[uncensored]

How do you know that the person you'll be marrying won't cheat on you and won't leave you in hard times? If you apply the methods we use today for interviews you'll end up with a 50/50 chance at best, a coin toss.

Yet why do some marriages last forever (till death do us apart) while others fail miserably or crumble even after 20 years?

The search for the global optimum cannot be performed by asking a set of questions. I argue that it cannot be done consciously. It's gut/instinct thing. If you have a mechanical approach, anyone can game the system and get a job because humans can be like chameleons to present themselves as the right candidate, and they can study for the interview. Only way IMO is to have that 3rd eye or whatever you call it... instinct, gut feeling, etc

The problem with this conclusion is that instinct and sexism/racism are often conflated.

No good answer.

[scottshepard]

This article is critiquing the unstructured get-to-know you interview. It is not critiquing highly structured interviews with clear goals, nor technical challenges, nor references checks or past performance.

In your example, how would you structure a series of questions and procedures to limit the risk of marrying someone who will abandon you or cheat on you? I think you can apply good interview process techniques to this quite well!

1. Have they been divorced or cheated on someone before? People who have been divorced before are much more likely to divorce again. The 50% divorce rate in the US is slightly misleading, as many of the divorces are concentrated in repeat divorcees. In fact, among younger (early to mid twenties) first-time marriages, the divorce rate plummets to something like 15-20%.

2. Have their parents been divorced or cheated? Children of divorced parents are much more likely to get divorced themselves.

3. Have they been physically, emotionally, or sexually abused as a child? People with traumatic early childhood experiences are much more likely to develop trust issues with long-term partners, especially if they never had extensive counseling.

4. Do they have a good relationship with their family? People who have a difficult or unstable relationship with multiple family members are more likely to see tumultuous relationships as a norm.

This is all equivalent to reference checks in a job.

Then a long dating / engagement period is necessary. How do you they treat you during this period? Do they cheat? Are they abusive? Do they leave you during a period of difficulty? Do you have the same religious views? Do you split housework evenly? Do you both want kids? How do you view money? The three most common reasons for a fight among couples are 1) money, 2) housework, 3) free time (and how to spend it).

People who are otherwise happy and well-adjusted adults who get married and then divorce bitterly after 10 years are not the norm. Most divorces can be predicted. And most divorces happen before 2 years of marriage. If you are aware of the warning signs and are not blinded by a "gut instinct" I think you can definitely minimize the potential for marrying a snake -in-the-grass.

[rntz]

The trouble with this advice is that, while it's accurate if your one and only goal is to predict the likelihood of someone divorcing or cheating on you, it seems profoundly unfair.

To examine this "unfairness", let's imagine it at its most extreme: a society in which divorcees are so stigmatized that it's practically impossible to ever re-marry; in which children of divorcees are likewise stigmatized; in which victims of child-abuse are further victimized by a society that considers them potential "snakes-in-the-grass". Do we really want to live in such a society?

Obviously I don't think you were advocating this. But it's a thought experiment which demonstrates a classic class of problem: what's good for the individual isn't always good for society, especially taken to extremes.

[Houshalter]

Isn't that true for any system you use to predict? If you rely on "gut instinct", then you filter out people who aren't good at fooling gut instinct. Ugly people, short people, people with poor social skills, autistics, etc. That's hardly fair either.

If you want to make the most accurate predictions possible, you absolutely should not use gut instinct. If you want to be fair, then have a lottery or select randomly. You can't have both. There's nothing remotely fair about gut instinct. See, e.g. judges giving unattractive people twice the sentences of attractive ones. I can provide tons more examples of stuff like that. Gut instinct should be illegal.

[M_Grey]

The other problem is that it assumes that divorce is a bad outcome to be avoided, while a long marriage must be successful and happy; neither are axiomatic.

[lobotryas]

I'm not sure I see your point. What GP is proposing is a risk assessment strategy. If your partner ticks all of those boxes (for example), then you better think long and hard about whether the relationship is viable without being blinded by "love".

Anyone from any background can either rise above their circumstances or fail regardless of the help they get. This should never prevent is from thinking clearly and logically about our future with these people based on their backgrounds or past actions.

