Comment by tptacek
1 day ago
We're apparently back to making psychoanalysts out of interviewers:
I'll dedicate a post to specific ways you can identify motivation
during hiring, but in short, look for: the obvious one: evidence that
they indeed exhibited these external signs of motivation (in an
unforced way!) in past jobs; signs of grit in their career and life
paths (how did they respond to adversity, how have they put their past
successes or reputation on the line for some new challenge);
intellectual curiosity in the form of hobbies, nerdy interests that
they can talk about with passion
I'm pretty confident that this doesn't work, and that searching for "intellectual curiosoty in the form of hobbies and nerdy interests" is actually an own-goal, though it's a great way to keep your Slack channels full of zesty, nerdy, non-remunerative enterprise during the core hours everyone has to actually ship code together.
10 years ago I bought into the idea of hiring for nerdy interests and hobbies as a proxy for motivation. I will say I met some excellent people during this time, but looking back those same people would have been hired anyway due to their accomplishments at companies.
> though it's a great way to keep your Slack channels full of zesty, nerdy, non-remunerative enterprise during the core hours everyone has to actually ship code together.
Spicy take, but that's 100% consistent with my experience. Hire a lot of people for their nerdy interests and hobbies and your company comms become full of chatter about nerdy interests and hobbies. Meanwhile the "boring" people who ship code and then go home to their families (or pets, or anything) are trying to ship code and get the job done.
Nerdy interests and hobbies is not a good proxy for work ability. Hiring someone primarily for nerdy interests and hobbies is probably a red herring. Focus on what matters.
>10 years ago I bought into the idea of hiring for nerdy interests and hobbies as a proxy for motivation. I will say I met some excellent people during this time, but looking back those same people would have been hired anyway due to their accomplishments at companies.
>Nerdy interests and hobbies is not a good proxy for work ability.
Aren't you actually describing a great proxy?
What I was trying to say was that having nerdy interests and hobbies isn’t a negative signal. People can have nerdy interests and hobbies and be great at their job.
But it’s not a positive signal for work ability. Having nerdy interests and hobbies doesn’t signal that you’re good at work.
They’re barely correlated, if at all.
So do you think there's no useful strategies to identify highly motivated prospective employees, or just that these aren't good ones?
I'm not optimistic about scalable strategies to identify "motivated" employees, but I'm not certain. I am pretty certain these strategies are bad. They're what everybody did in the mid-2000s.
One of the problems is the idea that "motivated" or even "capable" is some sort of intrinsic property of a person. Those things ebb and flow based on tons of variables, from stuff going on at home to decisions made by management.
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