[PragmaticPulp]

> 1. Dodged a bullet (booo on any company that would reject someone with this level of passion).

Passion is a double-edged sword: When a person's passions align closely with the company's needs, it's wonderful.

But if a person's passions conflict with what the founders want, the passion can amplify the conflict.

That's why it's important to understand exactly what the candidate is passionate about. If they're passionate about helping the company wherever necessary, that's one thing. If they're passionate about something tangential and they expect the shift the company in that direction by joining, that's something else.

Codeamigo appears distinctly different than Codeacademy in some key areas, as the author explains, so I wouldn't assume that his passions aligned exactly with what Codeacademy was hiring fire. I think it's best to give the benefit of the doubt to Codeacademy in this case.

Remember: Being rejected from a job doesn't mean someone is unqualified or a bad developer. There's more to matching candidates to a team and not every candidate is a good match for every team.

[matheusmoreira]

> If they're passionate about helping the company wherever necessary, that's one thing.

Why would anyone be passionate about any specific corporation? Sounds like a great way to be exploited. People are passionate about enjoyable activities such as programming, not companies. They help companies with their problems because they get paid for it.

[boplicity]

> Why would anyone be passionate about any specific corporation?

Corporations are made of people, many of whom have a moral compass, and operate by that moral compass. If you believe in the mission of a company, the company is filled with people who also believe in that mission, and you're making real progress on that mission...then why wouldn't you be passionate?

Sure, you could be "exploited", but many people don't really care whether or not they're being exploited, if they're being treated well and doing meaningful work with people they like -- even more so if they're working towards a goal that can only be accomplished by a larger organization.

[javajosh]

Why would anyone be passionate about any specific corporation?

Speculating that it's perceived risk mitigation. If you're perceived as loyal, helpful, and even somewhat capable, they'll keep you around! This is in fact the perfect role for that person who gets a lot of juice out of supporting someone else achieve their goals. It is also probably a personality thing.

Of course, you have to answer a generalization of your own question: why be passionate about anything? It doesn't seem to be a necessary, or indeed very useful, to improve darwinian fitness.

[PradeetPatel]

> Why would anyone be passionate about any specific corporation?

This is quite evident in the entertainment (video games, film, music, etc.) industry. It has been established that many creative resources go to companies that produce most of their favorite work.

Sadly, it is quite common for those companies to have rather diverse and relaxed ethical guidelines around crunch and overtime.

[Agentlien]

I've seen this first hand. Even heard a manager asking a whole company "don't you want this game to be good?!" when challenged regarding increased overtime.

Luckily, my own experience is moving away from a company with crunch and a product I didn't particularly care for to a company strongly against crunch making a whole array of games I really love.

[q-big]

> Sadly, it is quite common for those companies to have rather diverse and relaxed ethical guidelines around crunch and overtime.

Rather: Hiring based on passion is a way to get away with demanding a lot of overtime or crunch time. :-(

[mylons]

Why is it best to give Codeacademy the benefit of the doubt? They likely hire by committee, like any tech company. In that scenario it's entirely dependent on who the committee is. It's not like Codeacademy, or any company for that matter, has some idempotent interviewing process. If you changed the interview panels, or some of the questions, the candidate may likely have received an offer.

[pkrotich]

Have you hired anyone? Asking because your comment make it sounds like there's science to it. I don't like the committee hiring as well but team or manager level hiring can segment the company culture. Also individuals can be biased and hire based on vibes or who is like them etc. - committee brings a check to that, that's why it's common.

The truth is - you'll miss some great candidates because they simply interview poorly and of the flip side sometimes get a professional interviewee that cannot deliver once hired.

You can also get a brilliant 10x candidate but a complete asshole (e.g CEO wanna be) that will destroy your team once hired.

[dimitrios1]

Hiring is hard. We, as an industry, simply cannot interview.

We don't know how to accurately gauge a candidates experience, personality or knowledge. We can only make them perform monkey-see-monkey-do on a whiteboard or through stupid, asinine puzzles and leetcode style exercises.

To make matters worse, we often place our most senior software developers on interview circuits. For better or for worse, engineers trend towards more anti-social traits. It makes the whole process of understanding one's personality, how they think, and whether or not they'll be a fit for the company a complete crap-chute. This is literally the only industry I have been apart of that sucks this bad at a process that is so fundamental to professional life.

I would rather interview at McDonalds or for a call center (having had both of those jobs).

