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Comment by jstx1 | Hacker News Reader

This is a long and polite way to acknowledge the UnderdogDevs group and not say much else.

Companies have a very strong incentive to miminise the false positive rate and the tradeoffs that they make there mean that they increase the false negatives because the cost of a bad hire is so much higher than the cost on missing out on someone good. In other words they're optimising for precision. I don't know how you start helping these disadvantaged groups without taking on a lot more risk and higher cost.

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> because the cost of a bad hire is so much higher than the cost on missing out on someone good

Is this true? Organizations I've been a part of the best hires were game changing for the company, and the worst hires just got fired after 6 months.

Yes, it’s true. Even if you remove the bad hires after six months, that’s six months of wasted mentoring effort and six months of of not being able to fill that position with someone who can do better.

That’s also six months that the bad hire’s coworkers have to put up with a bad employee on their team. They’re going to wonder if bad hires are the new norm and take it as a sign that it’s time for them to move on.

Bad hires have a lot of ripple effects. Most employees aren’t isolated islands within a company. Their coworkers suffer the most.

I see only really, really bad hires getting fired, after a year or so. Simply mediocre people are not fired, and don’t leave by themselves.

Unless you are paying a premium (and need exceptional employees), getting mediocre people qualifies them for being a good hire.

So those people not leaving is a good thing.

>because the cost of a bad hire is so much higher than the cost on missing out on someone good

The founders of WhatsApp for example applied to Facebook but got rejected. Facebook then had to acquire WhatsApp for 20 Billion, pretty expensive false negative. You can afford a lot of bad hires if a few of them hit big. That's basically the whole premise of venture capital and silicon valley, majority fail but a few unicorns pay the bills. Logically companies should be offering some sort of alternative short term "prove it" offer to people who are borderline for being hired.

I don't like this example because it assumes that the Whatsapp founders would have had the same billion $ impact at FB, or that FB would not have just acquired whichever app that would have filled the market potential otherwise.

Not to mention this is extremely rare.

We have to be realistic with WhatsApp founders from FB perspective when they did not hire them. They missed on good eng managers who may have grown to directors by now. There is about zero chance that they would have built WA inside FB.

The risk of hiring mediocre people who don't really care is invisible. Eventually, it becomes part of the fabric of the company, and the result, of course, is obvious. I suppose most large organizations can handle this particular risk because they've lucked onto a large cash-cow, such Google's ad-dominance.

> ...because the cost of a bad hire is so much higher than the cost on missing out...

We've all heard this enough that we don't need to keep repeating it. It's fast becoming a cliche, if it isn't already.

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