> One of the greatest gifts we have for each other, for our children and spouses, for our teammates, is the positive feedback loop we can put someone into purely by believing in them, by seeing their genius and their dysfunction clearly and then helping them construct conditions for the former to flourish.
I used to teach children whose internal state is generally easier to assess than adults.
I remember watching as one kid said to another "I believe in you" to help out in some moment of crisis. It struck me as odd - something cheesy they'd (probably) heard in a movie or cartoon.
But if they are saying that to each other then I could probably use it to communicate better with them as long as it was sincere.
I'd say it sparingly when I thought it might be appropriate or helpful. The reactions were surprising to me, not at the time I said it, but later on. I'm not suggesting I was a major influence that sets kids on the right track, but I think it helped out somewhat and for some reason that specific phrase seemed much more powerful than other forms of encouragement.
we're all contextually geniuses or dysfunctional - I think the thing the writer is advocating for is trying to find the right context based on an attempt at an accurate assessment of the person, and how you might go about assessing people.
This seems like a load of crap. More specifically it seems like a pre-scientific mindset. You use analogy and metaphor to describe phenomena and structures that are only half-understood to try to rationalize them and fit them into some sort of consistent narrative.
Wisdom is knowledge you can't describe. This seems like wisdom but just as it's really hard for a professional tennis player to describe exactly how they know where an opponent is going to hit a ball this guy seems to be grasping at straws to describe something he can't quite see and so can't quite describe to the rest of us.
If you think personality assessments have significant predictive power, or that using more than one of them increases predictive power, you don't know how they were made, how they are commonly applied, or the realities of psychometric assessment. It's exactly the kind of straw people grasp for when they want to, but do not understand a phenomenon of behavior.
If you follow this advice you will be participating in a cargo cult.
He doesn't discuss the problems or limitations. Here's his section on "assessing" myer briggs
>I tend to test as an “INTP.” Everyone now understands the usefulness of introversion versus extroversion. The difference between the “P” (extreme comfort with uncertainty) vs. colleagues and romantic partners who are “J” (a tendency to nail things down, to be decisive and minimize uncertainty) has also been useful at times. When I interview people I also sometimes notice the “S” (sensing) tendency to be super literal and concrete, in good and bad ways, versus the more abstract “N” (intuition). I think it’s particularly useful to track S vs. N between yourself and someone you work for or who works for you, because communication difficulties may boil down to that dimension, and it’s useful to have a vocabulary for the tension.
He doesn't pause for even a second to consider that perhaps myer briggs could be a bad tool for determining these aspects of a personality or to acknowledge that even if this was the case, people don't behave honestly in professional situations anyway.
He’s assuming some knowledge and experience on the part of the reader; that’s how it appears to me.
Upon reflection it seems like he went overly broad with the scope of this article.
If you’ve already interacted with things like the Enneagram test, you’ll already have the context to deal with his comments.
I learned a ton from this post, perhaps it’s because I’ve had a lot of experience interacting with all the problems and challenges he lists out. I got a lot of nuggets from it in terms of insights into problems I have faced and will continue to face.
Perhaps for the less experienced, this is less helpful, as they would miss this context.
For other people who are interested as myself, I looked up "Enneagram test" on Wikipedia. The intro concludes with:
> There has been limited formal psychometric analysis of the Enneagram and the peer-reviewed research that has been done has not been widely accepted within the relevant academic communities.[5] Though the Enneagram integrates concepts generally accepted in a theory of personality,[6] it has been dismissed as pseudoscience by some personality assessment experts and called "pseudoscientific at best".[7]
What happens if the hungry mind is too hungry for your menial CRUD job, and you were actually better off with the unhungry mind that is content to do its job and go home at the end of the day?
Make sure you don’t pay quite enough for the rapidly increasing cost of housing in the area and make them feel dependent on your employer-provided healthcare. Then they’ll buckle down and deal with it for the sake of some illusory stability.
The hottest take of all in every HN comment thread is the one talking about how bad the other comments are yet not adding anything to the conversation.
Do you have something to say about the article? You said you know a lot about the topic.
What I got out of it is the concept from psychology -> distinguishing self from other. You want to make sure your perceptions are real and not projections, that your reactions are appropriate and not transference. The only way to avoid those things is to recognize what it coming from within yourself. I can see how that sounds stupid or absurd to a lot of people, however it's like the blub paradox - if you're looking up the abstraction ladder all you see is a bunch of strange words and jargon.
I can see fairly clearly, and some of that is due to psychoanalysis that nearly killed me. Another very closely related psych truism is that there are hidden influences lurking below your conscious perception, and often another level below that. Most people reject that notion (obviously, they can't see it) and some get angry (that's often a defense against finding that which is hidden).
When you see the dumpster fire here, it's the dumpster in their heads that they're not even aware of manifesting in the comments.
