Losers Exist, Don’t Hire Them | Hacker News Reader

Losers Exist, Don’t Hire Them

danielmiessler.com

40 pointsmooreds40 comments

I work hard for 8 hours a day and spend the rest of my time hanging out with my wife and kids, watch TV, and go out with friends. Do I need to jump off airplanes or paint masterpieces in my spare time to be considered employable? And who cares how much I enjoyed my random undergraduate degree two decades ago?

If this is the criteria I am facing at an interview, rather than all my work experience relevant for the position, then I'd like to change the title to "losers exist, don't work for them".

In a sense, hanging out with your family is your hobby.

Is this hobby worth putting on a resume? I don't put hobby and non-work stuff on my resume but my college experience is there.

I don't see this as saying to put hobbies on a resume. Rather, he was asking about hobbies and considering that someone who had none wasn't going to be a good fit.

Someone can be very good at their job but in a startup situation you need to be flexible--and he's saying someone with no hobbies isn't going to be flexible enough.

What about someone who's hobby is working with tech but they also work in tech as a career? Does that make them unemployable somehow?

Not at all what the article talks about

from the article :

" “Tell me about your hobbies…” A person who has no hobbies, and can’t even exaggerate one, almost certainly lacks the ambition to make your company valuable. They are probably a loser. "

Am I missing some hidden nuance here? The interviewer is judging 'basic humanness' (their vocabulary, not mine) on the answers given to awkward questions in an already one-sided awkward interview.

Whether or not I want to talk about my hobbies in a interview has little to do with my technical or business acumen -- people get awkward around these kind of questions exactly because they don't grasp how it will affect the interview and the overall judgement , alienating people even more about how their 'extracurricular' activities outside the work place will affect their hirability is at minimum gauche , at most inhumane.

I echo the sentiment, I wouldn't want to work for losers who can't separate the business world from what I do on my off time, my favorite literature, my favorite yoga position ; whatever.

> Lesser managers will try to stump candidates with horrible brain teasers along the lines of “Describe a time you got into a bad situation and resolved it effectively?” — or crap like that. Those questions are not necessary. All you will do is filter out some good people who have not yet mastered the art of the interview.

> But if a candidate can’t even tell you why they liked their last job, or what they got out of their college experience, or any of the million other questions that speak to their basic humanness… Then no amount of experience will make them valuable.

This is the core argument, except the author decided to liberally douse it in hacker-news flame bait and in doing so makes himself sound ridiculous.

I don't necessarily disagree that you can't tell a lot about a candidate with questions that are not "horrible brain teasers", but really with all of the examples he gave he's also just filtering out good people who have not yet mastered the art of the interview. The art of the interview isn't to be able to chat shit about a bad situation you resolved at work, it's the ability to think on your feet and turn a single podcast you listened to two years ago into a "childhood love of Spanish history" at a moments notice.

Not being able to do that doesn't make you a loser, or any less qualified for the job.

I think it's also worthwhile to note that the whole article is talking about hiring salespeople, so surely you'd want someone who is able to be personable and think on their feet.

>This is the core argument, except the author decided to liberally douse it in hacker-news flame bait and in doing so makes himself sound ridiculous.

Yes, I don't know why he would dilute an otherwise good argument. I will ask some pretty easy tech questions for posterity, but they are very straight forward to filter out the frauds. One of my favorites that doesn't apply to every language is: What's the difference between a function and a procedure?

I usually ask what was their favorite project and why, what their least favorite and why. You get a lot of info out of those two that you couldn't get with tech trivia questions. If they don't elaborate, ask follow up questions to try to get them to. If they still don't they probably aren't a quality candidate.

I'm not sure I could answer that question in a satisfying way.

Digging into my memory of QBASIC, I think a procedure (called a subroutine?) doesn't have local variables and doesn't accept arguments, whereas a function does?

There are also probably FP languages that distinguish from between a pure function and something that might have side effects?

In Pascal and its descendant (and probably ancestor) languages: A function returns a result, whereas a procedure doesn't.