[ZeroGravitas]

Seems like point 1 is possibly just confounding age. They've not divorced yet partly because they've not been married long enough yet.

[daveFNbuck]

Point 1 is saying that if you're younger when you get married and it's your first marriage, the marriage is less likely to end in divorce. This is the opposite of what you'd expect if getting divorced was just a matter of time, as younger people have more potential time in which to get divorced.

[pseudalopex]

The trick is asking the right questions.

I know a couple that divorced because one of them didn't want to be monogamous anymore. They tried to make it work, first one way, then the other, but in the end they couldn't. Do you think the other one is more likely to cheat or file for divorce than someone who's never been married?

Children of divorced parents are more likely to get divorced, but I've never seen that statistic controlled for personal and cultural attitudes about divorce.

What I've read suggests that whether someone has experienced a healthy relationship is more predictive of relationship stability than whether they've experienced trauma.

A flawed heuristic may be better than no heuristic, but too much confidence in a flawed heuristic can backfire.

(Incidentally, most divorces happen after 8 years for both first and second marriages.[1] The 50% figure applies to first marriages as well.[2] That doesn't tell the whole story, because young adults now are divorcing less than young adults a generation ago. On the other hand, we don't know if that will remain true; divorce later in life has increased.)

[1] https://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/p70-125.pdf

[2] https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2016/06/08/life-table...

[j2kun]

> Yet why do some marriages last forever (till death do us apart) while others fail miserably or crumble even after 20 years?

Well, you don't exactly "date" for years before getting a job. You're acting like people get married on a hunch, or that people don't work hard to present themselves as "marriageable." (Incidentally, it's also not clear to me that a 20-year marriage is a failure, and certainly not in this analogy)

In most of the places I've worked where there are short-term contracts before full-time hiring, the employer has a far better idea of the skills and quality of the candidate.

[ythn]

> In most of the places I've worked where there are short-term contracts before full-time hiring, the employer has a far better idea of the skills and quality of the candidate.

At the place I work we offer paid internships to college students who haven't graduated yet. By the end of a summers' worth of work, we have a really good idea as to which interns we would like to hire full time, and we give them an offer on the spot (contingent on graduation), no interview needed.

[AlexCoventry]

Contingent on graduation for ethical reasons, or because you still see the degree as a relevant signal on top of the insight gained from working with the candidate?

[manarth]

  instinct and sexism/racism are often conflated.

What's perceived as instinct is often the outcome of social conditioning, which gives outcomes such as "People See Black Men as Larger, More Threatening Than Same-Sized White Men" [1]

[1] http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2017/03/black-men-thr...

[chmln]

Could also be due to the disproportionally high rates of crime among black men. That should never be an excuse for prejudice, however.

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-... https://infogr.am/Black-34991937313

[projektir]

I think instead of instinct "intuition" would be a better word. It is gut feeling, but developed from environment rather than innate.

[imh]

If you ask someone to predict a coin toss, and use the methods we use today for interviews, you'll end up with a 50/50 chance at best. Yet some people guess the coin toss correctly. It must be some unmeasured "gut" that's doing a good job for those people, right?

[projektir]

I think there absolutely are people who can guess correctly, but how do you tell who they are and how many of them do you think are actually out there? I'd guess not many at all.

[uncensored]

There are a huge number of coin tosses to guess when evaluating someone for marriage potential. Maybe less for a job candidate. But the candidate is not the coin being tossed. We're talking about the ability to estimate probabilities for a whole range of stuff that combinedly give us a measure of confidence.

[magicalist]

> I argue that it cannot be done consciously. It's gut/instinct thing. If you have a mechanical approach, anyone can game the system and get a job because humans can be like chameleons to present themselves as the right candidate, and they can study for the interview.

Not sure why you think people can't game your gut instinct as well. A whole lot of bullshit artists out there, which may or may not be a requisite skill for the job they're applying for.

[devoply]

It goes both ways. Companies are often not trustworthy and will fire people for their own reasons. They may not pay very well. There are so many things. I am not Mr. Right, I am Mr. Right Now accurately describes the business arrangement. It's a one or a few nights stand. Not a lifetime commitment.

