[terminado]

To frame an assessment of an individual like that, risks throwing the baby out with the bath water.

It leaves no room for externalities and circumstance, and assumes the individual had all needs met, perfectly, at all times.

Facts are facts, even if someone came up short once or twice. Maybe blame is irrelevant, and excuses aren't a substitute for productivity, but simply put, that's not how you measure humans, and any human knows that.

[arca_vorago]

What I don't think many people get is that these types of people and structures and institutions they exist in largely exist in order to perpetuate inequality in many ways.

It's not just google though, this is fairly widespread in America, and I bet many of these companies that practice hiring like that are either doing it because thats what everyone else has done (without realizing the reasons or not articulating the real ones), or because taking those kinds of candidates means not only do you get a potentially useful in their job employee, but you get access to another kind of elite-social capital.

https://youtu.be/PMotykw0SIk?t=595

[acjohnson55]

100%.

People ignore the extent to which the signals they're using as input are simply correlated with the signals some previous gatekeeper used. Therefore, they vastly underestimate how much a person's resume is "all signal".

I'm a great case in point. At some point, scholarships I had earned became the justification for giving me more scholarships. Much of my early adult life was spent compiling signals and statuses. I absolutely tried to develop real capabilities along the way, but to say my "impressive" resume indicated significant real world value created outside my own life probably wasn't true until about age 30.

When I was a hiring manager, I tried to evaluate people on what they accomplished relative to what they were given.

[jackgolding]

haha this is very relatable - there are massive rewards for signalling

[CalRobert]

I didn't originate the phrase, but read once that university is mostly privilege laundering. It seemed an apt description.

[alexbeloi]

I agree that this is a bad way of measuring humans accurately, but I would say that _accuracy_ is not exactly the correct or optimal goal for hiring.

Google (and other's) strategy is to optimize for precision rather than recall or accuracy, which is the optimal strategy when you receive several orders more candidates than you are capable or willing to hire.

To maximize precision, you need to minimize Type 1 errors (False Positives), and you don't really care about Type 2 errors at all (False Negatives, e.g. throwing the baby out with the bath water).

This is of course if you treat people like data points, which seems more and more common (and explicit) with larger companies.

[hinkley]

That would be great if nobody ever tried to emulate other companies.

But they do. Look at all the people trying to pretend like they have problems that require Google's infrastructure instead of just three machines with a shitload of memory and some redundant networking hardware.

If you don't react to the fact that other people are copying your actions then your moral compass is broken.

[harperlee]

Well but is that really Google's responsibility?

And if company A can have the luxury of copying Google and ignoring perfectly capable candidates because they had a C+ in one exam, what is the issue? There is then company B that cannot afford not to have that candidate recruited and she might turn out great.

At the end of the day, GPA is an imperfect ordering of candidates by quality, but it is such an ordering, and companies with the sweetest offer (money, prestige) will be able to get the best candidates, be that they look at GPA or not.

And it is not as if someone with a C+ is banished from the workforce - just from Google and the other companies that can afford to be so exquisite.

[derangedHorse]

Just to clarify, Google doesn't actually hire candidates based strictly on their academic performance. If you've had any side projects or prior jobs before applying, I'd say that's weighed more heavily.

[harperlee]

Sure, I was just commenting on that specific dimension of the decision space.

[acjohnson55]

This assumes a false positive is such a bad thing. I've heard a bad hire costs $X, where X is some surprisingly high number, but why must it be this way? And are these big companies even avoiding bad hires in the first place?

The other problem is sameness bias. I posit that those false negatives are disproportionately folks that are underrepresented, demographically. Therefore, this approach has concerning externalities.

[ghaff]

>I've heard a bad hire costs $X, where X is some surprisingly high number, but why must it be this way?

Because most companies don't (and generally shouldn't) operate like pro football teams. "You've had a couple bad games; we're cutting you. Sorry it's just business." Most (though of course not all) people think that once you've hired someone, you should really try to make things work. Both because of the costs associated with someone getting up to speed at a company and because of the personal cost to the person being fired. Different companies have different philosophies of course.

[acjohnson55]

I think there are humane ways to part ways with an employee who just didn't work out. Give generous severance and some warm intros to places that might be a better fit.

If you really screwed up, make that choice soon. In the more common borderline case, that person is still giving you decent value, so it's not a total loss, even if you invest effort in trying to coach them up to your high bar.

[jimhi]

I like the sentiment, but I would rather a potential hire just apply cold than if a company told me to look at a candidate they just let go (even if it was google).

Warm intros from an entity that just rejected you would be a terrible signal.

[darpa_escapee]

Being precisely inaccurate isn't optimal. There needs to be a balance between precision and accuracy for a measure that's close to reality. Of course, there's going to be tradeoffs between the two, as well.

[rorykoehler]

What's more valuable to a company or society... someone who can come up with one paradigm shifting idea and execute on it but fail in everything else or someone who can never come up with a paradigm shifting idea and execute on all the ideas they come up with or partake in?

[psyc]

Oh I absolutely agree it's an appalling approach to hiring, at least for a role that isn't heavy on macroeconomics (or whatever). I suppose I was only making the trivial point that very high GPAs are common in that sphere. But upon reflecting on your reply, maybe that is an undesirable self-perpetuating selection effect.

[JumpCrisscross]

> risks throwing the baby out with the bath water

If one has an excess of qualified candidates, this isn't an issue. Wasting too much time on the decision becomes the biggest risk.

[quantumhobbit]

I think we have seen that an excess of qualified candidates, for some values of qualified, leads to problems with diversity in tech.

After all if you have enough candidates, you can choose to only hire clones if the founders. And completely miss out on the benefits of diverse experiences bringing out creativity.

[candiodari]

Isn't this racist ? Why are you saying "diverse" candidates wouldn't be qualified ?

Google is well known, as are many other companies, to have the upper echelons of engineering filled with Stanford grads (and faculty), with their idea of diversity being the occasional Berkeley faculty member that's well liked there. (other companies, of course, have different universities they do this with, although Stanford certainly seems to have more than it's fair share)

So on the plus side, it's not racist. On the down side ...

[GFY-NSA]

>After all if you have enough candidates, you can choose to only hire clones if the founders

Or you could choose to hire people who aren't clones. It's not like you're stuck with Hobb's Choice when you have a glut of options

[quantumhobbit]

Completely agreed, but that isn’t what seems to happen in reality. Im not a hiring manager but what seems to happen is when presented with too many candidates, hiring managers redefine qualified to be more like themselves.