Right. It was for a Delphi position back in the early 2000s. It's a very simple and straight forward question that someone unfamiliar with Delphi/Pascal probably wouldn't know but someone who does could answer it immediately. It's a great type of question. This technique is used to detect stolen valor by asking, "What was your MOS?" Someone who served in the military could answer it immediately, someone who hasn't would struggle with it.

A C++ style type question could be: What's the difference between an object and a struct? A SQL question could be, what's the difference between a join and a left/outer join? Something everyone who works with that language would know without hesitation and could answer in a few words. No trickery, just a quick filter, then you can go onto more meatier topics like discussions of prior projects.

> This technique is used to detect stolen valor by asking, "What was your MOS?" Someone who served in the military could answer it immediately, someone who hasn't would struggle with it.

Hey, I served my year like (almost) everyone else, but I'd probably flunk that anyway: The only "MOS" we had in the Swedish army was potatismos and rotmos.

In other words: "I'm right, my trusted experts who interviewed him are wrong. He's a loser because he didn't answer my irrelevant questions properly."

If your employees can't even suss out losers in an interview and you have to step in to have the final say all the time, doesn't that make them losers as well? Why are you even passing this responsibility to them when you're so much better than them that their expert opinions don't count?

> If your employees can't even suss out losers in an interview and you have to step in to have the final say all the time, doesn't that make them losers as well?

Worse — it makes you a loser, because you hired them and either you hired bad people because you decided nobody below you is allowed to be smarter than you (a sign of low self esteem), or you hired the wrong people for the job (a sign of bad judgment).

In both cases you are at fault. Or the third option: you hired good capable people and they just don't happen to share your obsession of dividing the world into winners and losers.

In any case, the people I personally know who have been obsessed about this or similar things always had a low self esteem and tried to mask it by putting others down.

In my world, "loser" and "winner" don't make sense. The world is not composed of people who are losers and people who are winners. It's composed of people with different motivations, different aspirations. That's it.

The article does not define loser by the way, so I'm having difficult time to understand what the article is supposed to mean. For what I know, "loser" could mean "people this author doesn't like", which is irrelevant to me.

I read the entire article waiting for the definition of "loser" and never got it, which was a huge disappointment.

Having no basis for what a "loser" is and having the english context to know a "loser" is a negative, "people this author doesn't like" was the only concept I could relate "loser" with. There's just nothing else to pin it to ... in the entire article.

Effectively, what he is saying, is that ultimately he gets to decide who wins and who loses. There are no other rules to the game. And let's just say given those rules, I'd rather play the squid game.

> They might be able to do the job for which they are hired. But that is not good enough. Especially at a startup where you are able to hire a lot fewer people than you would like.

Yes, yes it is enough to be able to do the job for which they are hired. I would dread working for this person so perhaps its a good thing they would weed me out when they started asking about my hobbies. People that hold these types of ideas and standards are holding back the industry, if you can and will do the job, thats all that matters. Everything else is just gatekeeping.

It's a pretty bad article but I think that point at least is valid. At a startup you definitely need people who can do stuff that isn't strictly on their job description. People who when faced with a task they've never done before will figure it out, rather than sit there saying "I don't know how to do that". Some people really are like that.

His whole "you have to have hobbies" thing is stupid though. My girlfriend is extremely capable. She went from answering phones to director in 6 years. She doesn't have hobbies.

In that instance though its not that you need to do more than the job, its that the job also involves doing multiple things, some of them you might have never done before, thats totally fine. If doing the job isn't enough, change the job description. In my opinion, just expecting people to do more than their job, even if its a start up, is toxic and exploitative. There are tons of generalists out there, hire one if thats what you need.

In a startup or small company situation you never know what all hats might need filling. You can't make a job description that covers anything that might come up.

I ended up reading this, so I am the loser.

It's not that he's wrong, it's just that the author is an asshole.

I feel like this article contains at least the kernel of some mildly interesting insight, but all in all it's far from terribly insightful. And it probably "over-binarizes" the whole "loser / non-loser" distinction.

