ideally totally passive) tests on a control population, your applicant population, your offer population (specifically those who turn you down), your new hires, and your ongoing employees (especially if you can sort your employees once hired into good/bad).
It would ideally be descriptive vs. prescriptive, so you could uncover things like "we get mainly recent-college-grads applying, but our strongest employees are those who joined mid-career", or "we have very few minorities who apply, but those who apply and are offered positions tend to be strong and stay with the company a long time".
Pretty meaningless unless you are hiring at Google scale, though.
In the UK a lot of otherwise sensible organisations seem to include these daft wee tests into their hiring process (including at least one large US tech giant and one fairly successful VC funded startup that I know of).
It's common with big companies in South Africa as well. It may have to do with how difficult it is to fire someone under our laws, but a few months probation is usually good enough, and fairer.
Software consulting places and body shops (unfortunately the line is increasingly blurry) don't generally do them. There was small software company in Jhb that used to send candidates for invasive IQ and personality tests to a psychologist, but they don't exist anymore.
Many big corporates have psychometricians on staff. At least one even has a department dedicated to psychometric testing.
There's plenty of demand for skilled developers so I don't understand why people put themselves through the humiliation. I expect that a lot of skilled people self-select out of these sorts of psychometric processes if they can, to the detriment of potential employers.
I also wouldn't be surprised if many of the tests contain an element of uncorrected racial/cultural bias, and the psychometric industry has been exploiting the inability of the government to enforce the law (Employment Equity Act), which makes discriminatory testing illegal.
"I also wouldn't be surprised if many of the tests contain an element of uncorrected racial/cultural bias, and the psychometric industry has been exploiting the inability of the government to enforce the law (Employment Equity Act), which makes discriminatory testing illegal."
Bingo! The way it actually works is you organize everything with the assumption that applicants will fail 20% of tests. A different failure mode each time, but the odds are excellent if you give an applicant ten tests, and they fail 1 in 5, every applicant will fail at least one. Then you remove all the undesirables (skin color, sexuality, that kind of thing) and declare the fact that the bosses nephew being the only guy to fail the 360 interview with the janitor turns out to be not relevant, so lets hire him.
In the original article the only reason the 1% test result mattered In That Particular Case is the HR person didn't like that asian's nationality, or race, or religion, or something like that. Guarantee if I was the candidate it would be swept under the rug (unless the HR lady hates me because of my race, politics, religion, of course)
"I also wouldn't be surprised if many of the tests contain an element of uncorrected racial/cultural bias, and the psychometric industry has been exploiting the inability of the government to enforce the law (Employment Equity Act), which makes discriminatory testing illegal."
Why would the psychometric industry want to exploit such a lack of enforcement by vending a discriminatory test? Do you think their customers are interested in using tests that give bogus results?
Perhaps I was unclear. I don't think that they deliberately bias the tests, I do think that they don't rigorously validate the tests to prove that they are non-discriminatory, perhaps because of laziness, or because they lack the statistical know-how.
Section 8 of the Employment Equity Act:
“Psychological testing and other similar assessments of an employee are
prohibited unless the test or assessment being used—
a) has been scientifically shown to be valid and reliable;
b) can be applied fairly to all employees; and
c) is not biased against any employee or group."
My current company do this, we've around 600 employees across Europe and every candidate for an IT position in the UK takes the same test at a 1st/2nd level interview.
Unlike the OP it's at the hirer's discretion how much weight they put in the score and it's made clear to us there's a definite pattern that more nervous candidates & those without English as a natural language score less well. We ask them to come into the office, only in rare occasions does someone do it remotely.
Most of my candidates in software positions score 40-70% and have done well in the company, I've had a number in the 0-20% bracket of whom I took 1 based on his good performance in other aspects of the interview - he's not turned out to be a great hire relative to the others. A handful in the company get the 95%+ scores and they've all done well - I think many are among the best performers in our department suggesting some kind of particular capability.
The output of the test is a % score with breakdown in a few catagories plus a 2-3 page personality profile. I showed mine to a few ex colleagues, it said probably 8 things like "will have days where he's uncommunicative or seems unfriendly and days he's warmer" which everyone pointed out as eerily true about me (and the negative aspects I can therefore work on!) but it read a little like a horoscope in that you can probably find truth in it and it's up to you to what extent you forgive the paragraphs that are very untrue, although presented in a scientific way.
Honestly, I think it's pretty helpful as accompanying information and would use it again at another job
I don't get it -- was this at an operating company hiring people, or at the author's recruiting company (which seems to be a depressingly common way to hire people in Europe)?
If a recruiting company is so incompetent as to require personality profiling, and worse, enforce it so rigidly, it would explain why Europe lags so far behind the US in tech startups, despite having at least as many (if not substantially more) brilliant developers per capita.
If it's an operating company, then it maybe explains why European companies use recruiting agencies so much. Still seems like a huge tax on companies -- having decent internal HR would go a long way.
It was at a (large/medium sized) company I used to work at, not the company I work for at the moment (recruiter). To be honest my interview for this position was just a really good conversation - my interviewer started out with a bunch of technical questions and eventually I said to him "Don't you have anything harder?". And then after that we just chatted about tech, it ended with him saying "I'll give the good news to your recruiter"
I wonder if recruiters recruiting recruits for recruiting are substantially better at it than when the same recruiters recruit for clients -- the way real estate agents tend to be substantially better when selling their own houses vs. for clients, and how doctors tend to make better medical decisions (less painful, better holistic outcomes, less cost) for themselves or family vs. regular patients.
Maybe part of it is that a recruiter should fully understand the role of a recruiter, but very few really understand the developer/devops/etc. roles they recruit for.
This has not been my experience - this is not intended as a slur against my employer (who are fairly awesome). But when you're in a recruitment company you get to see all the processes and the problems with those processes. I would probably recommend that all companies do their own recruitment.
I wonder if recruiters recruiting recruits for recruiting are substantially better at it than when the same recruiters recruit for clients
Here in the UK that's called 'rec to rec' and I promise you, they are generally shockingly bad. If you think tech recruiters are incompetent and greedy then you would be horrified at the standard of rec to rec.
In my experience Agency recruiting (on behalf of another recruiting agency) is indeed usually done because the original recruiting agency couldn't fulfill the entire contract. So they find whoever will give them the highest markup from the smaller agencies and contract it out to them.
Kind of like picking the lowest possible bidder for a construction contract, it doesnt usually go well.
I was interested in applying for a job here in Norway, but it turned out the company had 2-3+ interviews (which would mean spending the day at their offices) over several months, as well as some sort of IQ test and other things.
That was in the spring and they expected to have picked out some people by the end of summer.
I didn't apply, mostly because I am happy where I am, but also because a 3-5 month interview process is completely ridiculous.
The entire process just put me off from applying. If they can't talk to me once or twice and look at my resume/past projects then I do not know if I want to work there. I understand the need to find the right people, but there are limits to how many hoops I care to jump through to get the honour of working in their company.
Is this a common practice?
I can understand if you have another job and end up interviewing somewhere else while working, but if I was without a job I probably wouldn't be able to wait 5 months for someone to decide I've passed their tests.
My friend ended up applying and he was also one of the few that got hired, which is why I've heard a bit more about their process than I think I normally would.
I think using a recruiting company is more common around here. Where I work now, quite a few of us have started out working part time (as I am now) through a recruiting process, and occasionally those who work full time get picked up by our company to work directly.
My boss worked the same position I work in now, back when he was in university.
Yes. Looks like 3 Interviews, 3-5 months of interview process is pretty normal in Europe. I have applied for a job in Norway as well once.
> I can understand if you have another job and end up interviewing somewhere else while working, but if I was without a job I probably wouldn't be able to wait 5 months for someone to decide I've passed their tests.
Well there is another common practice that if you are unemployed without a serious reason (freelancing, relocation, family matters etc.) you are turned down immediately by a logic "If he couldn't get a job, something must be wrong with him". That's even worse if you were unemployed for a prolonged period of time.
> you are turned down immediately by a logic "If he couldn't get a job, something must be wrong with him"
It's even worse, even if you freelance most people will assume there is something very wrong with you to the point that they are not turned down, but not even considered for the job.
I've gone through two interview processes in Norway – none of them took longer than ten days and I can't say I have heard about anyone else that has been through months-long processes either. (I'm a software engineer.)
I interviewed for Sybase here in Portugal, and the process took about 3-4 months as well, after which I dropped out of it before getting an answer. The interviews didn't take a full day, though, just a couple of hours each.
it would explain why Europe lags so far behind the US in tech startups
The primary reason Europe lags behind is the substantial lack of investors & VC's.
The case highlighted by the author is typical of large corporates but if you look at any decent tech company in London for example, this case would sound ridiculous and extreme.
lol. London does quite a lot of risky financial shit.
Also you might have heard of a little company kicking the shit out of Intel... ARM. Based in Cambridge UK, that is also where most tech investments in Europe are happening (not London or Berlin).
Also, Germany and Switzerland are much more quiet and private about investments. You won't hear about many of them.
These days you can invest in a UK startup, and have the government pick up 100% of the tab if it fails. Not to mention insane tax breaks (100%+) for r&d and for exploiting patents. The UK already has crowd equity.
If you get all your news from YC then you're probably stuck in the silly valley echo chamber.
Don't developers in London get paid crap though? I've heard horror stories about ridiculously low London salaries here on Hackernews. Are the low salaries just because their is a surplus developer talent in the UK?
It really depends on your definition of crap. London dev salaries range from £24k for absolute juniors to £120k+ for the top 2%. Contractors fare substantially better. In my recruiter days I placed a Python developer who had experience with a particular trading system on a contract with a large trading firm. His contract was £1,100 per day for 6 months.
Keep in mind the other notable differences between here and the US such as free health care, a larger number of paid holidays etc.
How much you pay in London really depends on how/where you want to live. It's far cheaper if you're happy to spend an hour or more commuting each way.
I need to earn £50k to cover just childcare costs and the mortgage (looking forward to both of those going down soon). I could sell up and buy a similar property 5 miles away and those costs would both halve. I could sell up and buy a similar property 10 miles away and have no mortgage at all. Neither of those would make us happier as a family (no matter how much I'd love to have no mortgage); we want to live where we're living now, so I just get on with it.
Yeah, that's definitely a possible rate. A high end one though. I think contract rates for Python devs average around 500/day ($772 USD). Base salary seems to average at 45-50k.
Also bonuses. Bonuses in London can be 100% of salary or more.
National health insurance is not really free in the UK... but UK contractors pay less tax than US ones generally. German freelancers get paid more, but pay more tax (and get more holidays).
Developers outside of London can earn less, but many prefer it.
I disagree. We have a handful of senior devs being paid in excess of £70k. There are plenty of non-finance companies paying similar salaries. £80k-£90k is relatively common for a senior developer in London.
Another way to see things is that the US, and especially Silicon Valley, have ridiculously high salaries. I'd say that compared to the rest of Europe, developer salaries in London are probably on the high side.
The service prices (health, education, banking, communications, etc) are generally much lower than in the US, though, so it's hard to get an accurate comparison of cost-of-life.
UK Developers seem to have no idea what they are worth, and work for peanuts. IMHO.
The varied answers you get about London salaries is because the financial industry pays pretty well, competitive with SV or NY money. Everyone else gets paid peanuts. Or goes contracting like me.
Please tell me more about "have the government pick up 100% of the tab if it fails". I'm aware of some incubators here and there (which are mostly a way to create artificial markets for well-connected "advisors" and Euro-funded "trainers"), and I know about the new R&D legislation (which is mainly benefiting BigCo, like anything else patent-related), but I don't see how you could drop the whole bill of your private enterprise on the Chancellor.
If you invest under a certain threshold you can actually deduct the full amount from taxes in case of failure. Don't recall the details, but it makes for a pretty sweet deal for angel investors.
If it's fully tax deductible, then you simply don't pay tax on that amount (not reduce your payable tax by that). It saves you about a third of the money, but doesn't make it risk-free.
Exactly, so what it says is if you have 10.000 loss on share-A, and 10.000 capital gain on share-B, then you can set the loss against your gain and not pay tax on that 10k of income. I.e., purely for the share-A you still lose the 10.000 but gain a "tax credit" worth some % [whatever your rate is] of that. A common misunderstanding is that you'd get "tax credit" of 10.000, which you don't.
Yeah, I didn't mean to say it was the sole reason or even a primary reason, but it's a contributing factor. The risk-averse culture (investment and employees), and lack of exemplars of successful entrepreneurs (vs. going into banking, government, etc.) is probably the biggest problem.
I get the general perception top tier Sand Hill VCs are now willing to invest in Series B or later (and some Series A) in Europe. Costs have dropped, even in Europe, so you can get pretty far on $50-100k in savings for a seed round. So the big problem in the long term is probably risk-aversion in hiring, vs. raising money.
The main reason we lag so far behind is that most of us don't have a "Let's do something prone to failure and find out if it will actually work!" mentality. In general we pay too much attention to thoughts and too little to feelings when it comes to business ventures. Add to that a dash of extreme risk avoidance and you've got the perfect recept for a very weak startup culture. Of course, the ones who are the opposite of that get struck down relentlessly by the collective mentality.
These wacko interviewing processes are just another symptom of this. Don't think any comptetent business leader actually believe these scores matter at all. In the end it's just another safeguard against (gasp!) taking a risk.
The outcome might feel wrong, but I think it might be actually better for the guy.
If he got hired, but would have his pay stuck because HR and higher management would not understand his value(e.g. not boasting his accomplishments everywhere, prioritizing business relevant issues over internal political issues etc), he would end up rage quitting and "wasting" years he could have spent at some more open company.
You're right, smarter people who were hired before the introduction of the psychometric test became frustrated and weren't recognised for their abilities. I knew one very anti-social but exceptionally skilled developer that rage-quitted in a spectacular "hissy-fit"
I was hired as a senior manager into a well known company that used psychometric testing to filter job candidates. To start off with I was happy to go along with it when hiring into my own team - after all the filter had resulted in them recruiting me and I was pretty sure I was a "good hire" - a post testing bias you might think.
You would be right. It took me a while but I began to notice that a high percentage of key hires in other areas of the business were notably failing to make the sort of contributions expected of them. They must all have done "well" on the psychometric test of course but was it possible that this was over influencing the selection process and eliminating better candidates - of course we could just have been attracting the wrong applicants.
My recruiting was able to balance any psychometric testing bias by only short listing people we thought were likely up to the job technically and who would fit in with the team. Other areas probably did not have the luxury of having the capacity to "test" that someone could probably do the job as well as pass the more dubious psychometric test.
After I left that company I was pretty sure that I would avoid businesses that used psychometric testing - in the same way as I would refuse to interview for any business that used something like graphology - more obviously bogus science?
I worked with a UK company which decided to 'professionalise' their HR function which, of course, meant adding psychometric testing.
I was doing fleet management software at the time which meant I was also bundled with actually handing cars out to new hires when they arrived. What can I say, they were cheap-asses and I was young enough to enjoy goofing around in cars.
Anyway, almost immediately one of the hires was sent to me and I had instructions to give him a car. He had no idea why he was to come to me so introduced himself and the usual stuff before I told him he could choose from a couple of cars I had available. The blood drained from his face and it was obvious there was something wrong.