[wpietri]

> It's gut/instinct thing. If you have a mechanical approach, anyone can game the system and get a job because humans can be like chameleons to present themselves as the right candidate, and they can study for the interview. Only way IMO is to have that 3rd eye or whatever you call it... instinct, gut feeling, etc.

This is ridiculous. Mechanical approaches can be gamed, but so can gut instinct. You just have to look at the White House to see that. A lot of gut-instinct voters got hoodwinked by a skilled self-promoter. And he's a gut-instinct guy himself, so he's getting led around by whoever's got his ear.

Gut instinct, though, is worse in several ways. One is that it's not transmissible. As a company grows, how do you scale? Another is that it's not necessarily repeatable. Was that person bad, or is your gut off because you're tired, depressed, or upset? A third is that it can't be consciously improved. If your mechanical process has a flaw, your team can discuss it and come up with solutions. But if your gut judgment isn't good enough, what can you do?

I am a big fan of gut instinct as a component of a hiring process. Often, thanks to experience, we perceive things we have a hard time articulating, and it's wise to pay attention to that. But I think it's a giant mistake to treat our subconscious as some sort of mystic oracle that we must worship and never question.

[cat199]

> I argue that it cannot be done consciously. It's gut/instinct thing. If you have a mechanical approach, anyone can game the system and get a job because humans can be like chameleons to present themselves as the right candidate, and they can study for the interview.

If it were only a gut/instinct thing, you would have no basis to reject 'wrong action' other than it feeling bad for the gut..

At some point, the 'set' of circumstances will/will not intersect the 'set' of actions such that it is clear that the person acted/didn't act 'correctly' according to ones heirarchy of values.

Ethics, philosophy, and theology exist for a reason - the fact that our society tends to ignore this , presuming and not investigating the subtleties within a relative-individualist framework doesn't make these frameworks correct, or even a very coeherent set of doctrines with which to gauge things..

but yes, a 30 minute interview, or even a 1 week trial period is not a very good means by which to judge character, since the potential reward is great enough, and the period to observe inconsistencies short enough, as to allow a deviant personality to 'fool people' for the trial period.

[vinceguidry]

Interviews happen at scale, dating doesn't. Once you find someone, the getting-to-know-you period before marriage is months / years of one-on-one time where you really can get to know them.

It's not the unstructuredness or the judging humans part that's the problem, it's the fact that this is all done at scale by people with more important things to be doing.

If companies all did like Apple in the early days and treated every hire as a bet-the-company decision, bad hires would go away.

[johan_larson]

Maybe the answer then is to push the decision down to someone for whom the hiring is a big decision, and who does not have to work at scale. An individual group manager has a lot of incentive to make a good hiring decision if the person being hired will be working in his group. And the manager does not have to hire so many people that he needs to consider it a large-scale project and adopt corresponding expediencies. Things can remain personal.

And if the organization for some reason needs to work at scale, add an initial lightweight sanity-checking and routing to the correct group. But keep the main hiring decision with the group the engineer would be working in.

[oculusthrift]

i see some faulty reasoning there. humans have billions of years of evolution in them that contributes to their mate selection instinct. Notice that monkeys and birds also have good mate selection, it isn't a big-brained thing. Not sure how that has anything to do with selecting good engineers.

[projektir]

Mate selection in evolution is not at all geared at the same things. If anything, I think instincts from that actually cause a lot of the failed relationships rather than improving them, since evolution doesn't really care about you having a long happy marriage.

[oculusthrift]

it cares about you staying together long enough to raise kids. remember that also half of marriages end in divorce so it's not that great

[gukov]

Have good instincts or have a system (hire after speaking to 34% of the candidates, fire early and often, etc).

[YZF]

The biggest problem with instinct/intuition is that you need to have enough relevant experience for it to work. Your intuition ends up being completely wrong when you brain doesn't have enough data to work with. When it does have enough data it's an extremely powerful tool.

I think it would be cool if a company like Google published anonymized data about the correlation between interview "scores" and some post-hire metrics. My guess is the correlation would be poor to non-existent. Picking those metrics is difficult, perhaps an obvious one that is difficult to game is how long the employee stayed with the company. Another interesting one would be anonymous peer evaluations where it's guaranteed no one would see the data points so it wouldn't suffer from the problems 360 reviews have.