[boneskull]

it’s “crapshoot” as in the game of craps, meaning “it’s a gamble” but crap-chute is pretty good too. just not for this sentence

[a1369209993]

> > the whole process of understanding one's personality, how they think, and whether or not they'll be a fit for the company

It's a chute you shovel crap into (or out of), with no justifiable expectation of useful results. The interview process as a whole is a crapshoot, but the process of understanding the candidate is a crap chute.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

It's a crapshoot whether or not you end up in a crap chute of a company.

[KerryJones]

I have -- quite a few times in quite a few different jobs. There actually is a lot more science to it than we usually take credit for. There have been studies that our typical interview process gives us 17% predictability of how they will perform, but if we do a contract-to-hire (of just one week) that improves to 80%.

We have proven time and time again that certain times of interview questions are not helpful.

If you look at the best investors, their job is similar, I would say that most notably as YC being crazy successful and found similarly in my own hiring is that passion for a given space is one of the best predictors of success.

[PragmaticPulp]

> There have been studies that our typical interview process gives us 17% predictability of how they will perform, but if we do a contract-to-hire (of just one week) that improves to 80%.

The pool of candidates interested in full-time jobs is not the same as the pool of candidates interested in doing contract-to-hire positions.

Contract-to-hire selects for people with the ability to risk working for a company for a period of time without a high risk of near-term unemployment if it doesn't work out. The people willing to take those jobs are usually more qualified to begin with because they have more career options open to them if the contract-to-hire doesn't turn into a contract job.

So you're basically pre-selecting your candidates.

[KerryJones]

There are two different types of "contract-to-hire". This type, I'm talking about working for 1 week, most people think of "contract-to-hire" as a 6-month gig that _might_ turn into a position. This is more of a "trial week", but is still technically contract to hire. They are not two different types of people, but it is true that it is much harder for someone who has an existing position to take off 5 days -- but we did it in our company and made accommodations to make sure we fit. It also weeded out people who wouldn't fit.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

So, you're agreeing that it works, then.

[hellojason]

I think they were trying to convey the idea that not all very qualified candidates would even consider a contract-to-hire option. I know I wouldn't. That’s an unnecessary risk for me to take.

[cutemonster]

> improves to 80%.

Sounds interesting. If you happen to have links to any articles about that, it'd be interesting to read

[KerryJones]

I wish I kept the references, I didn't think they would be hard to refind but they have been. This is a reference I just found that's more recent (I found the others around 2016): https://www.qualified.io/blog/posts/truly-predictive-softwar...

[cutemonster]

Thanks! I've seen that article, it was posted at HN 1.5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22704116

Turns out I still had it open, half read, in one of my 100+ browser tabs :-)

Nice to hear that you recommend it. (Hmm I wonder if maybe some of the other things you've read were also based on Schmidt & Hunter, 1998?)

I have in mind to do as they recommend (incl work sample tests and structured interviews and work knowledge tests), when/if later on I'll look for people to help me with the software I'm creating.

I wonder b.t.w. if you know about any automatically generated GMA tests?

(Edit: I found some, I can post a link if you want.)

It'd be nice if there were ways to auto generate GMA tests. Then maybe it could be just fine if everyone was allowed to practice as how as they wanted -- if there was an unlimited supply of new questions, because they were auto generated.

Maybe something with generating random 3D shapes and applying rotations.

But then it seems to me it's necessary to measure how well begin good at such things, correlates with being able to learn and get good at software, and scrap any poorly correlated tests.

[ikiris]

you get 80% chance of the idiots willing to work supposed contract to hire positions. Not sure that's anywhere near the same thing.

[cutemonster]

Some people prefer to work as contractors since that tends to pay a lot more, and they might have many many offers to choose among. And, paired with (not in the US) a well functioning social welfare system in case of really bad luck

[bitwize]

This is why it's important, in the corporate world, to cultivate a VB programmer's or PHP programmer's mindset, no matter what language you're working in: your passion should be with the business and solving exactly the business problem at hand, and treating your programming tools strictly as tools in service of the business.

[beepbooptheory]

Is there any room left for someone to just be good at something and a company pays them to do that thing.

[derangedHorse]

I think one should be passionate about the mission. If someone is just passionate about the company and is willing to follow any orders from management, then the original vision can easily be corrupted in a way no one notices. Having universally agreeable employees also puts the target demographic at risk of being undermined by the employee based who never cared about the mission

[opan]

Small note: It's "Codecademy", not "Codeacademy". Like a mash-up of words rather than just two whole ones squished together.

[csee]

This is where you take a gamble and hire them, then ask them to leave if it really doesn't work. The chance you're giving up on a 10-100x leverage hire is just too high in such a case.

[maximp]

> Codeamigo appears distinctly different than Codeacademy in some key areas

I imagine that building and releasing _the exact clone_ of the product from a company that rejected you would be petty and legally dubious.