After a few awkward seconds he looked around to make sure no-one else was around and explained he was banned from driving due to multiple drink drive (DUI/DWI in North American) convictions. A car was out the question and I now had a problem I had to go back to HR with.
When I spoke to HR, they were indignant and stressed their psychometric tests had guaranteed he was excellent for an on-the-road salesman and there was no problem giving him a car. I then had to point out it would be a criminal offence for me to give him a car so that was not going to happen. I left them still saying, 'but the test is very clear, he is an ideal candidate'.
I've never believed in them after that and anytime I see them I know the sort of brain dead thinking which goes along with them is a red flag not to join any organization using them.
Sure, the test says give the DUI guy a car - what could possibly go wrong ?
Only once have I had a job where I was interviewed by a HR person. The whole interview made me feel uneasy, but I took the job anyway. I should have trusted my instincts and rejected the job, on the grounds that they put HR people to interview engineers with silly questions.
The job, and the working environment in particular, was horrible and I didn't stay after my probation period.
On the other hand, I was put on a dead end project and the company, despite being a rather small one, was like a big corporation where you can hide without doing anything and still get paid.
I actually read a few thousand pages of Intel programming manuals and wrote not one but two toy operating system projects and got paid for it!
It was a hoax, but there are plenty of true stories in the same vein. What sets the parent's true story apart is that the protagonist did something productive with the time he had been given, whereas in the story you linked, the guy spends his days wasting away.
Well, developers can hire other developers, but we can't easily hire the accountants, lawyers and others (including HR, ironically). The big question is: how do we hire people from a field we're not competent in?
But yes, at my last job interview, I succeeded at the technical interview but failed at the 'personality' one. It's a loss for them, not for me.
> we can't easily hire the accountants, lawyers and others
What makes you think HR people are any better than we in hiring those ones? (Hiring other HR personal excluded, they are probably good on that, the same way that we are good on hiring techies.)
I don't have an answer to your question, but I'm quite confident that it isn't "you ask a psychologist".
I respectfully disagree. Get some decent HR people and don't give them the last call on hiring decisions. Make it clear that HR is supporting the process, but not leading the process and that the last call is with the department/team that is looking for a hire. Let HR take all the tedious tasks of hiring from the developers, such as all the legalese, handling employee benefits, sick reports and all associated paperwork, but do not let them define the flow of a hiring process. Developer time is far to valuable to be wasted on mainly administrative side-tasks.
Be careful, if HR screens resumes then they effectivly have a last call on highering decisions by rejecting people before anyone else sees them.
From what I have seen the only useful function for HR in the highering process is a background verification check. Aka did John Smith work at your company from 2000-2004. Anything else is risky.
I agree that HR can screen out some otherwise qualified people. I've seen that from both sides. But I think that if the criteria you provide to HR are sufficiently broad and high-level, they can be helpful. If the candidate clearly has no relevant (as defined by the hiring team/manager) education or experience, HR doesn't need to send that one down.
I think the worry would be that HR will miss a lot of people with relevant experience. "Oh, John Smith only has experience in C#, but we need someone with experience in .Net".
A partial solution to that is a better briefing and education for the HR team. Another partial solution is to make the selection criteria broader. Make clear that they should include the candidate when in doubt. But if for example you're looking for a team lead for an important project, you can certainly specify requirements that the HR team can handle, such as "must have 5 years of work experience. Must have team lead experience." etc.
I don't think there is a need to "respectfully disagree" to a disrespectful comment. Just like there are terrible dev teams there are terrible HR departments, and this sounds like one of them.
But as you mention, if developers were to handle everything related to hiring, firing, sick reports, vacation, benefits, contracts, compliance etc. that HR does, I doubt there would be any profit.
As with all departments in a company, HR does the tasks that they're assigned to do. It's a task, not a mission. There's scope creep and mission creep as with every task we're used to. If they do stuff that they're not supposed to do and make decisions that they're not supposed to make, it's the team and the person handling the team that's broken and time to reevaluate and adjust what value the team is supposed to bring to the company. That however is not unique to HR but applies to all roles and teams in a company. I worked with great HR people and less than stellar. But I also had to constantly battle system administration that made technical decisions for developers (no, we can't deploy this because ..., you must code your projects in ...) and stellar OPS teams that worked with the dev teams to provide an insane amount of knowledge, experience, insight and help.
It's easy to bash HR people just as "regular" employees often bash IT ("They won't provide that simple feature that I've been asking for ever since, just because they hate me."). But calling the role "broken" does not magically make it disappear. Someone needs to handle the employer/employee relationship and all attached nuisances - any organisation with employees that does not handle this role is more broken than any HR department I've ever seen.
I'd really hope that we'd be over this and appreciate that other people in our organisation provide value and experience that we maybe can't see at fist glance. Instead we close our eyes and call their role "broken".
The task for an HR person? The scope really depends on your organisations needs and on the quality and qualifications of your HR person. In general: Handle or at least support all tasks that are associated with employees and other people in your company.
The scope can be as narrow as "do background checks on hires, do the math on their desired pay and tell me how much each one would cost and if there's any red flags" or as broad as "do a first phone call and check out if you think that person is a good fit culturally." Handle all associated paperwork, set up interview dates, handle travel and accommodation arrangements for the prospective hire, ... Handle all paperwork associated with employees, sick leave, keep track of holidays, ... Follow changes in applicable law. Organise team building events. I know of an HR department that organises monthly lunches where people of the company get randomly assigned to groups so that they get to know other people working in the same company, not only their team peers. There's a lot of things you can do as HR person. Not everybody needs everything and not every HR person may have the required qualifications for each task, so you probably just have to figure out what exact set of responsibilities right for your place.
> Given your previous comments about mission creep, would you agree with me that the narrower the role the better?
No. Mission creep happens on broad and narrow roles the same. The better defined the role, the better. Constant reevaluation and adaption to changed realities is a must.
> Out of curiosity, could you imagine an organization functioning where HR work was done by administrative assistants to team managers?
Up to a certain degree yes, but there's the question how and where to allocate common functions if you have any. Depends on your organisation. That doesn't make the "HR department" disappear though, it just changes its name to "administrative assistants". It certainly makes things harder when people try to reach the HR department because that's what they're used to.
All in all: If that fits your organisation, sure. Just make sure that the role is defined and someone is responsible and actually takes up the work.
edit: see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6289282 for a point where a more centralised HR made a positive impact. An assistant to the team manager might easily have missed the broad picture because of a more narrow view, focused on the teams turnover rate.
Our recruiters learn about the field they are recruiting in and search and evaluate potential candidates. Our HR admins manage and monitor sickness days, vacation days, contract renewals, contract terminations and so on. The HR managers, well, manage the rest of the HR.
Personal anecdote: One of the first companies I worked to as CTO lost me because they didn't have an HR person. The person in charge let the contract renewal negotiations slip from scheduled meeting to scheduled meeting for more than 6 month and by the time the actual meeting took place all I could say was "Sorry, I just signed somewhere else." That was the shortest contract negotiation I ever had.
Question: Did you not bring this up yourself, to the person in charge? ... or were you possibly not so interested in continuing to work there, or maybe feeling that bringing it up was the sole responsibility of the person in charge?
I initially brought the issue up. I was unhappy with the way some things were organised and (not) part of my sphere of influence plus a set of other open issues. The initial thrust was to renegotiate, to set responsibilities and expectations straight.
We had an initial round of meetings and then the issue slipped with meetings getting pushed out further and further from the other side. So yes, I think that in this position the other person was in charge. In any case, even if I'd be responsible to push the agenda, a good HR department should not let an open (and known) issue slip. Quite, to the contrary, good HR should recognise situations like this before the employee ever feels the need to push for a contract renegotiation.
I'm not sure what you're arrangement was, but when I was contracting through an agency, HR was not involved. And contract expirations were a constant worry. It can take months to get the ball rolling for a contract renewal.
It's not even really their fault. The HR person wouldn't know about databases and the deep knowledge and great insight a candidate might possess.
What the HR person would know is how the person appears socially and how he manages to present himself.
The company should make sure the HR person isn't the only one deciding if somebody gets hired or not, because the HR person simply does not possess the tools needed to get the best man for the job by himself.
I think it depends on the organization. I have never worked anywhere where the HR team had such a large role in hiring - that was not part of their mission. They freely acknowledge they were not qualified to do that. In all of my experience - at mid - large- size companies, the HR people did very high-level phone and resume screenings, if that. After that, it was up to the hiring manager and team. I've also heard of those "personality" tests being used as tie-breakers. But never to reject an otherwise highly qualifed - and preferred - candidate.
The article you linked to talks about psychiatry (the DSM is tightly bound to psychiatry, not psychology).
I don't know if you meant by including that link that psychologists criticising psychiatrists undermines their credibility, but if that's the case I disagree strongly.
> I don't know if you meant by including that link that psychologists criticising psychiatrists undermines their credibility ...
I included the link only to show that the DSM is being abandoned by mental health professionals, not to suggest a schism between psychiatry and psychology. The latter has been true for decades and goes without saying.
> Maybe the more rigorous ones should change their titles, not to be associated with standard "psychologists" anymore?
I have been recommending that serious students, those who want to avoid the stigma of psychology, enter the field of neuroscience instead. Neuroscience will eventually replace psychiatry and psychology as the preferred approach to treating what we now call "mental illnesses", most of which are actually biological illnesses with mental symptoms. Reference:
But psychiatry and psychology do not have much in common.
Psychiatrists are medicals doctors treating the organ "brain". It's pretty much interchangeable with neuroscience. And before once changes, one should reason very carefully, because they are completely different, and medical school is very hard, while one says that psychology tends to be easy. Also there is not much new about this approach. It's probably as old as psychology. Maybe one could say psychology developed from the former. Pawlov for example was a physiologist.
/e Well, no they are not interchangeable. A psychiatrists does not research about bionic eyes. But the way they see human psyche is pretty much.
> But psychiatry and psychology do not have much in common.
Psychiatry and psychology are branches of human psychology -- both rely on the study of human psychology for validation. And if human psychology were a rigorous, empirical science, people wouldn't be able to say, as you just have, the psychiatry and psychology do not have much in common.
Would you say the same thing about cosmology and particle physics? They're very different -- one studies events at the smallest possible scale, the other at the largest possible scale. But no one suggests that they're unrelated to either each other or to their parent field of physics. The reason is they're sciences.
> Psychiatrists are medicals doctors treating the organ "brain".
No, that's false -- you just described the field of neuroscience (except that neuroscience is more a research than a medical field at the moment). Psychiatrists are psychologists with a medical degree, they are not neuroscientists, and they treat the mind, not the brain.
> It's pretty much interchangeable with neuroscience.
Not remotely. Neuroscience studies the brain and nervous system, psychiatry is a branch of psychology that studies the mind.
Not all psychologists see eye-to-eye on the tests issue.
In the case mentioned in the article, even a professional that truly trusts the tests should have taken into consideration:
1) make his own assesment and check against the test score,
2) realize that the test is supposedly validated against a sample, and if the candidate falls out of that sample (non-native english speaker), the test should probably be disregarded.
Carefull when disregarding a whole field based on preconceptions. All fields have different branches and disagreements. True some fields like psychology have a harder time producing great professionals, in my assesment. I think it's because of it being a young field and it's hard to agree on what the standards are to measure good/bad practice.
What are you talking about psychology is awesome i am quite interested in the field however HR's use of psychology by just ticking boxes is not correct.
They don't understand it so they are unable to apply it without ticking boxes.
That form is completely useless in London for example where about 50% of the population is a non native English speaker.
> What are you talking about psychology is awesome i am quite interested in the field however HR's use of psychology by just ticking boxes is not correct.
I think you should ask yourself some hard questions about psychology. It's true that psychology's current practices are rather unreliable, but it's not obvious how to solve that problem, given the field's subject, the human mind. If the target were the brain, that would be different, but the mind is not the brain.
If you're trying to say psychology is not an exact science I agree. You can't use psychology to make exact predictions of how people will behave however the more you learn about psychology the better you get at figuring out people and make a educated guess what motivates them.
The solution is simple teach HR psychology but don't make it the be all end all solution in hiring people it should however be a tool in their tool box and they should use their best judgement. Or thrust the IT staffs judgement at least.
I call it inexact because you can't use the classical way of proving theories right or wrong. There's no mathematical calculations you can do to figure out all the implications of that theory. The theories are based on observations of human behavior and they most likely do not cover all edge cases they are however the best we got at the moment in describing human behavior and motivations.
If this were to happen in physics we'd call it it a failed or incomplete theory.
> I call it inexact because you can't use the classical way of proving theories right or wrong.
If you cannot clearly and empirically prove a theory wrong (in principle), it is not science. Falsifiability is required for science and scientific theories. This doesn't mean all scientific theories are false, it means all scientific theories must not fail a comparison with reality.
Quote: "The strength of a scientific theory is related to the diversity of phenomena it can explain, which is measured by its ability to make falsifiable predictions with respect to those phenomena."
On that basis, psychology is not a science.
> If this were to happen in physics we'd call it it a failed or incomplete theory.
If this were to happen in physics, people would abandon it, as they abandoned astrology and alchemy.
> If you're trying to say psychology is not an exact science I agree.
It's not a science at all. Sciences make observations, then craft generalizing theories to explain the observations, then test the theories in unrelated contexts, then discard those theories that fail. This is certainly not how psychology works. In psychology, it's commonplace to see a therapy for a disease whose existence hasn't yet been established, or that was brought into being by a secret vote rather than a microscope (as was true during the DSM-5 editorial process).
Am I exaggerating the requirements for real science? Let's perform a thought experiment to see. Let's say we can have science without theories, only with observations, as in modern psychology. Here goes ...
Let's say I'm a doctor and I've created a revolutionary cure for the common cold. My cure is to shake a dried gourd over the cold sufferer until he gets better. The cure might take a week, but it always works. My method is repeatable and perfectly reliable, and I've published my cure in a refereed scientific journal (there are now any number of phony refereed scientific journals). And, because (in this thought experiment) science can get along without defining theories, I'm under no obligation to try to explain my cure, or consider alternative explanations for my breakthrough — I only have to describe it, just like a psychologist.
Because I've cured the common cold, and because I've met all the requirements that psychology recognizes for science, I deserve a Nobel Prize. Yes or no?
Ask yourself what's wrong with this picture, and notice that the same thing is wrong with psychology — all description, no explanation, no established principles on which different psychologists agree, no effort to build consensus, and no unifying theories.
> You can't use psychology to make exact predictions of how people will behave however the more you learn about psychology the better you get at figuring out people and make a educated guess what motivates them.
Only if you're suffering from a bad case of confirmation bias. You need to understand that psychology is undergoing a major upheaval eight now, mostly because of improvements in neuroscience that suggest neuroscience will eventually replace psychology, in the same way that astronomy replaced astrology in the 17th century.
Quote: "the medical specialty devoted to the study, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of mental disorders."
See the word "mental" in both definitions? Neither studies the brain, neither is scientific, and the distinction between them is more a matter of history than topic.
I ask that you think about what you're saying. If human psychology were a science, then its two major subfields, psychiatry and psychology (there are actually 54, but never mind), would be looked on as intimately related to human psychology and to each other.
Would you argue that cosmology and particle physics aren't related to each other because they study different things, i.e. one studies the universe at the largest possible scale and the other at the smallest? Most scientists would disagree because these two fields rely on physics and physical theory for their scientific standing.