Projection is strong, and people are often bitten by projecting their altruistic and positive feelings on other persons, especially if they talk the talk like in this article.
Where you see a dumpster fire, I see life experience. Hiring and management is in fact one of the topics that HN is quite good at.
I have noticed that, in the last 6 months or so, more low-quality comments get voted to the first page on HN posts than before. It feels like a new Eternal September. I spend more of my downvotes on distracting reddit-style comments than on incorrect posts. Is my change in downvoting behavior contributing to the decline?
What's the difference between the front page and the classic view? I didn't know about this.
>I spend more of my downvotes on distracting reddit-style comments than on incorrect posts. Is my change in downvoting behavior contributing to the decline?
I don't think so. I can't downvote yet, but that's how I imagine I'll use the feature too. It warms my heart seeing most "reddit-style" (I'd argue some are twitter-style too) comments so heavily downvoted, as they are usually the exact opposite of thoughtful. It's nice to know, or at least feel like, there is a silent majority of users here that can stick to the rules even when a thread gets super divisive.
There are certainly topics where the median level of discourse on HN doesn't approach the professional level of understanding (advertising is the one I notice) but that's true of any broad community. The overall level of discourse and knowledge on here is high regardless.
A lot of comments on anything about quantum information/computation/foundations are definitely nonsense. Thats the only field I'm really qualified to make such judgements about.
> As the gaming company Valve puts it: “Hiring well is the most important thing in the universe.”
Nope, Hiring is basically almost random no matter how much energy or tests you put in it, you can never know someone well until you actually work with them on a daily basis.
Partially agree. A good hiring process can boost your odds of finding the “right” people, but my personal experience has been that firing well is at least as important as hiring well. Firing well is also something that most companies do very poorly.
This. It's extremely difficult to hire well, because no one knows what that even is. Firing well is somewhat easier because almost everybody knows who must be fired, but taking action is the difficult part.
It seems rather obvious to me that most hiring should be done at the intern/contractor level, where the interview process is extremely basic and let's most people through. Can you do a single basic level hackerrank question? Welcome aboard. Pushing for harder and harder questions simply doesn't accomplish anything real.
Once proven that a candidate is able to learn and adapt to the job, they should be moved to a full-time position, with pay above what is currently being given to that role. If they aren't excellent, let them go. As a company you want to advertise this promotion experience so that people who know they will pass this test will feel more comfortable signing up for a "lowly" temp position.
The top 5% or so of candidates might not take that offer, but you can leave a hole for exceptional candidates based on past experiences and proven success.
Isn't figuring out people just something you can learn?
The problem I usually see with most people is, they think they already learned it.
Many people I met thought they had good knowledge of human nature, even the ones who were failing constantly in different parts of their life. Even the ones who where obviously hanging out with toxic people all the time.
Everyone thinks, even if they don't know much, at least they know that, but I think it's one of the hardest things to know and nobody really puts in real work to get good at it.
I'm struck by the analogy to investing. If asked to pick from among several stocks, there is doubtlessly the one great stock that will make you rich. Yet as a whole, stock pickers under-perform market averages. "The rest of us" are better off buying index funds.
Another problem with hiring is that in reality people will be flexible and adapt to the traits of a new person in their group, if that person has something valuable to offer.
Yet another person trying to teach what can’t be taught through verbal lessons.
Or maybe it can and I have just never been able to find anyone that is able to.
Basically you understand other people with reference to your understanding of yourself, to become better at understanding other people you need to change the way you understand yourself.
Someone else will not be able to change your understanding of yourself. You must do that yourself.
> Someone else will not be able to change your understanding of yourself. You must do that yourself.
But people can make you think the thoughts and feel the feelings that you wouldn't have otherwise.
And those new things can improve your understanding of yourself.
I recently understood that I need to avoid people with fragile ego, that get hurt when their opinion is challenged or proven wrong and people that assign to other people the responsibility not only for their speech and actions, but also for the emotions those things invoked in them.
I also need to build up my emotional resistance to being misjudged and cut off without chance of defending myself, because it turned out I'm quite sensitive to that.
That is a good realization! Damaged/broken people are dangerous to be around.
> But people can make you think the thoughts and feel the feelings that you wouldn't have otherwise. And those new things can improve your understanding of yourself.
True. However those insights can’t be reached from learning about them through a verbal description on the meta level like they are in this article. If I tell you it is good to be happy does that realization make you happy? No. To make you happy I must “manipulate” you (or to use terminology from the article your elephant) into being happy. Just telling you “be happy” does not work.
"How do we become better at understanding others" is an eternal question. The answer that works for you wont work for others, and vice versa likewise, as well.
I can speak to most mammals and many reptiles, but that "body language" sense interferes severely with understanding people. They're almost always unaware of and fighting those layers of themselves, and my guesses as to the mental states causing that are no better than random. Their inner demons and happy ponies are totally different from the ones leading me astray.