I think the best you can do is some sort of mix between a more structured portion trying to gauge where the candidate is in terms of knowledge and intelligence and a less structured portion where you try and get more of a "feel" for the candidate's personality. You have to realize that under the best of times it's not perfect. Rejecting someone can't code at all for a software position should be relatively easy. Ability to tackle bigger things can be gauged by looking into previous projects and through references. I think there's a big region though where the outcome is difficult to determine.

I think back to the very first time I was involved in a hiring decision. The guy was very smart, technically capable, engineering degree; PhD material. Seemed pleasant enough. Got hired and IMO definitely the kind of person a company like Google would hire with their process. He lost interest fairly quickly on the job. Working with him I found he had some very odd, not to say crazy, political opinions. Everything was too boring for him so he didn't really get that much done. Couldn't really work independently at all. He left the job, left the country, and I think he ended up being a cab driver. Not sure. Yet another example is someone fresh out of school with a CS masters degree who despite all the help of the team could simply not wrap his head around the project and become productive. On paper all the right credentials but first real world job and he couldn't cope for some reason. Ended up leaving. I've seen a few CS background people just not find their place. I'm sure we've all seen situations where we wonder how some person got hired and how come they're still there. Over time I think I learned to do a better job hiring/interviewing and have had a stream of pretty successful hiring decisions.

It turns out that it takes many months on the job to really know the fit. Even if the person is capable the specific job or team may not work out. Some people are very good at making it look like they're accomplishing things while they're not really. There's no way any company has a secret sauce of only hiring "great" people and even great people will do poorly under certain circumstances and conversely not so great people can be very successful under the right circumstances. Some people can grow really quickly while others can't.

[mikelyons]

You're claiming that sexism/racism is not instinct and there is plenty of evidence that it is.

[dlwdlw]

I think one issue is that interviews are often confused about whether they are checking credentials or checking for fit. That is, are they looking for people who will thrive in the environment, or are they checking that someone has the skills they say.

Google's interviews may well boil down to "prove you're smart enough to work here at this smart company with smart people like me. "

Other examples:

"Oversell yourself so you pressure yourself into high standards and thus end up working late often out of guilt"

"The job is easy but with a lot of specific untransferable domain knowleedge. Prove that you're a company man. "

"Most of us aren't sure what we are doing, but there's value in our companies general direction. Can you seek out help and thrive in such unknown conditions?"

These simplifications are actually for the most part "good" and is actually reflective of how the manager sees the world. Google is unique in that the direct manager doesn't have as much control, but the manager spirit is a belief in giving smart people freedom.

That gets you in, but your immediate manager may end up not believing in this. Michael O Churches story comes to mind. In some cases, the manager having no say in the process is bad as there isn't a good fit.

A manager who believes in treating people like slaves and people who want to be treated like slaves for a specified amount of money is actually a good fit. Someone who wants to be a cog but is given freedom is paralyzed by indecision and vice versa, the person is stifled.

It's hard to see this in the US because there's a strong bias for the free/smart paradigm and all companies have to outwardly present this shared value. In china though "i'm just a code monkey" is said a lot because despite having little to no say in hours worked or project assigned, software pays much mich hogher than other jobs. It's a deal they accept because there aren't any better ones. Or more specifically, because there are too many other people who will take the deal.

Only when a majority of people demand a base standard of life can you prevent a race to the bottom inflicted by employees themselves.

The key is to see through the game that companies arr required to play (at least in the us) and track down the exact team you want to be a part of, figure out the actual culture (having a taxonomy beforehand is useful) and then deciding if it's for you. (Given your BATNAs)

Because of this game, all marketing about being great places to work is BS because thats the ONLY thing they can say. I say mostly because the marketing is a result of a real cultural shift in realizing how to effectively manage knowledge workers.

So silicon valley does in fact have a more progressive attitude to management styles unlike the east coast which is more about play books, but it's fsr far less than what you would think. The majority of managers still subconsciously reject new team managment styles, and shitty interviews are a result of having preferred filters but NEEDING to dress them up in all sorts of covolution.