> but it applies to psychiatry (more specifically, the DSM) rather than to psychology.
False. Both psychiatry and psychology rely on the DSM as a diagnostic guide.
Quote: "The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is the standard classification of mental disorders used by mental health professionals in the United States ... It can be used by a wide range of health and mental health professionals, including psychiatrists and other physicians, psychologists, social workers, nurses, occupational and rehabilitation therapists, and counselors. "
> I agree with your major point, but it applies to psychiatry (more specifically, the DSM) rather than to psychology.
On the contrary, it applies to both, because both psychiatry and psychology depend on the DSM's imagined authority for diagnosis and treatment guidance.
If the DSM were to suddenly disappear, psychologists would have no therapeutic guidebook. That wouldn't stop them, of course, but it would be disrupting and embarrassing.
If human psychology were a science, we wouldn't be having this conversation, because psychiatry and psychology would be looked on as branches of a science with more similarities than differences, just as with cosmology and particle physics.
I would urge you to realise that psychology!=psychotherapy.
I hate with the blinding passion of a thousand fiery suns psychotherapy, but I find much (experimental) psychology rather interesting.
Seriously, one of the very first things they tell you in a psychology degree (at least in Europe) is that its not about therapy, and in fact that most therapists are not psychologists. The study of the human mind and what is essentially a form of confession are very, very different.
But hey, you'll believe what you want to on this one, it doesn't look like I can convince you.
Have you read any of the work of Daniel Kahneman? Thats what I would consider as psychology (even if his System One and Two stuff is a dirty hack that provides little useful insight to the field).
> I would urge you to realise that psychology!=psychotherapy.
You don't need to clarify that, and it lacks any connection with the present topic.
> I find much (experimental) psychology rather interesting.
I would find it much more interesting if it were scientific, if its practitioners crafted and then tested falsifiable theories. But it isn't and they don't.
> But hey, you'll believe what you want to on this one, it doesn't look like I can convince you.
My position isn't based on belief, it is based on evidence. Consider this summary of an investigation into recent egregious and fraudulent psychological research:
Quote: "In their exhaustive final report about the fraud affair that rocked social psychology last year, three investigative panels today collectively find fault with the field itself. They paint an image of a "sloppy" research culture in which some scientists don't understand the essentials of statistics, journal-selected article reviewers encourage researchers to leave unwelcome data out of their papers, and even the most prestigious journals print results that are obviously too good to be true."
Too bad about these academic experts and their "beliefs" about psychological research.
Incidents like the above explains why the director of the NIMH has recently decided to abandon the DSM, psychiatry and psychology's central authority, as unscientific and of no research value:
Quote: "While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity."
Too bad about the NIMH director's "beliefs".
> Have you read any of the work of Daniel Kahneman? Thats what I would consider as psychology (even if his System One and Two stuff is a dirty hack that provides little useful insight to the field).
Hmm -- it seems you are now making my argument for me.
Why do I care? Why am I critical of psychology but give sociology a pass? Sociologists don't have clinics in which they tell you how sick you are, using disease definitions they voted into existence.
> Not all psychologists see eye-to-eye on the tests issue.
But psychologists don't see eye to eye on anything -- that's one of the obstacles to turning psychology into a science.
> In the case mentioned in the article, even a professional that truly trusts the tests should have taken into consideration:
> 1) make his own assesment and check against the test score,
On the contrary, if psychology were a science, a clinical psychologist administering a standardized test should produce the same high correlation with reality as a clinical doctor administering a standardized test. But this is certainly not the case, and one of the reasons for this discussion is that psychologists are often married to the outcome of a test that isn't a reliable measure of its subject. A psychologist's confidence in a test's unreliable results is an obvious theme in the linked article.
> Carefull when disregarding a whole field based on preconceptions.
Tell that to Thomas Insel, director of the NIMH, who recently and reluctantly decided to abandon the DSM, psychiatry and psychology's standard diagnostic manual, on the ground that it's becoming less scientific with each new edition:
My point is that, when a field's opinion leaders disregard a whole field, it's no longer a preconception.
> All fields have different branches and disagreements.
When a medical doctor says you have cancer, it's 99% certain you have cancer. When a psychologist says you have Asperger Syndrome, the reliability of the diagnosis is so unreliable and divorced from reality that the diagnosis has been reluctantly abandoned after an epidemic of phony diagnoses.
The same pattern applies to most other psychological diagnoses and decisions -- they are very subjective. Tom Widiger, who served as head of research for DSM-IV, says "There are lots of studies which show that clinicians diagnose most of their patients with one particular disorder and really don't systematically assess for other disorders. They have a bias in reference to the disorder that they are especially interested in treating and believe that most of their patients have."
> I think it's because of it being a young field ...
Psychology and psychologists have been around making pronouncements since before the U.S. Civil War. That makes psychology one of the oldest fields that has scientific pretensions.
> it's hard to agree on what the standards are to measure good/bad practice.
Yes, true, which is why psychology is now being replaced by neuroscience -- the latter can produce more objective results.
I've worked in companies with both good and bad HR departments. Currently, our HR department, has intervened in our department hiring processes because they saw incredibly high - and quick - turnover in some groups. In those groups, they have improved the interview process significantly. Not by taking over, but by forcing the managers to be more honest when posting and discussing the positions, by forcing the managers to actually learn "better" interview skills and techniques, by forcing the managers to be more realistic about job requirements (do you really need someone with a Master's degree to staff your standard Tier 1 or 2 helpdesk????? OMG, NO!!!)
It might be better to not respond to a disrespectful comment, but when responding, there is a need to respectfully disagree. When someone lowers the quality of the discussion, it is important for everyone else to make up for it. This also communicates the desired standard of conversation to the writer of the disrespectful post.
I once had a job at a software company where an HR manager was hired to introduce a new "Performance Management" system, where people were scored on their "behavioural competencies" and "technical competencies". I learned from my line manager (before he quit) that the HR manager regarded behavioural competencies as more important than technical competencies, because anything technical could be picked up on a week's training course. (She also didn't understand the difference between a qualification and a certificate that you get for having attended a training course.)
Now, I'm just a software engineer, but I can't really get my head around the idea a software company hiring lots of supposedly smart people, subjecting them to this sort of nonsense, and then make it obligatory to take it seriously. To me, that sounds like a recipe for trouble.
I disagree very much. There are many bad HR people, and many HR people who are given bad direction. It's very hard to imagine a company of over 30 or 40 people surviving without one.
Is the CEO supposed to be up on all the HR rules? Is the CEO out in the market calibrating salaries every day? Does the CEO have time to analyze optimal organization designs? Should the CEO do all the initial fit screens? Chase down background checks?
If HR is an issue, it's because they're being asked to do the wrong thing, or the individual is incompetent. Saying "We don't need HR because they are poor technical interviewers" is like saying "We don't need accountants because I don't like the expense report form." You still need accountants, and you still need HR.
> Does the CEO have time to analyze optimal organization designs?
Optimal for what? I do think the CEO or someone similar needs to figure out what you want from the organization and design it. HR may have input but it is just input.
HR can do the market calibration research. That's a good role for them. Initial fit? That should be the team or team manager. Background checks? Either HR or an administrative assistant somewhere.
Without HR, that work should fall upon the team manager and maybe some assistance somewhere. It can be done though.
Bottom line, yes, there is a role for HR, I think. No, I don't think it is a big role.
Short question: Do you have employees? We do have a handful and the amount of work associated with them [1] is astounding. On average it used to cost me 20% of my time until we hired someone for administrative and HR work. Now, we're a small company and have no need for a full HR position, but that role is taken by a person and I can quite well tell that the more employees we hire, the more we'll move to a dedicated HR position. It's not a "big" role, but it's still an important one. I value that work being taken off me.
That's a good reason to have an administrative assistant, right? In fact there;s no reason why departmental administrative assistants can't take on HR roles, is there?
Sure, if that fits you. That still doesn't make "HR" disappear - they're just labeled differently and can't specialise. So as long as you can't fill a full HR position that's certainly a measure, but if you can, why not fill it with somebody who can and wants to fill that role as good as possible?
If the team manager is doing background checks - initiating, conducting, following up, etc.- how much time does that allow for him/her to manage the team, do whatever technical work is required at level, interact with the rest of the company as required, take a breath and think strategically, etc.? And how many team mangers WANT conducting background checks as part of their jobs? Even farming that out to a contractor - finding a good one, following up, ensuring quality, making sure deadlines are met, etc. - takes time.
Please re-read what I said. Background checks should be either HR or an administrative assistant tot he team manager. But things like initial fit interviews should be with the team, not just the manager.
The point is that bringing someone onto the team and seeing if that is a good fit, is something that belongs at the team level. Some of the support could be done by a small HR department, or the old fashioned way, by an administrative assistant.
I agree that HR serves a role in the company and that they cannot simply be fired, but there are a few points I heavily disagree with:
> "Is the CEO out in the market calibrating salaries every day?"
No, but neither should this be a HR responsibility. HR has no fucking idea how well someone is doing, nor can they be reasonably expected to since they neither work with these employees daily, nor do they have domain knowledge of what they do. Raises and promotions need to be handled by someone with the correct background - CTO for small companies, VPs for larger ones.
HR should not be handling raises.
> "Does the CEO have time to analyze optimal organization designs?"
YES. Emphatically yes. He/she's the Chief Executive Officer, the structure of the company is entirely their business. HR has no substantial insight into the specific needs of the business structure, if they did, shit, fire the CEO and make HR the boss.
The CEO is a manager first and foremost, and organizational design is one of the most fundamentally important parts of the position. Letting HR do this is abdicating a primary responsibility of the role.
> "Should the CEO do all the initial fit screens?"
Yes, for small companies. No, for larger companies, but neither should it be HR. Again, HR has no idea how the team dynamics in your company works. Who do you think is a better judge of culture fit - the CTO/VP who's interacting with the team daily, or the HR person who rarely speaks to any of the engineers? Once again this is very much a CTO/VP role.
> " Chase down background checks?"
This is pretty much the only thing in your list that I'd say firmly belongs to HR. HR administrates benefits, HR mediates disputes, HR performs the clerical duties in hiring - including background checks. HR is not a decision maker any more than you'd let your accountant make strategy decisions for your company.
Let's agree to disagree. My view on the small company CEO is that most of their time should be spent on products, customers, fundraising and hiring. Within hiring it's mostly analysis of candidates and selling people on joining the firm. Anything they do that's not one of these things is a distraction.
If they're spending their time on Glassdoor figuring out what DBAs get paid when they could be at a customer the customer suffers. Much more efficient for HR to do it. Much better to let a specialist propose an organization design to get the firm from 10 people to 100. Let the HR person do the research, let the CEO decide. If the CEO is reading all the books on org design instead of being in front of VCs, there won't be funding.
It depends on how big your company is, but for anything under say 5,000 people:
> Is the CEO out in the market calibrating salaries every day?
HR should not be setting compensation. That's a business question and something the business people need to understand and deal with.
> Does the CEO have time to analyze optimal organization designs?
Organizational structure is also a business question. It goes directly to what sorts of team structures, etc, are most effective in delivering the company's product.
> Should the CEO do all the initial fit screens?
Not necessarily the CEO, but some technical person should do the initial fit screens.
> HR should not be setting compensation. That's a business question and something the business people need to understand and deal with.
I read "out in the market calibrating salaries" as gathering market information which serve as an input for management in making compensation decisions.
Exactly what I was trying to get across. It's HR's job to come up with general salary trends by seniority, geography and anything else that management wants.
It's management's (really the CEO's) job to apply it. Is it a company that want to pay median salaries with lots of benefits? Low base relative to the industry, but lots of bonus and equity? Lots of cash? All these are the CEO's decision, but they shouldn't be the ones gathering the data.
This is really not HR's job. HR people are hired for experience with benefits management and bookkeeping; when they try to trend salaries, they inevitably wind up just sourcing extremely dubious data from extremely dubious sites. Most companies would be better off not pretending that HR has any other function than trying to minimize the cost of health insurance to the company.
Perhaps I'm biased because I've been in a few places where HR did the mainline jobs in the firm prior to becoming HR. Those scenarios turned out extremely well, though perhaps we didn't get the best deals in health insurance.
I've also seen (unhealthy) environments where HR's primary job was to protect the company from lawsuits. That's not great either.
In general I've counseled people not to put their career in HR's hands, but that's still a long way from calling it a near-useless function. It frequently turns out that way, but it has the potential to be much more.
The point I was trying to make was that with a good, professional HR folks, your company will avoid stupid mistakes that can become very expensive when dealing with an employee who knows how to work the system to their advantage.
One of the folks who worked for me several years back had complaints filed against her by an employee whom she had woken up from a dead sleep during the day a few times. (The employee was working from 6-2AM as a night clerk at a hotel) The employee claimed that although the supervisor had 5 employees, she only checked his sleep/wake status, and did so because he was a member of a protected class. (Yes, really)
This nonsense required administrative hearings with the human rights commission/eeoc and untold gobs of paperwork. The HR people saved the day, and were able to use the good processes that they had in place to keep an awful situation from getting worse.
Companies should lose discrimination / disability / wrongful termination lawsuits. HR's purpose is to get businesses off the hook for these crimes. Maybe you're thinking about it as an actual or theoretical startup owner, where you don't want to get in trouble. I can understand that. But people are more important than businesses and any business that abuses people deserves to be shut down.
I don't know how you feel about silly software patents being used to extort money from companies, because trolls know it will be cheaper to settle than to fight.
The same thing can and does happen with labor law.
Obviously some claims have merit and deserve to be heard by a court and get some reasonable relief.
At the same time, just as there are "patent trolls", there are "employment law trolls".
I would suggest that the vast majority of employment law disputes are legitimate cases of a human being abused by a business.
In contrast, most software patent disputes are simply businesses extorting other businesses because they can, rather than because they were harmed and deserve to recover damages.
The two are not really the same. Generally speaking, when a company damages a human, it should pay what it owes rather than trying to weasel out of the situation.
I don't have stats on % of frivolous lawsuits for patents vs. employment matters. I'll be generous and stipulate there are fewer bogus employment claims. But it's not 0%.
In the U.S. legal system, you can sue anyone for anything, and it will cost them _something_ to make you go away. It's not hard to come up with _some_ claim that's not obviously absurd enough to get dismissed quickly. There are individuals who realize this --- as well as attorneys who have an economic interest in helping more people realize this.
So again, I grant that many claims have merit. But I don't think you can stipulate that every employee claim is automatically valid, i.e. that every company is automatically guilty of every claim against it. Sometimes companies suck. And sometimes so do employees. It's life.
Profit. . .until you consider the money paid out in lawsuits (discrimination, illegal firings, etc.) that could have been avoided by HR. . .or the money wasted paying for expensive benefits vendors that could have been saved by HR. . .or the turnover that could've been saved by HR though intervention with some particularly bad managers/management teams (who HR had no hand in hiring). Granted, this is only true of decent - or better - HR departments, but I've seen them.
So, no bad programmers, drivers, receptionists, sales people, accountants........ just HR people.
Dunno what HR does in the US, but here in the UK I know a lot of cases where a decent HR person would have saved companies millions in payouts to now ex-employees who sued them. In several cases, the business was made bankrupt, jobs lost.