OK, sure, if somebody can't even tell you what their favorite college class was, or show even the barest hint of enthusiasm / passion for their chosen field, then that is indeed a pretty big negative marker in my estimation. But I don't know that I'd make a hiring decision based on that one marker in isolation (or any one marker for that matter). Nor would I necessarily deem somebody a "loser" on that basis. And I'd bet money that out there, somewhere, is a guy or gal who would have failed this guy's interview, who is absolutely kicking ass wherever they did eventually wind up.

People are complicated.

I couldn't cringe harder while reading this. The author desperately wants to emulate Matt Damon's character in Good Will Hunting, during that bar scene.

I got a degree entirely unrelated to software engineering. If an interviewer spent a half hour seemingly stroking his own ego, pestering me about my college experience, I'd assume that he had a terrible time during undergrad and can't move past it.

If someone asked me about undergrad 5-10 years after I graduated within the context of an interview, I'd probably laugh in their face. What, are you interested in my high school experience too?

And I loved my undergrad (and high school!) experience, and will happily remember it with those I attended with. Asking a new grad? Definitely. But at a certain point it quite frankly becomes none of your business.

As for hobbies, when I'm doing the interviewing, I lean toward "none of my business" either. Totally understandable if you're at the early stages of a startup, I guess, where you're as much a group of friends as colleagues, but from anecdotal experience I'd expect you're hiring from your own network anyways, and already know who you'd like to work with.

The real loser is the author of this article.

I would love some examples of how the author’s necessarily biased and narrow vision of “losers” have underperformed compared to the non-losers.

"None of the people I rejected due to this weird rule turned out to be good employees. The rule works!"

> But she learned the job in about six weeks, and her upside enabled her to take on a lot of the unforeseen — and valuable — tasks that the previous candidate would have stumbled around.

Which the author knows, because he already identified the other candidate as a loser. QED.

This author reminds me of a child who is a picky eater. They don't understand that it doesn't make a big difference whether you get a chicken nugget happy meal or a cheeseburger happy meal. It's not like you're choosing between McDonald's chicken nuggets and a 50$ steak from a nice restaurant, the chicken nuggets and the cheeseburger are pretty much interchangeable.

Looks like this guy gets to be the arbiter of what humanness constitutes, and label anything that does not meet up to that standard as 'loser'. Yes, this approach will weed out some people that will consume more than they produce, but at the expense of a lot of false negatives and false positives. For example, it will also weed out the highly competent, highly conscientious, yet also highly private and introverted (a group with high representation in the tech world).

The original author and reposter are (within legal limits) free to hire who they want for at-will employment, shaping whatever culture they desire, but to blanket label everyone who does not meet their criteria as 'losers' is immature.

Ironic that the face at the bottom of rhe page (the republisher, not rhe author) has every visual hallmark of the angry, incel neckbeard stereotype or in other words, "a loser".

Yes, many people who bumble through college may be unmotivated and not that intelligent. Its certainly not some 100% iron clad rule.

Another thing that would be a sign of a "loser" to me would be writing angry and not even particularly insightful rants calling broad swaths of other people losers

> Another thing that would be a sign of a "loser" to me would be writing angry and not even particularly insightful rants calling broad swaths of other people losers

> Ironic that the face at the bottom of rhe page (the republisher, not rhe author) has every visual hallmark of the angry, incel neckbeard stereotype or in other words, "a loser".

I can't make this up

I bumbled through college.

I like making stuff and college wasn’t about that, so I couldn’t wait to get through it.

What a ridiculous thing to write. If recruiters actually think like this it'd be horrifying.

This employer has accidentally outed himself as his own labelled brand of loser, whose narrow life experience and position of hiring power have demonstrably eroded his understanding of how other people enter the world. Not everyone does a degree because they want to. Many do because of societial pressure and then discover their disinterest but see it through anyway. Couldn't be more irrelevant. This psychopathic modern attitude of cross-analysing peoples free time is the latest low that "late stage capitalism" has plopped on the carpet.

This man with his neckbeard profile picture (with fitting headgear and pseudo-angry pout pose) is exactly the sort of disagreeable, overcompetitive idiot whose narcissim is only outdone by his myopia. Bullet dodged.

Add "FAANG alumni on resume" to that list.

You have clearly not seen enough of life.

This feels like a piece that has some good ideas that are expressed in a very off-putting way.

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