Hacker News Reader

Comment by giraffe_lady | Hacker News Reader

I feel like you should take some responsibility for your own resentment rather than passively saying another party has "fostered" it.

I'm not a fan of corporate and especially tech DEI initiatives either, I don't think they're an effective way to achieve their stated goals. But the hiring bar thing just does not match my experience at all. Some of the worst teams I've been on have been behind some of the most grueling & "selective" interview processes and some of the best teams have had lax ones. Given how poor we are at actually predicting who is going to be a good coworker we might as well allow some other backgrounds in.

View on HN

> Some of the worst teams I've been on have been behind some of the most grueling & "selective" interview processes

By this process we should just drop hiring bars altogether. But for every team I've worked at, hiring bars clearly worked. We filter out maybe 95% of candidates and none of them would work for our team. Everyone on our team is incredible at what they do.

When I had to lower the hiring bar, it was destructive. We hired a person that was inexperienced and could not keep up with the rest of us. They did not have the domain knowledge others on our team had. They were eager, friendly, and personable, but they required a longer period of extensive coaching get up to a level we would consider adequate.

> They were eager, friendly, and personable, but they required a longer period of extensive coaching get up to a level we would consider adequate.

Did they end up being productive, and hopefully worth the effort?

---

As a data point I'm ok when hiring new people with less-than-desired level of experience (within reason ;>), as long as their general attitude and willingness to learn are solid.

Those last two mean they'll get the hang of things given some appropriate guidance, so it works out ok.

> By this process we should just drop hiring bars altogether.

I don't think the parent comment is negating the need to hiring bars. IMO two important points :

1 - DEI and hiring bars are not opposed to one another. Actually well designed DEI program are meant to make sure the hiring bar are free of un neccesasary blockers.

2 - I think that mostly what the parent comment was trying to say, "hiring bars" is a nebulous term thrown around. Every team "saying/thinking" they have ha hiring bar doesn't mean that there actually have one. Just rejecting 99% percent of the candidate doesn't imply a good hiring bar... since you might selecting the bottom 1%...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com