Keep in mind you see strong selection bias. First, you only hear about extremely good or extremely bad cases. Second, on a site like Hacker News, you're more likely to hear about the bad HR departments.
Most HR people are at least somewhat competent and help the company, and good HR people are worth their weight in silver. When Human Resources actually understands the needs of the employees and is able to enact policies that make them happier, that's extraordinarily useful.
On the contrary, it's not the personnel department in this case that needed firing, it's the senior management. The personnel department performs a necessary function in dealing with the legal nightmares that come with hiring people. They must not, however, be given authority over who to hire and fire. Senior management, in giving the personnel department such authority, botched their own job.
They must not, however, be given authority over who to hire and fire
It's not obvious to me that this is what actually happened here.
I worked for many years at an organisation that had a similar policy - if I wanted to hire someone that the psych evaluation had flagged as no-hire, then I needed the approval of my boss's boss.
HR didn't invent that policy on their own. They recommended it to the CEO/Management Team because they saw the number of bad hires that were coming up where the hiring manager ignored the psych eval and then all the issues that the eval predicted came true.
I didn't love the rule - particularly when the issue was something like this person you're trying to hire for a relatively boring entry level role doesn't have a lot of ambition or initiative - but it was a specific response to an identified problem. Perhaps the wrong response, perhaps not, I'm still not sure.
But what it wasn't, was an HR dept that set their own rules. Their authority was purely to enforce the CEO's decisions on hiring policy.
Because the author of this article doesn't seem to know much about the origin/nature of the policy in his organisation, it's hard to tell whether he ran into the CEO's rule, or HR's rule.
The decision to give the test in English to someone who wasn't a native English speaker is a mistake, but it might be the candidate's mistake.
My organisation gave candidates the choice of language in which to take the test, and strongly advised them to take it in their native language. Every so often we'd see someone who didn't listen to that (possibly because they didn't want us to think that they weren't confident in their english skills) and it showed.
Based on the information provided in the blog post, I'm still not sure whether the wrong decision was made or not. There were clearly mistakes in the process, but we don't know who made them, and there's no way to know whether the psych eval was accurate or not since the hire never went ahead.
The problem with departments named "Human Resources" is that employees are not resources and they resent the dehumanization of being treated as such. All the HR horror stories have the same thread: they are dehumanizing employees.
In my limted experience this is much more of a problem in big companies than small. In small companies, employees know each other as fellow human beings from the owner to the interns. In big companies, the humans are numbers in a computer to be ranked, graded, and filed yearly.
I worked at a small telco (couple hundred people) long ago where HR saw themselves as providing "Resources for Humans" (as opposed to the physical plant guy who could replace lightbulbs all day but couldn't help figure out your health insurance)
They had their nose pretty deep in payroll operations; we were always paid correctly and on time. Insurance problems? They'd help. They were frankly pretty decent service providers for us.
Unfortunately this is extremely rare in corporate life.
In Verner Vinge's "Deepness in the Sky" there's a [Human] culture with a filled position called "Director of Human Resources". In the context of that book, that title and position has about as happy undertones as if you were to watch 'The Matrix' and then hear Chevron's advertisement blurb: "Human Energy".
First, personal interviews can be poor predictors of future hire performance. People will often hire someone who resonates on a personal level, or who is otherwise charismatic, rather than for the right skillset. Standardized tests, administered correctly, are one way of reducing the variability.
And variability is pain. Your HR and hiring people are likely being judged just the way everyone else is. Hiring, or forcing dev teams to interview, a lot of low-quality candidates without an effective screen is a good way to find yourself being replaced.
The second is that, as people are fond of saying, the standard you walk past is the standard you accept. This is the source of a lot of foolish "musts"––candidates must have a certain GPA, or only go to a certain school, or they have to hit a certain percentage on some tests. Having standards is all well and good until you find a case that doesn't fit your profile and you either get flexible or look foolish.
Being flexible means that other hires complain that you're lowering your standards, and no one likes hearing that either.
The test in this case wasn't correctly administered, as columbo pointed out elsewhere, and I agree that hiring managers shouldn't have a veto over technical hires. But this is the sort of human-dynamics problem that can't be solved by firing entire departments. If you don't address the problem head-on it'll just come back next year in a different form.
These psychometric tests are often unscientific and bull sh*tty. If I interviewed with someone who gave me one, I would be highly tempted abort the interview early; this is not a company I would want to work for.
This is in the UK; a found a lot of weirdness goes on there that wouldn't be tolerated anywhere else. Its the anti-authority types who are most likely to think out of the box, and are actually praised for by many American companies (at least vocally, implicitly they might not like them so much, of course).
It's normal, yes. Growing up in NZ we were taught that it's impolite and you should always say "X and I." I was surprised to learn that in the UK it's said the other way around.
I like to read what I write aloud as a sense check before submitting it - nothing stood out immediately. My wife often tells me my (written) English is terrible.
Aha, you appear to be correct. This might be a case of linguistic prejudice then - the mistake of saying "me" when "I" is appropriate is considered to be a sign of miseducation, whereas few people ever make the mistake of saying "I" when they mean "me", so it has not acquired any negative connotations. This prejudice applies even when the usage of "me" is correct!
Notice that I said "as the subject of a sentence". It certainly works in the single case you chose. How about these:
"… and me and Carl were quietly trying to weigh up which team …"
"Me and Carl had a winner and …"
"During the excercise me and a colleague, Carl, made ourselves available …"
Yes, those are incorrect. Perhaps it's just because I'm not located in the UK, but it really stands out for me. Those, the lack of periods and phrases such as:
>and thinked the way most of the team already worked and thought
Yes, that sentence in the first paragraph stood out to me too, but I really didn't expect for the article to gain traction.
I want to add that I can't suit everyone, there are things that annoy me about American English grammar that I can't change, and I wouldn't think about writing in the comments suggestions on how to fix it. Maybe that's just me.
Shouldn't it be "Carl and me"? I thought there were two rules for these phrases: subject vs. predicate (as illustrated in the parent post) and that you should put yourself last.
I can only speak for tech companies, but my experience is that once a company becomes large enough to hire HR people and middle management, that's a sign that money is being wasted paying for unproductive types rather than creating and improving sold products and services.
Hiring HR people because "that's what a serious, large company does" and having a certain amount of mid-tier bosses because "we [the top] need better control over what's happening down at the bottom" (read: "we need detailed control of people that have been self-sufficient and productive on their own for several years"), is an excellent time to start looking for other work.
In general, HR and middle management exist for a reason. Someone has to handle all the associated (legal) burden of having employees. There's a lot of paperwork to do, a lot of communication that needs to be handled. Same for management, they exist for a reason. Not hiring HR or management is a waste of productive time: The tasks don't just magically disappear but other people, the ones that you call "productive" will have to take care of them and all of a sudden, we developers do have less time to do productive things, such as having important discussions on HN blaming HR and management for our misery.
There's an argument to be made that HR and Middle Management should be supportive functions in tech companies and thus shouldn't have the last call, but I'd be really really careful with calling them "unproductive". I for myself am glad that the paper-shuffling tasks get managed by a dedicated employee rather than myself. I'd go bonkers in a week if they'd pile up on my desk.
I very much dislike the idea that you can't give special treatment to individual candidates. The job of a recruiter is to find the best candidate for the job, not to treat all candidates equally. Now obviously we can't go around discriminating against candidates based on attributes not relevant to their ability to perform (ie gender, race, religion etc), but that doesn't mean we can't make use of any extra information we might be able to garner about a person.
If a particular candidate, who happens to fail part of the interview, still seems like a good choice, by all means look for additional means of evaluation.
I once had an interview, where I spoke with a few people very positively for about 3 hours, it was going great. There was no sign of a technical test, so I had assumed by this point that they either didn't do them, or they'd be in a second round of interviews. Then they realised they'd forgotten to give me the technical test, which they then gave me and I screwed up for whatever reasons. Upon learning that I'd aced every part of the interview except the programming test, I mentioned they had an employee who'd worked with me on previous projects and could vouch for my coding ability. But they said they couldn't use that information because it would be unfair to other candidates.
This was a long time ago, and I didn't really lose much by not getting the job, but it always felt like the approach they took was wrong.
> The job of a recruiter is to find the best candidate for the job, not to treat all candidates equally.
I won't disagree, but I would like to restate that a little more carefully:
"The job of a recruiter is to measure which candidate is best for this job, fairly and without bias."
As you point out, there are quite a few reasons that people try to weedle out of actually hiring the best person, some of them not so savory (subconscious preference for white, male people - but it depends on the company, and the culture). It should be hard, but not impossible, to override the default procedure - and for exceptional cases only.
Certainly, in the Article, the flawed psychometric test should not have been grounds to reject the best-performing candidate in the room. But similarly, personality (or appearance) should also not be a reason to promote someone over their ability to do the job.
That was very possibly a white lie. In this egalitarian, self-esteem is paramount
era, many will be more comfortable saying "it wouldn't be fair" as opposed to "you FAILED."
Another employee vouching for you isn't quite the same thing.
The problem here is that it's very hard for people to not discriminate at all based on attributes not relative to ability such as gender, race, religion, etc.
For example, many people have racist tendencies but rationalize them as something else.
"There is a big group of male magentas dressed the same over there, I should avoid them because they are almost certainly a gang"
is rationalized as:
"I don't avoid the group of male magentas dressed the same because I'm racist and assume that most magentas are in a gang, but because I've been taught common sense. Common sense dictates people that look like that must be gangsters."
Perhaps if we interviewed people without being able to see them, their name, or anything about them and using voice obfuscation we could eliminate a lot of bias?
It's indeed very hard to avoid discrimination. I'm not proud to admit that I have racist, and even sexist tendencies. I have just enough self-awareness to recognise that I've done it after the fact, but it's much harder to stop myself in the process of discrimination and behave differently.
I imagine a significant number of people are similar to myself in this regard, I would love to see more discussion about it. Because I feel it's the subtle prejudices we all have that create the real problems, rather than the smaller (but louder) groups of overtly prejudiced people.
If I had the money to fight the lawsuit, I'd be right there.
Also, I formally let them know I disagreed with the psychometric testing.
Double also... I used to apologise to new hires for the psychometric testing, and tell them "this is not how the real-world works, this is a micro-community"
Fight the smart battles - and know the parameters of your influence ie don't be labelled as public enemy no.1 by dis-agreeing visibly.
Personally i think hr's role in selectin should simply be one of co-ordination and documentation, nothing more. Selection should be done by the team that needs them, with even the managers of the team playing a supporting role ie team decides not even the project manager. That requires a strong CTO/CIO type person and supporting CEO etc.
But, more importantly, by allowing HR to label you as a dis-ruptor and someone who threatens their own influence, it will be tough for you in the long run
HR - particularly recruiting - at most (big) companies is a colossal joke. They´re typically lazy - limited in their understanding of the business and very quick to make decisions that they refuse to change due to the insecurity of knowing that they might actually be superfluous if it wasn´t for all that paperwork that someone had to take care of. They set some random parameters and don´t actually have an understanding of who would really fit the job. At the end of the day - they dont have to work with those people, nor do they understand the current team dynamic - so how can one expect otherwise!?
Thought experiment: For those running companies and hiring people. Would you take the time to occasionally run your interview processes over your existing employees? I'm not talking about involving them, I mean actually putting them through it.
It would be one way to sanity-check that the process is selecting for the things you want from those coming from outside. As a company grows, the non-technical systems and policies also need to adapt but without feedback things might get weird (like the OP's example). If an existing high-performer does badly with your interviews/tests at some point then you really, really need to fix something.
Here here, I'll second-that. Most management types are disconnected from the processes that their staff are instructed to follow. I've ran through application demos and walkthroughs with senior managers before where at the end they ask "Why do we do that?"
By your logic, no position in a business know about business apart from oh so clever programmers? Oh please. Look across HN at the threads about the psychology, depression, and so on. Programmers and some of the most insular people out there. No problem as such, but don't tell me they have some special ability to cover all bases in a business. That has to be a joke.
If you think about it, HR are one of the few departments that are more likely to know about other departments. They have to, its their job. Do you think marketing has more interest in various departments as HR? Developers? Try talking to sales people, they think the idiot developers know nothing about that people want. Try talking to accountants, they think marketing just blows money. And so on. Oh yes, my department is best and every one else is a monkey. Yeah, heard the inter department politics over and over again. Its tired, boring and gets in the way of business. If idiots just grew up, and respected each others job functions productivity would benefit. But, hey.....
A lot of the problem with HR is arrogant people in other departments who don't do the hiring job properly, then spit the dummy because they find out their funky programmer got fired for fraud from their previous job, or something, because arrogant programmer didn't want HR to do the back ground checks, because arrogant programmer thought new programmer would be one of the boys.
I think I was in a really fortunate position when I was able to negotiate this at my second company. Interestingly, at my first company, asking an existing employee to take the written tests in the specified time-frame was a standard practice. They were also encouraged to provide subjective evaluation.
On a very positive note, our HR director was someone who had removed psychometric tests at a number of organizations before he came to us.
How many people trust their employer to take a negative result on such a test as a sign of a poorly functioning test rather than a poorly functioning worker.
Why start with the interview? Try to find the job listing and submit a resume. Then ask yourself if that was a good use of your time. This part of the process is horribly broken for a lot of employers and they don't even know it.
She also told me that if I was re-interviewing at the company then I likely wouldn't get the job based on my psychometric profile, which was actually ironic since I was highly respected in my role and was one of only a handful of people that could convincingly debate technical alternatives with Senior Management.
This reminds me of an article I read a while ago. In essence it warned of hiring people that think the same as everyone else on your team, as you will get stuck with the same opinion almost every time.
It advocated hiring different thinking employees to achieve a broader view to any given problem.
These psychometric tests seem to go against that advice by only selecting people with very similar personalities and thought patterns, thus stinting the company.
The job interview is the absolutely worst way to find different minded people. I temped at a fairly large electronics corp and they made me take the ridiculous personality test. I answered the questions the way you assume a large corporation would like and got the position. A few years later I applied to the same company again and took the same personality test.
I figured now that I've got some experience under my belt and I have references from within I'd be a shoe-in. So I answered truthfully this time and was rejected. I asked my references about what happened and HR told them I didn't pass the personality test.
When money is on the line people are quite flexible about their views. If you like ObjC, I like ObjC. If you like Starbucks, I like Starbucks.
I don't understand why HR should have a role in decision making to hire candidates. I'd find them useful in: 1) providing guidance; 2) ensure that all hiring is done legally and ethically; and that's about it. It is the hiring manager's responsibility to make sure his team delivers, so it should also be the hiring manager's decision on who is hired.
There were two tests - I don't know the names but maybe someone here knows more than I do about them.
Firstly: You had to write a personal statement, something to describe yourself
Test 1: Involved ticking (agreeing) with a list of statements from two perspectives. The first perspective was how you see yourself. The second perspective was how (you think) others see you
Test 2: Involved rotating the letter R many times in a fixed time period. I was given a grid of about 100 R's all at different angles and had to count the number of clock wise rotations for it to be normal.
The end-result was basically a bunch of weightings that gave personality traits. Followed by a really well written auto-generated description of that individuals traits.
Typically when people had the chance to read their results, they'd say "ooh, actually I agree". But of all the things it said - there was a hell-of-a-lot that it didn't say.