I'm not sure I got much of value out of this on a quick reading. Could someone summarize the lessons of this article?
I think it's too psyche-oriented. Trying to psycho-analyze the candidates? Trying to find a person from whom you can get the maximum benefit?
I've always had the feeling that people who are very interested in psychology are really trying to gain an edge over the others who they now "understand better" than the person him or herself.
Think of playing poker. If you understand your opponents it will give you a a benefit. And it's an interesting exercise. But on the other hand you could spend more time mastering the probabilities and counting cards, and gain an advantage by simply being a better player yourself.
If you are in high pressure situations you need people who can handle pressure, stay focused etc i.e. not neurotics. Discovering that they cant, when shit hits the fan will have a big cost. On the other hand, if you are dealing with problems requiring curiosity, there is more tolerance for the neurotics and less tolerance for obedience trait holders who need to be told what to do.
Psychology gives team managers that mental framework of what to look for, a vocabulary to think about the types of chimps in the population, where they fit, what they can handle, when they need a break, the spectrum of rewards and punishments that work depending on the personality type, needs, values etc.
Without that knowledge, most good managers will spend a lot of time coming up with their own frameworks (usually to fit a very specific small problem domain) that will invariably resemble what already exists in psych text books.
Yes some managers will take advantage of the knowledge but that is a separate issue to whether the knowledge is required to build good teams. It is.
In my experience most psychology students are confused about themselves and trying to work out why they are the way they are and how they can deal with that. Less Machiavellian, more simple survival.
From the article, this person has done over 4,000 interviews. Their primary job is to talk to people, find out as much reliable information as possible to allow them to decide whether they are the right fit for the role. When this is your job, you need some framework/toolchain to do it in a consistent manner.
The problem (as many people here would frame it at least) is that unlike engineering, the best practices are very soft and subjective to each person, since the perception of another person is through your own lens. So this author is trying to convey the importance of having multiple lenses to view people through, so you have a higher chance of seeing signal from that person, rather than reflected signal from yourself.
I found it very helpful (and I am prone to dismissing people that do this as scummy/manipulative when I encounter them), and made me a little more understanding.
> So this author is trying to convey the importance of having multiple lenses
That is important no doubt. I would have preferred seeing a short practical list of what those different lenses are.
As it is, a contemplative article like this makes me think there is not much understanding of the subject at hand, therefore let me convey to you the feeling that I don't know if my approach is correct here's some other "lenses" that might be more or less correct too ...
No doubt the topic is a difficult one so it is good that people are thinking about it and trying to verbalize some possible solutions.
I came here exactly to say similar thing after reading for 5 mins and things got repetitive. Then i read the "about" section and found the author is from financial sector. I don't think i am going to get much value reading further.
EDIT: Reasoning below. A commenter asked the mental model.
Novel Insights are found when deepwork is performed over analyzing huge's volumes of data from multiple sources and thinking about the interconnections. I doubt any one in financial sector or the business types ever perform deepwork at all. There is really no new ideas or key insights that's worthy of deepwork. I think the success is mostly luck and unique to the situation which is beyond human control. When a financial person says they have 3 decades of experience, its the same thing repeated over and over again with no progress build over the previous work simply because that is not possible. For these reasons i think its not worth the time.
> Absent negative externalities or monopoly effects, a man receives from the free market what he gives to it, his material worth is a running tally of the net benefit that he has provided to his fellow man.
Reminds me of a line from a movie, something like this:
"If everyone played poker the way they're supposed to, I would win 100% of the time."
That original quote about the free market seems tautological to me: "In a perfectly fair system, the outcomes would be fair". I can see why that's an attractive ideal, but it doesn't seem very useful to me.
A lot of this seems like pretty typical consulting/business wisdom - be a mastermind of people, build carefully designed teams where all the personalities complement each other, ask people hard and somewhat unexpected questions during interviews (catch them off guard, intimidate them a bit, establish your dominance, see if they get shaken).
What I'm never quite sure about is whether this actually works: it always looks a bit like a confidence game. As long as you can convince people that you're able to design great teams they will give you leadership positions and pay you a lot, and until something happens that breaks the spell, you get away with it (and you get to keep believing in it yourself, as well, which makes the sell easier).
I am sure that personalities matter, but given the complexity and unpredictability of social dynamics I'm skeptical about this really working the way it's presented.
“Start with an opener that makes it safe to convey private information: “Thanks for taking the time. I’m trying to find the right seat for Jane and I’m investing the time in speaking to people who know her. Everything you say will be off the record, and I don’t plan on conveying any of it back to Jane.””
1. This is deceptive you’re pretending to want to help someone to further your own goals. I.e. immoral.
2. This encourages Bad actors to script their references. Its easy to send a script to people who act as professional references it’s a cheap service. All this does is catch anyone who doesn’t.
