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by rcme 1196 days ago
I've been thinking a lot about hiring recently. Friends and acquaintances often tell insane stories about their workplaces, and inevitably the problems all stem from poor hiring. The specific request in TFA is insane and shouldn't be entertained. This doesn't mean the employee in question is bad, but, in general, when you entertain requests like this you're bound to pick up a few bad eggs. When you build a team, you want to ensure that everyone has the right mindset. This means people with little ego who are willing to put aside their personal differences to do what's best for the team. Starting your employment with a bizarre religious exemption to using Windows does not illustrate that in the least.

There is also the related question about why the company needs this employee. What I've seen is that such red flags often come up in hiring. Good managers recognize that there is a potential culture fit and pass without losing any sleep. Bad managers, those who obsessed with increasing their headcount, are willing to ignore such signal. They're willing to sacrifice the quality of the team, its output, and the company at large for their own personal gain.

1 comments

> They're willing to sacrifice the quality of the team, its output, and the company at large for their own personal gain.

I could write a book about it over just what I've seen with my own eyes for 30 years. I wish someone would have forced me to see that, when this happens, it's almost always because someone is making a _conscious_ choice to do so, NOT because "they're stupid." It would have saved me an unbelievable amount of time and frustration, trying to "correct" their thinking from a place of naiveté and best intentions. My personality is such that I couldn't conceive that this path would have been chosen, as I thought it would be (in essence) "evil." Really, it's just another strategy for whatever "success" they can achieve, by people who don't have any of the other tools at their disposal. It's sad, but it's a fact of life and the nature of the human race. Once you can understand this, it's easier to recognize it, and just route around it. It took me 20 years to get it. I hope others fare better.