Involved rotating the letter R many times in a fixed time period. I was given a grid of about 100 R's all at different angles and had to count the number of clock wise rotations for it to be normal.
This sounds like a test to see if you're capable of doing boring, repetitive and uninspiring work. I can see how that might be useful to many large businesses!
I got a test that tested my math skills, problem solving, my understanding of a text, and word associations. They ended with a test for a Myers-Briggs personality type.
My math skills (without calculator) were pretty bad, but I was reassured that it didn't matter, I was applying as a software developer not an accountant.
I got the job, and in my time there I also heard about people that "failed" the test.
I've taken several kinds of psychometric tests, but have never seen one that produces a single result, whose unit is %. What kind of psychometric test could that possibly be?
Even when I saw my own results, towards the end of my employment there, there wasn't a single overall metric result.
Maybe she did some kind of averaging, or maybe she was told by management to invent a reason to reject him... since about 96% of the company was of British White origin - I shouldn't speculate though.
"The psychometric test was supposed to produce a "true" reflection of how someone saw themselves, and I was told it couldn't change over time - i.e. whatever it determined was fixed, immutable and infallable."
20 years ago I took the Meyers-Briggs test multiple times (well, once a year for 3 years). My numbers changed a little bit each time - I was fairly strong I and N, but very weak 'T' and 'J', to the point where sometimes they were 'F' and/or 'P'. I took a similar test again a few weeks ago and 'I' and 'N' were strong, the others were still weak.
I had a couple people tell me though that "it never changes". Which is ridiculous because it's obviously not true, and depends totally on how you interpret the questions, and that's based on how you're feeling when you take it. I don't think people administering tests or interpreting the results always understand what they're actually looking at (which probably makes me a stronger J).
remember that MBTIs have no evidence base - they can be helpful in allowing someone to "see" jobs they might be happier in, as they did for me, but they don't necessarily measure anything statistically significant about a personality.
It's obviously pseudo bullcrap; what's astonishing is that the hiring manager in the article is dogmatically following it and ignoring the advice of the senior technical people involved in the hiring process
Sure - they're not the be-all answer to everything, but I've found them helpful in (re)assessing myself lately.
I found much more static-ness in my IQ over the last 30+ years. I was actually surprised at how consistent it was over decades and various tests (and, dare I say, slightly disappointed).
I agree about MBTI - until I understood that I was allowed to have a personality preference for perceiving over judging (preferring to live in the moment than plan ahead in detail) I was stressing myself worrying about why I was so rubbish at planning, rather than trying to find a career where it was less important! (the only careers I've come up with so far are stock exchange trading and politics - if anyone has any others I'd be interested to hear. I like coding, especially in sprints, but I am absolutely terrible at estimating how long it will take me to write things.)
I find that every time I take an IQ test I get a higher score - I presumed because I'm learning what sort of questions IQ tests ask and how to answer them faster - so when required I just quote the first ever test I took as my IQ (which was a very unscientific one, unfortunately, by answering questions along with a TV program. I also had a score bump for age, because I was only 16.) I was, at the time, delighted that I got higher than my maths teacher! remember too, though, that IQ is heavily biased towards people with a "western" education.
IQ isn't very important though, once you get above 130 - the differences don't correlate to greater performance in any real test cases. The difference in performance at those levels is to do with attitude, experience, vocabulary (outside of technical fields I've studied/worked in, mine is awful), and all sorts of soft factors.
(apologies if I'm wrong, but I assume that anyone with karma on hacker news is IQ >= 130 or so.)
IQ numbers vary based on tests, to some degree, so "130" doesn't necessarily mean a whole lot. What I'd found is that I was in the same percentile on all tests (took 3 a few years ago) compared to tests from 30 and 20 years ago.
The raw score numbers might have changed up or down slightly, but same percentile in my case.
... IQ is supposed to be a normal distribution, ">= 130" === "3 sigma above the mean," i.e. top 0.1%.
(bearing in mind that the test is inescapably biased towards people with our background - US/UK/etc, certainly English speaking, probably university educated.)
fair point indeed - the tests are highly weighted (and thus rather unsatisfactory - the skewing reduces the resolution of the test, if you like) for young people.
that has actually recently been updated with reliable sources. Some of the comments below this comment of yours make guesses about IQ tests that can be checked against the sources by referring to that article.
That's arguably backward. The MBTI was developed to help people place into jobs, but it has not proven itself to be a useful indicator of that. Conversely, all it is is a personality measurement. When you analyze the type system, it's actually a fairly decent one. (Probably the best we have today, but that doesn't mean much if you think they're all bad.)
Well, really, how different is it from the Chinese Ground/Fire/Water/Wind personality traits system? You can explain anything with it: Roger is Water with some wind, and B-Con is mostly Fire with some ground mixed in. We need more "ground" people for our team!
What does that tell you that "hey, this team is pretty pie in the sky and chasing ideas that aren't likely to be monitized. Let's get a product manager in here to give some direction!" The latter, I argue is far superior cognitive model, and has the decided advantage of being based on empirical observations. (I know you weren't arguing for MBTI, I just used your post as a launching off point since you mentioned the existence of different systems).
I've taken the Meyers-Briggs several times and tried to answer in a way to get different outcomes. I've answered realistically, speculatively, and hopefully. Each time I got the same result.
Interesting. How strong are those results each time?
Each of my 4 scores have had a % strength with them - my I and N have been fairly high (30-60% over time), and the T/J were always < 10%, slipping in to F/P on occasion.
There's no way this is possible unless you are selecting different shades of the same category of answer. The overall framework of MBTI is largely binary. To produce different results, all you have to do is choose the complete opposite of answers you chose last time.
"I make lists frequently" is the opposite of "I don't maintain lists at all"
What wouldn't work is substituting "Crowded environments make me tired" with "I like to hang out sometimes, other times alone". The delta isn't wide enough.
When I said I was trying to get different results I didn't mean artificial results. There were times when I answered the questions how I thought I would actually act in a situation. And I've answered the questions in how I would want to act in a situation. I wanted to see if there is a difference between who I am and who I want to be. What is the difference between actual self and idealized self.
If I wanted a different answer then all I could have done was answer the opposite of what I did before.
The worst part about companies using Meyers-Briggs (other than the pseudoscience beliefs around it) is that it's easy to manipulate. If you study the test and know what the company is looking for you can easily answer the questions to the the result you want.
> I had a couple people tell me though that "it never changes". Which is ridiculous because it's obviously not true, and depends totally on how you interpret the questions, and that's based on how you're feeling when you take it.
The official MB position is that your type itself doesn't change, even if your answers do. Your perception of yourself and of the questions can change, but your type itself does not.
Frankly, I don't buy that, I don't see any strong evidence, from theory or practice, to suggest that it must be that way. However, IMO, it's a pointless subject. Whether you change or not really has no impact on anything. Just use the typing system and take the most accurate results you get. If your score changes, whatever.
Note: I'm a very strong MB enthusiast and I think it's a fantastic personality typing system. Oddly, I've never taking the actual MBTI (that is, the actual test), though.
I participated in a similar test not a long time ago. Along with personality test it self, It was basically asking same questions again and again and testing if I am being honest/consistent.
They told me in my next interview I was one of the most consistent people that took test. I got a 95%, whatever that means. In reality I just noticed the pattern and gave my answers with that information
The main problem is companies are too afraid of firing people - a "good fit" from an HR perspective is someone they won't have to fire later.
They are "risk averse" insofar as they would rather hire a safe and comfortable person who meets their personality metrics rather than take a chance on someone outside of that who is technically sharper.
too many in authority want the glory of title, they do not want to be responsible, hence they tend not to do. Hence, when they run across people who can think, can do, get it done, they create systems where adherence is more important that work.
Those on the other end fail these wonderful HR tests because they all too often have to around the title hounds to keep the business they work in up and running.
It's really not my attention to offend/troll, but I found it amusing that whilst reading the blog post I found myself thinking "The grammar of this article is so bad, I wonder if the author's first language is English"... just as I hit the same question in the text. :)
To add something constructive to the discussion:
I've hired tens of developers over the years. Recruiting is by far the most black art I've ever suffered in the IT industry. I've terminated interviews with the most technically-adept people because their attitude was so risible there was no way they could be part of the company; I've begged interviewees who would barely speak to open up because I had a hunch they were brilliant (I was right); and I've hired promising and smart junior staff over proven yet jaded senior staff.
Trying to encompass the delightful diversity which is presented to an interviewer in a few rules is usually folly to appease the suits. You will miss great hires that way.
Does that matter? Well, it depends. I spoke to or interviewed one person for every 20 resumes, and hired one in every 20 interviewees. So, miss one through a bunch of dumb rules and think about the 400 resumes you will have to wade through......
The bottom line is that people are diverse and weird- especially engineers!- and a good interviewer with a developed spidey sense will do better for the company by ignoring daft rules regarding recruitment.
TL:DR
Recruiting is really hard and difficult to define. You will lose good hires by implementing made-up rules.
The story is certainly more important, which is presumably why the majority of redpola's comments are about it. But to be fair, I actually asked myself exactly the same question and went to your "About Me" page to check.
Try not to be offended. He's likely just pointing out what many who read the story may think, but not say. Just take it on-board as constructive feedback for future articles.
It's an interesting story. Thanks for taking the time to write it up.
On the topic of technical tests, the company I work for has a good approach. They'll set the technical test for you to do at home (the same one for everyone), then you submit it and they review it. Based on that, you have a phone interview in which you have to talk through what you did and why you did it, being asked questions about certain bits and your choices. They also talk through some other bits to try and gauge your knowledge. If you pass that stage, you then go on to a face to face interview.
Might not catch everyone who tries to cheat, but will help.
That sounds like a sane test. If someone does blatantly cheat, it will be immediately obvious during the interview afterwards.
At my company, we ask people to submit some choice prior work if possible. Then we look at that, and try to have a conversation about the tech. The bonus is that it respects the candidates time, and it is easier to get them talking when it's their own projects. The downside is that very few candidates have recent prior work publicly available.
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[ 55.4 ms ] story [ 1083 ms ] threadFortunately, I googled the phrase before embarrassing myself. Turns out he all-but-invented the phrase to describe his own work.
I suppose he had no such illusions.
The thing I was unaware of was that Asimov did actually think of his writing as social science fiction.
An actual scientist would have asked questions -- Do the test results correlate with performance? Is the test biased? What is the margin of error on the test? etc. -- and would very likely have come to the conclusion that the test should not be trusted as a reliable indicator.
Yup ...
There is going to be a real big shift in the next twenty years. We look at things like Developer Anarchy and say "what let the programmers run the company?" - but that's the wrong idea. It's let those with software literacy run the company - just as 500 years ago those who were literate took over running companies
For a while we shall see parallel organisations within one company - the illiterate traditional management model, and a more productive, clearly vital org that consists of all those who "get it" - whatever their job title
I wasted too many years trying to join the well renumerated traditional side - and regret the half attention I found I could pay to programming. But I have seen the light
Stop working for companies that are not dedicated to software literacy. Schumpter will be round soon enough to have a word with them.
I would love to work for a shop, even in an underling capacity, that really gets software dev right. It would be worth delaying my startup dreams just so I can do it right at scale.
It's not saying its important - everyone in Hollywood says the story is the thing - but only Pixar seems to live by it. See any talk by Ed Catmull
But not being able to do it is a very strong signal that someone can't program in any professional setting, no matter what they pretend. It's a very simple and effective test to rule out people who think/pretend they can program, but really can't.
Our experience is that the answers to fizzbuzz are a good classification criteria in vetting who has got programming abilities and who has not. Most people who actually try can solve it, but the ones who are talented give out either a perfect and simple solution or do something elegant and go for the style points. The ones who don't give out a fumbling solution that is too long or shows signs of not being comfortable with the task at hand, even if they manage to write a computer program that produces the correct results.
As silly as it may sound, the fizzbuzz test is a good classifier for programmers. I didn't believe it until I saw the evidence from the quality of candidates we got.
a and b are ints, so a/b is truncated (rounded down) before applying *b.
Definitely not a gimmick question about whether you know about modulus.
The role or the person performing it in most cases generally does nothing even remotely close to engineering. If you sit down and seriously grill the guy, he will have no clue what he is doing, why he is doing it or if he is even necessary.
There are a few good people who become VP's but such people are exceedingly rare. Most of the times, VP's are made and hired through politics, strong friend network, god fathers or sometimes sheer luck.
A person I know who has done a few successful start ups once told me, he purposefully avoids hiring anyone with 'director' or 'VP' titles from big companies. Often, they are the ones which take the highest compensation, while actually being the most useless people on the team.
This is about the same kind of shitty thinking that results in surveillance states.
"We can't employ/feed you/let you travel/let you have a mortgage/let you open a bank account, you are Invalid."
"Invalid, what do you mean?"
"We are not allowed to tell invalids why they are invalid. Report for reprocessing."
Edit: Oh, and psych tests are bull. It's pretty obvious what the "right" answers are - so all you actually succeed in doing is filtering the psychopaths in.
You wish. Once a company is a certain size, it can ignore market pressure by colluding with government (the company I work for should have been obliterated long ago, but there are artificial barriers to entry).
It would ideally be descriptive vs. prescriptive, so you could uncover things like "we get mainly recent-college-grads applying, but our strongest employees are those who joined mid-career", or "we have very few minorities who apply, but those who apply and are offered positions tend to be strong and stay with the company a long time".
Pretty meaningless unless you are hiring at Google scale, though.
Many big corporates have psychometricians on staff. At least one even has a department dedicated to psychometric testing.
There's plenty of demand for skilled developers so I don't understand why people put themselves through the humiliation. I expect that a lot of skilled people self-select out of these sorts of psychometric processes if they can, to the detriment of potential employers.
I also wouldn't be surprised if many of the tests contain an element of uncorrected racial/cultural bias, and the psychometric industry has been exploiting the inability of the government to enforce the law (Employment Equity Act), which makes discriminatory testing illegal.
Bingo! The way it actually works is you organize everything with the assumption that applicants will fail 20% of tests. A different failure mode each time, but the odds are excellent if you give an applicant ten tests, and they fail 1 in 5, every applicant will fail at least one. Then you remove all the undesirables (skin color, sexuality, that kind of thing) and declare the fact that the bosses nephew being the only guy to fail the 360 interview with the janitor turns out to be not relevant, so lets hire him.
In the original article the only reason the 1% test result mattered In That Particular Case is the HR person didn't like that asian's nationality, or race, or religion, or something like that. Guarantee if I was the candidate it would be swept under the rug (unless the HR lady hates me because of my race, politics, religion, of course)
Why would the psychometric industry want to exploit such a lack of enforcement by vending a discriminatory test? Do you think their customers are interested in using tests that give bogus results?
The Employment Equity Act doesn't make discriminatory testing illegal, it legalizes discrimination.
I don't know if the results matter.
Unlike the OP it's at the hirer's discretion how much weight they put in the score and it's made clear to us there's a definite pattern that more nervous candidates & those without English as a natural language score less well. We ask them to come into the office, only in rare occasions does someone do it remotely.
Most of my candidates in software positions score 40-70% and have done well in the company, I've had a number in the 0-20% bracket of whom I took 1 based on his good performance in other aspects of the interview - he's not turned out to be a great hire relative to the others. A handful in the company get the 95%+ scores and they've all done well - I think many are among the best performers in our department suggesting some kind of particular capability.