I have already learned a few of the things in this article the hard way. If anything else here is half so useful, any time spent reading the rest of this will pay for itself many times over.
All of the fairly meager advice in this is either bad or totally unactionable.
The references to outmoded concepts from pop-psych and generic aphorisms also really aren't convincing me that this person has any idea what they're talking about.
This is a relatively deep look into the bottomless task of considering a candiate for a role in an organization. It bears multiple readings.
It suggests that you may not learn much from interviews with the candidate, and may learn much more from face to face interviews with their references.
It encourages the reader to seek both the genius and dysfunction of every person (candidates and references), for each context they've worked in. (Altho I'd refer to these as their inherent irrationality and ingenuity; dysfunction and genius are the extremes.)
I loved this part, and it is something we try to do in my current company when interviewing. Interview for potential. What are they good for, even if not for us, and with the purpose of keep the door open if they decide to come back later.
> I also try to stick to the default assumption that “everyone is an A player at something.” It’s a more effective and more dynamic way to approach an interview—a live, fascinating puzzle to discover what the elephant and the rider do well—rather than going in with the purpose of determining whether someone is an A player in a binary, Manichean way. I prefer to imagine that I’m trying to find the candidate the best possible job for them; it may be the job I had in mind, or something else altogether.
I liked the essay and certainly learned a few things. But how are you going to put the stuff about references to use? It's going to be limited how many people you know who also know a candidate you're interested in. References from the candidate will have a heavy positive bias because who on earth wants to spoil someone's chances of getting a job?
I actually gave a very positive reference this week, an honest one for a friend I've worked with who really is a top guy, while thinking that the recruiter must hear this all the time.
A friend of mine told me to get more endorsements on LinkedIn. I never bothered because I dismiss them out of hand when considering candidates - they're usually the result of trades with ex-colleagues, and not a heartfelt "wow this person was amazing to work with!". Like your opinion of references - they're rigged to be positive always, so kinda worthless.
i like how the author prefaces this essay with the fact that it's all a game. otherwise, i would think it's (the personality assessment part, which is half of it) a bit too reductionist.
the fact that some firms out there are going after people with some "personality type" isn't surprising to me, but seeing it clearly stated is...
"seeing the water" is very profound. it's something that has got me thinking a lot lately. what good is a feedback loop if nobody in your circle sees the water?
This post and the Leetcode post both today in HN are in the totally different extremes at hiring. Try to get to dissect the person's psyche or try to find the best algorithm-maker? Totally different ways of hiring. Is the right formula in between?
It's also hard to do unless you're hiring for several similar positions at the same time.
If you hired only one guy, who's to say that the others you rejected would have performed better or worse?
If you hired 3 for similar positions, you can start making guesses from interview performances and (in)validating them one year after. But as you said I don't think it's done in practice anyway.
It's too bad, because I think it's necessary to go back and check how your predictions were. tptacek had a good process that was consistent, quantified and checked afterwards, but the average interview process (mine included) is just random stuff that ultimately feed into my bias.
I once hired two engineers for the same role on my team; they both seemed about the same level during the interview. After working with them for a while, one of them was perfectly adequate, the other turned out to be the best engineer I've ever worked with.
Did that help you reframe your hiring strategy for the future? Curious what qualities in the second engineer both made them better and could have been revealed in an interview.
This was like a what you need to know tour through all of the LinkedIn-pro-sponsored, pseudo-quantitative approaches to evaluating personality guided by self fulfilling anecdotes and a glut of paraphrases/quotes from people I’ve never heard of. In other words, a lot of ideas clicked if somewhat reductive and Machiavellian. And certainly well researched and written.
Do you want to go through life on a whim, at the mercy of your subconscious self, with no real insight into why you do the things you do, think the things you think, like the things you like? It's not psychopathic to want to tease out what you are, what you want, and once you do that, how to play the game of life such that you build your world to match what makes you happy?
This can be at a macro/life level, but it can also be at a much smaller scale. There was an example in the article on it, but to add another one that I think is similar: student submits an essay to the teacher, it's a good essay with better grammar, fact checking, etc than their friend's essay. Their friend's essay gets a higher score. Upon reflection, the friend's essay, while being lower quality, plays to the obvious preferences/biases the teacher has displayed throughout the term. For your next essay, you both do the high quality work, but you work in some aspects of what you now know the teacher wants to hear.
Is it manipulative or dishonest to do the latter? Some might think so. Other might think you are hacking the system to your advantage and hurting no one in the process.
Just read the description as well. "Self-authoring" seems to mean simply having an agenda that informs your behaviour. This could be interpreted as manipulative, but not psychopathic. Psychopathy requires a cluster of other traits such as deficient emotional responses and lack of empathy or control.
Beautiful.