The output of the test is a % score with breakdown in a few catagories plus a 2-3 page personality profile. I showed mine to a few ex colleagues, it said probably 8 things like "will have days where he's uncommunicative or seems unfriendly and days he's warmer" which everyone pointed out as eerily true about me (and the negative aspects I can therefore work on!) but it read a little like a horoscope in that you can probably find truth in it and it's up to you to what extent you forgive the paragraphs that are very untrue, although presented in a scientific way.
Honestly, I think it's pretty helpful as accompanying information and would use it again at another job
Yeah, I think that describes approximately 1 of out every 1 persons.
If a recruiting company is so incompetent as to require personality profiling, and worse, enforce it so rigidly, it would explain why Europe lags so far behind the US in tech startups, despite having at least as many (if not substantially more) brilliant developers per capita.
If it's an operating company, then it maybe explains why European companies use recruiting agencies so much. Still seems like a huge tax on companies -- having decent internal HR would go a long way.
Maybe part of it is that a recruiter should fully understand the role of a recruiter, but very few really understand the developer/devops/etc. roles they recruit for.
Here in the UK that's called 'rec to rec' and I promise you, they are generally shockingly bad. If you think tech recruiters are incompetent and greedy then you would be horrified at the standard of rec to rec.
Kind of like picking the lowest possible bidder for a construction contract, it doesnt usually go well.
That was in the spring and they expected to have picked out some people by the end of summer.
I didn't apply, mostly because I am happy where I am, but also because a 3-5 month interview process is completely ridiculous.
The entire process just put me off from applying. If they can't talk to me once or twice and look at my resume/past projects then I do not know if I want to work there. I understand the need to find the right people, but there are limits to how many hoops I care to jump through to get the honour of working in their company.
Is this a common practice?
I can understand if you have another job and end up interviewing somewhere else while working, but if I was without a job I probably wouldn't be able to wait 5 months for someone to decide I've passed their tests.
My friend ended up applying and he was also one of the few that got hired, which is why I've heard a bit more about their process than I think I normally would.
I think using a recruiting company is more common around here. Where I work now, quite a few of us have started out working part time (as I am now) through a recruiting process, and occasionally those who work full time get picked up by our company to work directly.
My boss worked the same position I work in now, back when he was in university.
No, a 3-5 month interview process is not common.
Yes. Looks like 3 Interviews, 3-5 months of interview process is pretty normal in Europe. I have applied for a job in Norway as well once.
> I can understand if you have another job and end up interviewing somewhere else while working, but if I was without a job I probably wouldn't be able to wait 5 months for someone to decide I've passed their tests.
Well there is another common practice that if you are unemployed without a serious reason (freelancing, relocation, family matters etc.) you are turned down immediately by a logic "If he couldn't get a job, something must be wrong with him". That's even worse if you were unemployed for a prolonged period of time.
It's even worse, even if you freelance most people will assume there is something very wrong with you to the point that they are not turned down, but not even considered for the job.
I've gone through two interview processes in Norway – none of them took longer than ten days and I can't say I have heard about anyone else that has been through months-long processes either. (I'm a software engineer.)
The primary reason Europe lags behind is the substantial lack of investors & VC's.
The case highlighted by the author is typical of large corporates but if you look at any decent tech company in London for example, this case would sound ridiculous and extreme.
Doubtful about the second bit - beaurocracy seems to become magnified in London.
I was referring to the likes of Facebook UK, Google, Badoo, Songkick, etc.
European investors are just bankers (with a few exceptions).
Also you might have heard of a little company kicking the shit out of Intel... ARM. Based in Cambridge UK, that is also where most tech investments in Europe are happening (not London or Berlin).
Also, Germany and Switzerland are much more quiet and private about investments. You won't hear about many of them.
These days you can invest in a UK startup, and have the government pick up 100% of the tab if it fails. Not to mention insane tax breaks (100%+) for r&d and for exploiting patents. The UK already has crowd equity.
If you get all your news from YC then you're probably stuck in the silly valley echo chamber.
Keep in mind the other notable differences between here and the US such as free health care, a larger number of paid holidays etc.
I need to earn £50k to cover just childcare costs and the mortgage (looking forward to both of those going down soon). I could sell up and buy a similar property 5 miles away and those costs would both halve. I could sell up and buy a similar property 10 miles away and have no mortgage at all. Neither of those would make us happier as a family (no matter how much I'd love to have no mortgage); we want to live where we're living now, so I just get on with it.
Also bonuses. Bonuses in London can be 100% of salary or more.
National health insurance is not really free in the UK... but UK contractors pay less tax than US ones generally. German freelancers get paid more, but pay more tax (and get more holidays).
Developers outside of London can earn less, but many prefer it.
There's something mysterious about the low wages for programmers.
The service prices (health, education, banking, communications, etc) are generally much lower than in the US, though, so it's hard to get an accurate comparison of cost-of-life.
The varied answers you get about London salaries is because the financial industry pays pretty well, competitive with SV or NY money. Everyone else gets paid peanuts. Or goes contracting like me.
I believe the most important part is this:
If EIS shares are disposed of at any time at a loss, such loss can be set against the investor's capital gains or his income in the year of disposal.
So basically, if you take a loss, you can deduct it against any other gains you have.
I get the general perception top tier Sand Hill VCs are now willing to invest in Series B or later (and some Series A) in Europe. Costs have dropped, even in Europe, so you can get pretty far on $50-100k in savings for a seed round. So the big problem in the long term is probably risk-aversion in hiring, vs. raising money.
These wacko interviewing processes are just another symptom of this. Don't think any comptetent business leader actually believe these scores matter at all. In the end it's just another safeguard against (gasp!) taking a risk.
If he got hired, but would have his pay stuck because HR and higher management would not understand his value(e.g. not boasting his accomplishments everywhere, prioritizing business relevant issues over internal political issues etc), he would end up rage quitting and "wasting" years he could have spent at some more open company.
You would be right. It took me a while but I began to notice that a high percentage of key hires in other areas of the business were notably failing to make the sort of contributions expected of them. They must all have done "well" on the psychometric test of course but was it possible that this was over influencing the selection process and eliminating better candidates - of course we could just have been attracting the wrong applicants.
My recruiting was able to balance any psychometric testing bias by only short listing people we thought were likely up to the job technically and who would fit in with the team. Other areas probably did not have the luxury of having the capacity to "test" that someone could probably do the job as well as pass the more dubious psychometric test.
After I left that company I was pretty sure that I would avoid businesses that used psychometric testing - in the same way as I would refuse to interview for any business that used something like graphology - more obviously bogus science?
I was doing fleet management software at the time which meant I was also bundled with actually handing cars out to new hires when they arrived. What can I say, they were cheap-asses and I was young enough to enjoy goofing around in cars.
Anyway, almost immediately one of the hires was sent to me and I had instructions to give him a car. He had no idea why he was to come to me so introduced himself and the usual stuff before I told him he could choose from a couple of cars I had available. The blood drained from his face and it was obvious there was something wrong.
After a few awkward seconds he looked around to make sure no-one else was around and explained he was banned from driving due to multiple drink drive (DUI/DWI in North American) convictions. A car was out the question and I now had a problem I had to go back to HR with.
When I spoke to HR, they were indignant and stressed their psychometric tests had guaranteed he was excellent for an on-the-road salesman and there was no problem giving him a car. I then had to point out it would be a criminal offence for me to give him a car so that was not going to happen. I left them still saying, 'but the test is very clear, he is an ideal candidate'.
I've never believed in them after that and anytime I see them I know the sort of brain dead thinking which goes along with them is a red flag not to join any organization using them.
Sure, the test says give the DUI guy a car - what could possibly go wrong ?
Metric obsession when applied to people is not good, because unlike your conversion rate, people can't be defined by metrics.
* Get rid of HR people.
* Profit.
The job, and the working environment in particular, was horrible and I didn't stay after my probation period.
On the other hand, I was put on a dead end project and the company, despite being a rather small one, was like a big corporation where you can hide without doing anything and still get paid.
I actually read a few thousand pages of Intel programming manuals and wrote not one but two toy operating system projects and got paid for it!
At the time I thought it was a hoax, after your story I'm not so sure.
https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6087935
But yes, at my last job interview, I succeeded at the technical interview but failed at the 'personality' one. It's a loss for them, not for me.
What makes you think HR people are any better than we in hiring those ones? (Hiring other HR personal excluded, they are probably good on that, the same way that we are good on hiring techies.)
I don't have an answer to your question, but I'm quite confident that it isn't "you ask a psychologist".
From what I have seen the only useful function for HR in the highering process is a background verification check. Aka did John Smith work at your company from 2000-2004. Anything else is risky.
But as you mention, if developers were to handle everything related to hiring, firing, sick reports, vacation, benefits, contracts, compliance etc. that HR does, I doubt there would be any profit.
It's easy to bash HR people just as "regular" employees often bash IT ("They won't provide that simple feature that I've been asking for ever since, just because they hate me."). But calling the role "broken" does not magically make it disappear. Someone needs to handle the employer/employee relationship and all attached nuisances - any organisation with employees that does not handle this role is more broken than any HR department I've ever seen.
I'd really hope that we'd be over this and appreciate that other people in our organisation provide value and experience that we maybe can't see at fist glance. Instead we close our eyes and call their role "broken".
The scope can be as narrow as "do background checks on hires, do the math on their desired pay and tell me how much each one would cost and if there's any red flags" or as broad as "do a first phone call and check out if you think that person is a good fit culturally." Handle all associated paperwork, set up interview dates, handle travel and accommodation arrangements for the prospective hire, ... Handle all paperwork associated with employees, sick leave, keep track of holidays, ... Follow changes in applicable law. Organise team building events. I know of an HR department that organises monthly lunches where people of the company get randomly assigned to groups so that they get to know other people working in the same company, not only their team peers. There's a lot of things you can do as HR person. Not everybody needs everything and not every HR person may have the required qualifications for each task, so you probably just have to figure out what exact set of responsibilities right for your place.
Out of curiosity, could you imagine an organization functioning where HR work was done by administrative assistants to team managers?
No. Mission creep happens on broad and narrow roles the same. The better defined the role, the better. Constant reevaluation and adaption to changed realities is a must.
> Out of curiosity, could you imagine an organization functioning where HR work was done by administrative assistants to team managers?
Up to a certain degree yes, but there's the question how and where to allocate common functions if you have any. Depends on your organisation. That doesn't make the "HR department" disappear though, it just changes its name to "administrative assistants". It certainly makes things harder when people try to reach the HR department because that's what they're used to.
All in all: If that fits your organisation, sure. Just make sure that the role is defined and someone is responsible and actually takes up the work.
edit: see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6289282 for a point where a more centralised HR made a positive impact. An assistant to the team manager might easily have missed the broad picture because of a more narrow view, focused on the teams turnover rate.
We had an initial round of meetings and then the issue slipped with meetings getting pushed out further and further from the other side. So yes, I think that in this position the other person was in charge. In any case, even if I'd be responsible to push the agenda, a good HR department should not let an open (and known) issue slip. Quite, to the contrary, good HR should recognise situations like this before the employee ever feels the need to push for a contract renegotiation.
If you get a moment, read "Corporate Confidential" by Cynthia Shapiro. Only 200 or so pages, and it's a quick read. But very enlightening.
What the HR person would know is how the person appears socially and how he manages to present himself.
The company should make sure the HR person isn't the only one deciding if somebody gets hired or not, because the HR person simply does not possess the tools needed to get the best man for the job by himself.
True story: I got an ad for a consulting position for "Postgre"
The description had as a listed skill:
"PostgreSQL USE GOOGLE TO VERIFY SPELLING"
That's a bad sign there.
Required:
Java
Open source technologies
Microsoft Visual Studio
That's only true if the people defining the mission of various departments -- i.e., executive management -- is not competent at their job.
Reforming or eliminating HR will not fix that problem.
That depends. Are they staffed by psychologists? If yes, then no. Psychology and psychological testing are losing credibility very rapidly right now:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/side-effects/201305/the-...
I don't know if you meant by including that link that psychologists criticising psychiatrists undermines their credibility, but if that's the case I disagree strongly.
Not so. The DSM is the central authority and diagnostic manual for both psychiatry and clinical psychology. Reference:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/more-diagnosis/201003/ho...
> I don't know if you meant by including that link that psychologists criticising psychiatrists undermines their credibility ...
I included the link only to show that the DSM is being abandoned by mental health professionals, not to suggest a schism between psychiatry and psychology. The latter has been true for decades and goes without saying.
Unfortunately, they're overwhelmed by the majority, which are full of pseudoscience.
Maybe the more rigorous ones should change their titles, not to be associated with standard "psychologists" anymore?
I have been recommending that serious students, those who want to avoid the stigma of psychology, enter the field of neuroscience instead. Neuroscience will eventually replace psychiatry and psychology as the preferred approach to treating what we now call "mental illnesses", most of which are actually biological illnesses with mental symptoms. Reference:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/05/the-s...
Psychiatrists are medicals doctors treating the organ "brain". It's pretty much interchangeable with neuroscience. And before once changes, one should reason very carefully, because they are completely different, and medical school is very hard, while one says that psychology tends to be easy. Also there is not much new about this approach. It's probably as old as psychology. Maybe one could say psychology developed from the former. Pawlov for example was a physiologist.
/e Well, no they are not interchangeable. A psychiatrists does not research about bionic eyes. But the way they see human psyche is pretty much.
Psychiatry and psychology are branches of human psychology -- both rely on the study of human psychology for validation. And if human psychology were a rigorous, empirical science, people wouldn't be able to say, as you just have, the psychiatry and psychology do not have much in common.
Would you say the same thing about cosmology and particle physics? They're very different -- one studies events at the smallest possible scale, the other at the largest possible scale. But no one suggests that they're unrelated to either each other or to their parent field of physics. The reason is they're sciences.
> Psychiatrists are medicals doctors treating the organ "brain".
No, that's false -- you just described the field of neuroscience (except that neuroscience is more a research than a medical field at the moment). Psychiatrists are psychologists with a medical degree, they are not neuroscientists, and they treat the mind, not the brain.
> It's pretty much interchangeable with neuroscience.
Not remotely. Neuroscience studies the brain and nervous system, psychiatry is a branch of psychology that studies the mind.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychiatry
Quote: "Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the study, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of mental disorders."
Note the phrase "mental disorders," i.e. disorders of the mind. Not "brain disorders".
\snark.
Yep. I'm hearing "cognitive neuroscientist" more often, even though those so named haven't changed their practice and are still psychologists.
In the case mentioned in the article, even a professional that truly trusts the tests should have taken into consideration:
1) make his own assesment and check against the test score,
2) realize that the test is supposedly validated against a sample, and if the candidate falls out of that sample (non-native english speaker), the test should probably be disregarded.
Carefull when disregarding a whole field based on preconceptions. All fields have different branches and disagreements. True some fields like psychology have a harder time producing great professionals, in my assesment. I think it's because of it being a young field and it's hard to agree on what the standards are to measure good/bad practice.
I think you should ask yourself some hard questions about psychology. It's true that psychology's current practices are rather unreliable, but it's not obvious how to solve that problem, given the field's subject, the human mind. If the target were the brain, that would be different, but the mind is not the brain.
For instance i find myself using MBTI ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator ) a lot when meeting new people and tailoring my approach in a way that is meaningful to them.
The solution is simple teach HR psychology but don't make it the be all end all solution in hiring people it should however be a tool in their tool box and they should use their best judgement. Or thrust the IT staffs judgement at least.
If this were to happen in physics we'd call it it a failed or incomplete theory.
If you cannot clearly and empirically prove a theory wrong (in principle), it is not science. Falsifiability is required for science and scientific theories. This doesn't mean all scientific theories are false, it means all scientific theories must not fail a comparison with reality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory
Quote: "The strength of a scientific theory is related to the diversity of phenomena it can explain, which is measured by its ability to make falsifiable predictions with respect to those phenomena."
On that basis, psychology is not a science.
> If this were to happen in physics we'd call it it a failed or incomplete theory.
If this were to happen in physics, people would abandon it, as they abandoned astrology and alchemy.
It's not a science at all. Sciences make observations, then craft generalizing theories to explain the observations, then test the theories in unrelated contexts, then discard those theories that fail. This is certainly not how psychology works. In psychology, it's commonplace to see a therapy for a disease whose existence hasn't yet been established, or that was brought into being by a secret vote rather than a microscope (as was true during the DSM-5 editorial process).
Am I exaggerating the requirements for real science? Let's perform a thought experiment to see. Let's say we can have science without theories, only with observations, as in modern psychology. Here goes ...
Let's say I'm a doctor and I've created a revolutionary cure for the common cold. My cure is to shake a dried gourd over the cold sufferer until he gets better. The cure might take a week, but it always works. My method is repeatable and perfectly reliable, and I've published my cure in a refereed scientific journal (there are now any number of phony refereed scientific journals). And, because (in this thought experiment) science can get along without defining theories, I'm under no obligation to try to explain my cure, or consider alternative explanations for my breakthrough — I only have to describe it, just like a psychologist.
Because I've cured the common cold, and because I've met all the requirements that psychology recognizes for science, I deserve a Nobel Prize. Yes or no?
Ask yourself what's wrong with this picture, and notice that the same thing is wrong with psychology — all description, no explanation, no established principles on which different psychologists agree, no effort to build consensus, and no unifying theories.
> You can't use psychology to make exact predictions of how people will behave however the more you learn about psychology the better you get at figuring out people and make a educated guess what motivates them.
Only if you're suffering from a bad case of confirmation bias. You need to understand that psychology is undergoing a major upheaval eight now, mostly because of improvements in neuroscience that suggest neuroscience will eventually replace psychology, in the same way that astronomy replaced astrology in the 17th century.
Psychology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology
Psychiatry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychiatry
Note the not to be confused with introduction on Wikipedia.
They are quite different, and while I agree that DSM-5 was a disgrace, that was somewhat inevitable given the commercial pressures involved.
Its worth noting that I agree with your major point, but it applies to psychiatry (more specifically, the DSM) rather than to psychology.
Both are studies of the mind. Psychiatrists are psychologists with an M.D. degree.
Psychology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology
Quote: "an academic and applied discipline that involves the scientific study of mental functions and behaviors"
Psychiatry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychiatry
Quote: "the medical specialty devoted to the study, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of mental disorders."
See the word "mental" in both definitions? Neither studies the brain, neither is scientific, and the distinction between them is more a matter of history than topic.
I ask that you think about what you're saying. If human psychology were a science, then its two major subfields, psychiatry and psychology (there are actually 54, but never mind), would be looked on as intimately related to human psychology and to each other.
Would you argue that cosmology and particle physics aren't related to each other because they study different things, i.e. one studies the universe at the largest possible scale and the other at the smallest? Most scientists would disagree because these two fields rely on physics and physical theory for their scientific standing.
> but it applies to psychiatry (more specifically, the DSM) rather than to psychology.
False. Both psychiatry and psychology rely on the DSM as a diagnostic guide.
Link: http://www.psychiatry.org/practice/dsm
Title: "DSM"
Quote: "The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is the standard classification of mental disorders used by mental health professionals in the United States ... It can be used by a wide range of health and mental health professionals, including psychiatrists and other physicians, psychologists, social workers, nurses, occupational and rehabilitation therapists, and counselors. "
> I agree with your major point, but it applies to psychiatry (more specifically, the DSM) rather than to psychology.
On the contrary, it applies to both, because both psychiatry and psychology depend on the DSM's imagined authority for diagnosis and treatment guidance.
If the DSM were to suddenly disappear, psychologists would have no therapeutic guidebook. That wouldn't stop them, of course, but it would be disrupting and embarrassing.
If human psychology were a science, we wouldn't be having this conversation, because psychiatry and psychology would be looked on as branches of a science with more similarities than differences, just as with cosmology and particle physics.
I hate with the blinding passion of a thousand fiery suns psychotherapy, but I find much (experimental) psychology rather interesting.
Seriously, one of the very first things they tell you in a psychology degree (at least in Europe) is that its not about therapy, and in fact that most therapists are not psychologists. The study of the human mind and what is essentially a form of confession are very, very different.
But hey, you'll believe what you want to on this one, it doesn't look like I can convince you.
Have you read any of the work of Daniel Kahneman? Thats what I would consider as psychology (even if his System One and Two stuff is a dirty hack that provides little useful insight to the field).
You don't need to clarify that, and it lacks any connection with the present topic.
> I find much (experimental) psychology rather interesting.
I would find it much more interesting if it were scientific, if its practitioners crafted and then tested falsifiable theories. But it isn't and they don't.
> But hey, you'll believe what you want to on this one, it doesn't look like I can convince you.
My position isn't based on belief, it is based on evidence. Consider this summary of an investigation into recent egregious and fraudulent psychological research:
http://news.sciencemag.org/people-events/2012/11/final-repor...
Quote: "In their exhaustive final report about the fraud affair that rocked social psychology last year, three investigative panels today collectively find fault with the field itself. They paint an image of a "sloppy" research culture in which some scientists don't understand the essentials of statistics, journal-selected article reviewers encourage researchers to leave unwelcome data out of their papers, and even the most prestigious journals print results that are obviously too good to be true."
Too bad about these academic experts and their "beliefs" about psychological research.
Incidents like the above explains why the director of the NIMH has recently decided to abandon the DSM, psychiatry and psychology's central authority, as unscientific and of no research value:
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...
Quote: "While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity."
Too bad about the NIMH director's "beliefs".
> Have you read any of the work of Daniel Kahneman? Thats what I would consider as psychology (even if his System One and Two stuff is a dirty hack that provides little useful insight to the field).
Hmm -- it seems you are now making my argument for me.
Why do I care? Why am I critical of psychology but give sociology a pass? Sociologists don't have clinics in which they tell you how sick you are, using disease definitions they voted into existence.
But psychologists don't see eye to eye on anything -- that's one of the obstacles to turning psychology into a science.
> In the case mentioned in the article, even a professional that truly trusts the tests should have taken into consideration:
> 1) make his own assesment and check against the test score,
On the contrary, if psychology were a science, a clinical psychologist administering a standardized test should produce the same high correlation with reality as a clinical doctor administering a standardized test. But this is certainly not the case, and one of the reasons for this discussion is that psychologists are often married to the outcome of a test that isn't a reliable measure of its subject. A psychologist's confidence in a test's unreliable results is an obvious theme in the linked article.
> Carefull when disregarding a whole field based on preconceptions.
Tell that to Thomas Insel, director of the NIMH, who recently and reluctantly decided to abandon the DSM, psychiatry and psychology's standard diagnostic manual, on the ground that it's becoming less scientific with each new edition:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/side-effects/201305/the-...
My point is that, when a field's opinion leaders disregard a whole field, it's no longer a preconception.
> All fields have different branches and disagreements.
When a medical doctor says you have cancer, it's 99% certain you have cancer. When a psychologist says you have Asperger Syndrome, the reliability of the diagnosis is so unreliable and divorced from reality that the diagnosis has been reluctantly abandoned after an epidemic of phony diagnoses.
The same pattern applies to most other psychological diagnoses and decisions -- they are very subjective. Tom Widiger, who served as head of research for DSM-IV, says "There are lots of studies which show that clinicians diagnose most of their patients with one particular disorder and really don't systematically assess for other disorders. They have a bias in reference to the disorder that they are especially interested in treating and believe that most of their patients have."
> I think it's because of it being a young field ...
Psychology and psychologists have been around making pronouncements since before the U.S. Civil War. That makes psychology one of the oldest fields that has scientific pretensions.
> it's hard to agree on what the standards are to measure good/bad practice.
Yes, true, which is why psychology is now being replaced by neuroscience -- the latter can produce more objective results.
HR is ideally the former and not the latter.
Now, I'm just a software engineer, but I can't really get my head around the idea a software company hiring lots of supposedly smart people, subjecting them to this sort of nonsense, and then make it obligatory to take it seriously. To me, that sounds like a recipe for trouble.
You are correct. It is demonstrably going to lead to bad outcomes:
http://www.dorsethouse.com/books/mmpo.html
Is the CEO supposed to be up on all the HR rules? Is the CEO out in the market calibrating salaries every day? Does the CEO have time to analyze optimal organization designs? Should the CEO do all the initial fit screens? Chase down background checks?
If HR is an issue, it's because they're being asked to do the wrong thing, or the individual is incompetent. Saying "We don't need HR because they are poor technical interviewers" is like saying "We don't need accountants because I don't like the expense report form." You still need accountants, and you still need HR.
Optimal for what? I do think the CEO or someone similar needs to figure out what you want from the organization and design it. HR may have input but it is just input.
HR can do the market calibration research. That's a good role for them. Initial fit? That should be the team or team manager. Background checks? Either HR or an administrative assistant somewhere.
Without HR, that work should fall upon the team manager and maybe some assistance somewhere. It can be done though.
Bottom line, yes, there is a role for HR, I think. No, I don't think it is a big role.
[1] paperwork, monthly company events, ...
The point is that bringing someone onto the team and seeing if that is a good fit, is something that belongs at the team level. Some of the support could be done by a small HR department, or the old fashioned way, by an administrative assistant.
> "Is the CEO out in the market calibrating salaries every day?"
No, but neither should this be a HR responsibility. HR has no fucking idea how well someone is doing, nor can they be reasonably expected to since they neither work with these employees daily, nor do they have domain knowledge of what they do. Raises and promotions need to be handled by someone with the correct background - CTO for small companies, VPs for larger ones.
HR should not be handling raises.
> "Does the CEO have time to analyze optimal organization designs?"
YES. Emphatically yes. He/she's the Chief Executive Officer, the structure of the company is entirely their business. HR has no substantial insight into the specific needs of the business structure, if they did, shit, fire the CEO and make HR the boss.
The CEO is a manager first and foremost, and organizational design is one of the most fundamentally important parts of the position. Letting HR do this is abdicating a primary responsibility of the role.
> "Should the CEO do all the initial fit screens?"
Yes, for small companies. No, for larger companies, but neither should it be HR. Again, HR has no idea how the team dynamics in your company works. Who do you think is a better judge of culture fit - the CTO/VP who's interacting with the team daily, or the HR person who rarely speaks to any of the engineers? Once again this is very much a CTO/VP role.
> " Chase down background checks?"
This is pretty much the only thing in your list that I'd say firmly belongs to HR. HR administrates benefits, HR mediates disputes, HR performs the clerical duties in hiring - including background checks. HR is not a decision maker any more than you'd let your accountant make strategy decisions for your company.
If they're spending their time on Glassdoor figuring out what DBAs get paid when they could be at a customer the customer suffers. Much more efficient for HR to do it. Much better to let a specialist propose an organization design to get the firm from 10 people to 100. Let the HR person do the research, let the CEO decide. If the CEO is reading all the books on org design instead of being in front of VCs, there won't be funding.
> Is the CEO out in the market calibrating salaries every day?
HR should not be setting compensation. That's a business question and something the business people need to understand and deal with.
> Does the CEO have time to analyze optimal organization designs?
Organizational structure is also a business question. It goes directly to what sorts of team structures, etc, are most effective in delivering the company's product.
> Should the CEO do all the initial fit screens?
Not necessarily the CEO, but some technical person should do the initial fit screens.
> Chase down background checks?
This is the sort of thing HR should do.
I read "out in the market calibrating salaries" as gathering market information which serve as an input for management in making compensation decisions.
It's management's (really the CEO's) job to apply it. Is it a company that want to pay median salaries with lots of benefits? Low base relative to the industry, but lots of bonus and equity? Lots of cash? All these are the CEO's decision, but they shouldn't be the ones gathering the data.
I've also seen (unhealthy) environments where HR's primary job was to protect the company from lawsuits. That's not great either.
In general I've counseled people not to put their career in HR's hands, but that's still a long way from calling it a near-useless function. It frequently turns out that way, but it has the potential to be much more.
Step 4: Lose a trivial discrimination / disability / wrongful termination suit because you didn't keep the right paperwork.
BTW, suing for wrong doing is NOT parasitic. Its often the only recourse avaliable with bad employers
One of the folks who worked for me several years back had complaints filed against her by an employee whom she had woken up from a dead sleep during the day a few times. (The employee was working from 6-2AM as a night clerk at a hotel) The employee claimed that although the supervisor had 5 employees, she only checked his sleep/wake status, and did so because he was a member of a protected class. (Yes, really)
This nonsense required administrative hearings with the human rights commission/eeoc and untold gobs of paperwork. The HR people saved the day, and were able to use the good processes that they had in place to keep an awful situation from getting worse.
I don't know how you feel about silly software patents being used to extort money from companies, because trolls know it will be cheaper to settle than to fight.
The same thing can and does happen with labor law.
Obviously some claims have merit and deserve to be heard by a court and get some reasonable relief.
At the same time, just as there are "patent trolls", there are "employment law trolls".
In contrast, most software patent disputes are simply businesses extorting other businesses because they can, rather than because they were harmed and deserve to recover damages.
The two are not really the same. Generally speaking, when a company damages a human, it should pay what it owes rather than trying to weasel out of the situation.
In the U.S. legal system, you can sue anyone for anything, and it will cost them _something_ to make you go away. It's not hard to come up with _some_ claim that's not obviously absurd enough to get dismissed quickly. There are individuals who realize this --- as well as attorneys who have an economic interest in helping more people realize this.
So again, I grant that many claims have merit. But I don't think you can stipulate that every employee claim is automatically valid, i.e. that every company is automatically guilty of every claim against it. Sometimes companies suck. And sometimes so do employees. It's life.
Dunno what HR does in the US, but here in the UK I know a lot of cases where a decent HR person would have saved companies millions in payouts to now ex-employees who sued them. In several cases, the business was made bankrupt, jobs lost.
Keep HR people
Keep business
Edit: Format.
Most HR people are at least somewhat competent and help the company, and good HR people are worth their weight in silver. When Human Resources actually understands the needs of the employees and is able to enact policies that make them happier, that's extraordinarily useful.
It's not obvious to me that this is what actually happened here.
I worked for many years at an organisation that had a similar policy - if I wanted to hire someone that the psych evaluation had flagged as no-hire, then I needed the approval of my boss's boss.
HR didn't invent that policy on their own. They recommended it to the CEO/Management Team because they saw the number of bad hires that were coming up where the hiring manager ignored the psych eval and then all the issues that the eval predicted came true.
I didn't love the rule - particularly when the issue was something like this person you're trying to hire for a relatively boring entry level role doesn't have a lot of ambition or initiative - but it was a specific response to an identified problem. Perhaps the wrong response, perhaps not, I'm still not sure.
But what it wasn't, was an HR dept that set their own rules. Their authority was purely to enforce the CEO's decisions on hiring policy.
Because the author of this article doesn't seem to know much about the origin/nature of the policy in his organisation, it's hard to tell whether he ran into the CEO's rule, or HR's rule.
The decision to give the test in English to someone who wasn't a native English speaker is a mistake, but it might be the candidate's mistake.
My organisation gave candidates the choice of language in which to take the test, and strongly advised them to take it in their native language. Every so often we'd see someone who didn't listen to that (possibly because they didn't want us to think that they weren't confident in their english skills) and it showed.
Based on the information provided in the blog post, I'm still not sure whether the wrong decision was made or not. There were clearly mistakes in the process, but we don't know who made them, and there's no way to know whether the psych eval was accurate or not since the hire never went ahead.
In my limted experience this is much more of a problem in big companies than small. In small companies, employees know each other as fellow human beings from the owner to the interns. In big companies, the humans are numbers in a computer to be ranked, graded, and filed yearly.
They had their nose pretty deep in payroll operations; we were always paid correctly and on time. Insurance problems? They'd help. They were frankly pretty decent service providers for us.
Unfortunately this is extremely rare in corporate life.
If they needlessly block good hires, that's a bad thing, but I'd rather not be responsible for dealing with administering my own pension or benefits.
I wish my startup could afford to have an HR person to administer health benefits, run payroll, track receipts, and so on.
First, personal interviews can be poor predictors of future hire performance. People will often hire someone who resonates on a personal level, or who is otherwise charismatic, rather than for the right skillset. Standardized tests, administered correctly, are one way of reducing the variability.
And variability is pain. Your HR and hiring people are likely being judged just the way everyone else is. Hiring, or forcing dev teams to interview, a lot of low-quality candidates without an effective screen is a good way to find yourself being replaced.
The second is that, as people are fond of saying, the standard you walk past is the standard you accept. This is the source of a lot of foolish "musts"––candidates must have a certain GPA, or only go to a certain school, or they have to hit a certain percentage on some tests. Having standards is all well and good until you find a case that doesn't fit your profile and you either get flexible or look foolish.
Being flexible means that other hires complain that you're lowering your standards, and no one likes hearing that either.
The test in this case wasn't correctly administered, as columbo pointed out elsewhere, and I agree that hiring managers shouldn't have a veto over technical hires. But this is the sort of human-dynamics problem that can't be solved by firing entire departments. If you don't address the problem head-on it'll just come back next year in a different form.
Probably sincere, I guess.
This is in the UK; a found a lot of weirdness goes on there that wouldn't be tolerated anywhere else. Its the anti-authority types who are most likely to think out of the box, and are actually praised for by many American companies (at least vocally, implicitly they might not like them so much, of course).
This article makes one valid use of "me and X":
> in an effort to score extra points with me and Carl.
If you changed that to "Carl and I" then took out Carl it would be "to score extra points with I", which is disturbing and wrong.
"… and me and Carl were quietly trying to weigh up which team …" "Me and Carl had a winner and …" "During the excercise me and a colleague, Carl, made ourselves available …"
>and thinked the way most of the team already worked and thought
Yes, that sentence in the first paragraph stood out to me too, but I really didn't expect for the article to gain traction.
I want to add that I can't suit everyone, there are things that annoy me about American English grammar that I can't change, and I wouldn't think about writing in the comments suggestions on how to fix it. Maybe that's just me.
Hiring HR people because "that's what a serious, large company does" and having a certain amount of mid-tier bosses because "we [the top] need better control over what's happening down at the bottom" (read: "we need detailed control of people that have been self-sufficient and productive on their own for several years"), is an excellent time to start looking for other work.
There's an argument to be made that HR and Middle Management should be supportive functions in tech companies and thus shouldn't have the last call, but I'd be really really careful with calling them "unproductive". I for myself am glad that the paper-shuffling tasks get managed by a dedicated employee rather than myself. I'd go bonkers in a week if they'd pile up on my desk.
If a particular candidate, who happens to fail part of the interview, still seems like a good choice, by all means look for additional means of evaluation.
I once had an interview, where I spoke with a few people very positively for about 3 hours, it was going great. There was no sign of a technical test, so I had assumed by this point that they either didn't do them, or they'd be in a second round of interviews. Then they realised they'd forgotten to give me the technical test, which they then gave me and I screwed up for whatever reasons. Upon learning that I'd aced every part of the interview except the programming test, I mentioned they had an employee who'd worked with me on previous projects and could vouch for my coding ability. But they said they couldn't use that information because it would be unfair to other candidates.
This was a long time ago, and I didn't really lose much by not getting the job, but it always felt like the approach they took was wrong.
I won't disagree, but I would like to restate that a little more carefully:
"The job of a recruiter is to measure which candidate is best for this job, fairly and without bias."
As you point out, there are quite a few reasons that people try to weedle out of actually hiring the best person, some of them not so savory (subconscious preference for white, male people - but it depends on the company, and the culture). It should be hard, but not impossible, to override the default procedure - and for exceptional cases only.
Certainly, in the Article, the flawed psychometric test should not have been grounds to reject the best-performing candidate in the room. But similarly, personality (or appearance) should also not be a reason to promote someone over their ability to do the job.
Another employee vouching for you isn't quite the same thing.
For example, many people have racist tendencies but rationalize them as something else.
"There is a big group of male magentas dressed the same over there, I should avoid them because they are almost certainly a gang"
is rationalized as:
"I don't avoid the group of male magentas dressed the same because I'm racist and assume that most magentas are in a gang, but because I've been taught common sense. Common sense dictates people that look like that must be gangsters."
Perhaps if we interviewed people without being able to see them, their name, or anything about them and using voice obfuscation we could eliminate a lot of bias?
I imagine a significant number of people are similar to myself in this regard, I would love to see more discussion about it. Because I feel it's the subtle prejudices we all have that create the real problems, rather than the smaller (but louder) groups of overtly prejudiced people.
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html
2. Naming and shaming the company - better
3. Quitting your job and letting them know about it - even better
Also, I formally let them know I disagreed with the psychometric testing.
Double also... I used to apologise to new hires for the psychometric testing, and tell them "this is not how the real-world works, this is a micro-community"
Personally i think hr's role in selectin should simply be one of co-ordination and documentation, nothing more. Selection should be done by the team that needs them, with even the managers of the team playing a supporting role ie team decides not even the project manager. That requires a strong CTO/CIO type person and supporting CEO etc.
But, more importantly, by allowing HR to label you as a dis-ruptor and someone who threatens their own influence, it will be tough for you in the long run
It would be one way to sanity-check that the process is selecting for the things you want from those coming from outside. As a company grows, the non-technical systems and policies also need to adapt but without feedback things might get weird (like the OP's example). If an existing high-performer does badly with your interviews/tests at some point then you really, really need to fix something.
By your logic, no position in a business know about business apart from oh so clever programmers? Oh please. Look across HN at the threads about the psychology, depression, and so on. Programmers and some of the most insular people out there. No problem as such, but don't tell me they have some special ability to cover all bases in a business. That has to be a joke.
If you think about it, HR are one of the few departments that are more likely to know about other departments. They have to, its their job. Do you think marketing has more interest in various departments as HR? Developers? Try talking to sales people, they think the idiot developers know nothing about that people want. Try talking to accountants, they think marketing just blows money. And so on. Oh yes, my department is best and every one else is a monkey. Yeah, heard the inter department politics over and over again. Its tired, boring and gets in the way of business. If idiots just grew up, and respected each others job functions productivity would benefit. But, hey.....
A lot of the problem with HR is arrogant people in other departments who don't do the hiring job properly, then spit the dummy because they find out their funky programmer got fired for fraud from their previous job, or something, because arrogant programmer didn't want HR to do the back ground checks, because arrogant programmer thought new programmer would be one of the boys.
Please, stop this nonsense.
On a very positive note, our HR director was someone who had removed psychometric tests at a number of organizations before he came to us.
She also told me that if I was re-interviewing at the company then I likely wouldn't get the job based on my psychometric profile, which was actually ironic since I was highly respected in my role and was one of only a handful of people that could convincingly debate technical alternatives with Senior Management.
These psychometric tests seem to go against that advice by only selecting people with very similar personalities and thought patterns, thus stinting the company.
I figured now that I've got some experience under my belt and I have references from within I'd be a shoe-in. So I answered truthfully this time and was rejected. I asked my references about what happened and HR told them I didn't pass the personality test.
When money is on the line people are quite flexible about their views. If you like ObjC, I like ObjC. If you like Starbucks, I like Starbucks.
Firstly: You had to write a personal statement, something to describe yourself
Test 1: Involved ticking (agreeing) with a list of statements from two perspectives. The first perspective was how you see yourself. The second perspective was how (you think) others see you
Test 2: Involved rotating the letter R many times in a fixed time period. I was given a grid of about 100 R's all at different angles and had to count the number of clock wise rotations for it to be normal.
The end-result was basically a bunch of weightings that gave personality traits. Followed by a really well written auto-generated description of that individuals traits.
Typically when people had the chance to read their results, they'd say "ooh, actually I agree". But of all the things it said - there was a hell-of-a-lot that it didn't say.
This sounds like a test to see if you're capable of doing boring, repetitive and uninspiring work. I can see how that might be useful to many large businesses!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_reading
My math skills (without calculator) were pretty bad, but I was reassured that it didn't matter, I was applying as a software developer not an accountant.
I got the job, and in my time there I also heard about people that "failed" the test.
Maybe she did some kind of averaging, or maybe she was told by management to invent a reason to reject him... since about 96% of the company was of British White origin - I shouldn't speculate though.
20 years ago I took the Meyers-Briggs test multiple times (well, once a year for 3 years). My numbers changed a little bit each time - I was fairly strong I and N, but very weak 'T' and 'J', to the point where sometimes they were 'F' and/or 'P'. I took a similar test again a few weeks ago and 'I' and 'N' were strong, the others were still weak.
I had a couple people tell me though that "it never changes". Which is ridiculous because it's obviously not true, and depends totally on how you interpret the questions, and that's based on how you're feeling when you take it. I don't think people administering tests or interpreting the results always understand what they're actually looking at (which probably makes me a stronger J).
I found much more static-ness in my IQ over the last 30+ years. I was actually surprised at how consistent it was over decades and various tests (and, dare I say, slightly disappointed).
I find that every time I take an IQ test I get a higher score - I presumed because I'm learning what sort of questions IQ tests ask and how to answer them faster - so when required I just quote the first ever test I took as my IQ (which was a very unscientific one, unfortunately, by answering questions along with a TV program. I also had a score bump for age, because I was only 16.) I was, at the time, delighted that I got higher than my maths teacher! remember too, though, that IQ is heavily biased towards people with a "western" education.
IQ isn't very important though, once you get above 130 - the differences don't correlate to greater performance in any real test cases. The difference in performance at those levels is to do with attitude, experience, vocabulary (outside of technical fields I've studied/worked in, mine is awful), and all sorts of soft factors.
(apologies if I'm wrong, but I assume that anyone with karma on hacker news is IQ >= 130 or so.)
The raw score numbers might have changed up or down slightly, but same percentile in my case.
(bearing in mind that the test is inescapably biased towards people with our background - US/UK/etc, certainly English speaking, probably university educated.)
What was interesting to me was tests a couple years ago - the questions were sometimes things like
"I'll say a number, you repeat it back to me with the digits reversed".
They kept going until you couldn't do it anymore. I think I conked out around 9 or 10 digits.
"Give me as many names as you can in 10 seconds" (something like that).
"Spot the differences between these two pictures".
I'm wondering in what ways questions like these can be (or are) culturally biased? I can think of ways myself, but curious as to what others think.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_classification
that has actually recently been updated with reliable sources. Some of the comments below this comment of yours make guesses about IQ tests that can be checked against the sources by referring to that article.
What does that tell you that "hey, this team is pretty pie in the sky and chasing ideas that aren't likely to be monitized. Let's get a product manager in here to give some direction!" The latter, I argue is far superior cognitive model, and has the decided advantage of being based on empirical observations. (I know you weren't arguing for MBTI, I just used your post as a launching off point since you mentioned the existence of different systems).
Each of my 4 scores have had a % strength with them - my I and N have been fairly high (30-60% over time), and the T/J were always < 10%, slipping in to F/P on occasion.
"I make lists frequently" is the opposite of "I don't maintain lists at all"
What wouldn't work is substituting "Crowded environments make me tired" with "I like to hang out sometimes, other times alone". The delta isn't wide enough.
If I wanted a different answer then all I could have done was answer the opposite of what I did before.
The official MB position is that your type itself doesn't change, even if your answers do. Your perception of yourself and of the questions can change, but your type itself does not.
Frankly, I don't buy that, I don't see any strong evidence, from theory or practice, to suggest that it must be that way. However, IMO, it's a pointless subject. Whether you change or not really has no impact on anything. Just use the typing system and take the most accurate results you get. If your score changes, whatever.
Note: I'm a very strong MB enthusiast and I think it's a fantastic personality typing system. Oddly, I've never taking the actual MBTI (that is, the actual test), though.
They told me in my next interview I was one of the most consistent people that took test. I got a 95%, whatever that means. In reality I just noticed the pattern and gave my answers with that information
They are "risk averse" insofar as they would rather hire a safe and comfortable person who meets their personality metrics rather than take a chance on someone outside of that who is technically sharper.
Those on the other end fail these wonderful HR tests because they all too often have to around the title hounds to keep the business they work in up and running.
To add something constructive to the discussion:
I've hired tens of developers over the years. Recruiting is by far the most black art I've ever suffered in the IT industry. I've terminated interviews with the most technically-adept people because their attitude was so risible there was no way they could be part of the company; I've begged interviewees who would barely speak to open up because I had a hunch they were brilliant (I was right); and I've hired promising and smart junior staff over proven yet jaded senior staff.
Trying to encompass the delightful diversity which is presented to an interviewer in a few rules is usually folly to appease the suits. You will miss great hires that way.
Does that matter? Well, it depends. I spoke to or interviewed one person for every 20 resumes, and hired one in every 20 interviewees. So, miss one through a bunch of dumb rules and think about the 400 resumes you will have to wade through......
The bottom line is that people are diverse and weird- especially engineers!- and a good interviewer with a developed spidey sense will do better for the company by ignoring daft rules regarding recruitment.
TL:DR
Recruiting is really hard and difficult to define. You will lose good hires by implementing made-up rules.
Additionally, it's hypocritical to comment on ones grammar and then use bad grammar yourself.
Try not to be offended. He's likely just pointing out what many who read the story may think, but not say. Just take it on-board as constructive feedback for future articles.
It's an interesting story. Thanks for taking the time to write it up.
Might not catch everyone who tries to cheat, but will help.
At my company, we ask people to submit some choice prior work if possible. Then we look at that, and try to have a conversation about the tech. The bonus is that it respects the candidates time, and it is easier to get them talking when it's their own projects. The downside is that very few candidates have recent prior work publicly available.