[scarface_74]

I think you’re more showing your own biases. I never said that the neighborhood was “good”. I just said that there aren’t that many people with my skin color…

But back on topic. I base my interviews on behavioral traits that for framing, can be sussed out by asking “tell me about a time when” type questions.

You did see the part about I’ve gone through the interview training by the second largest employer in the US didn’t you?

It doesn’t matter if you can reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard if I’m looking for someone who “takes ownership”, “digs deep”, and has shown the ability to deal at the level of “scope” that I’m looking for an knows how to “deal with ambiguity”

[lmm]

> But back on topic. I base my interviews on behavioral traits that for framing, can be sussed out by asking “tell me about a time when” type questions.

> It doesn’t matter if you can reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard if I’m looking for someone who “takes ownership”, “digs deep”, and has shown the ability to deal at the level of “scope” that I’m looking for an knows how to “deal with ambiguity”

That definitely sounds like something that would filter more for "went to the right schools" (or, more generically, "mingled with the right people", but schools are the easy way). I could certainly believe it's as effective as "reverse a binary tree", but I very much doubt it's fairer.

[scarface_74]

How does “going to the right school” have anything to do with having a project at work that you took ownership of and you took the time to learn a new to you technology?

Do you realize that scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity is literally in the leveling guidelines stated in some way or the other in every tech company?

https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/

I’m not looking for someone who just graduated from college.

[lmm]

> How does “going to the right school” have anything to do with having a project at work that you took ownership of and you took the time to learn a new to you technology?

The right schools give you the opportunity and mentality to do that (and before that, even more fundamentally, so does having a comfortable upbringing), and then you'll compound that with your experiences in the good jobs that going to the right schools gets you.

> Do you realize that scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity is literally in the leveling guidelines stated in some way or the other in every tech company?

Everyone does it, that's exactly the point - you limit class mobility by ensuring that the good jobs are only available to the people from the right class. Even if someone from the lower classes has the skills to excel, they never get the chance to take ownership, learn new skills, and expand the scope of their impact because they're never hired for a position in which they can take ownership, take the time to learn, and have impact beyond their narrow position, because they never have a way to show that they can take ownership and learn new skills...

[scarface_74]

What do you mean you don’t get the chance to learn new skills? There are plenty of free resources on the internet to teach yourself new skills.

When I’m looking for the behavioral traits I wouldn’t care if they could only tell me stories about being the shift lead at McDonalds.

You realize I only got a job at a company that anyone has ever heard of at 46?

It’s called “work ethic”. Right now, I am building a team where the actual coding is really simple in the grand scheme of things. Since ChatGPT is well trained on the AWS SDK, the CDK, etc. you could literally use it to do 90% of the work.

But the organizational complexity, business rules, etc are complicated and we are still figuring everything out. I need someone with the following behavioral traits. I’m going to frame them in terms of the Amazon LPs since it gives everyone a publicly available point of reference:

- Customer Obsession

- Ownership

- Learn and Be Curious

- Bias for Action

- Dive Deep

- Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit

- Deliver Results

If you have any kind of work experience at the mid or senior level you should be able to demonstrate those.

I could answer “tell me about a time when” type questions three years out of college graduating from my no name HBCU in the south after my first job.

[lmm]

> What do you mean you don’t get the chance to learn new skills? There are plenty of free resources on the internet to teach yourself new skills.

Which is fine if you've got a job with reasonable hours that doesn't leave you drained at the end of it, and the rest of your life is stable enough for that, and...

> I ... got a job at a company that anyone has ever heard of at 46

> It’s called “work ethic”.

Maybe. Or maybe it's luck. People are particularly bad at assessing which when it comes to their own history.

> I need someone with the following behavioral traits.

Or you need someone with something else that's correlated with them. Or what you need isn't really related to them at all.

> If you have any kind of work experience at the mid or senior level you should be able to demonstrate those.

Right. Once you've made the leap into the good jobs it's easy to stay there (and if you went to the right schools then it's easy to get the first good job, and if you're born to the right family then it's easy to get into the right schools). The trouble is getting there at all.

> I could answer “tell me about a time when” type questions three years out of college graduating from my no name HBCU in the south after my first job.

Sounds like you had a good first job.

[scarface_74]

> Which is fine if you've got a job with reasonable hours that doesn't leave you drained at the end of it, and the rest of your life is stable enough for that, and...

It sounds like you’re making excuses. You mean you spend every hour of your life working? Are you suggesting that we should have no hiring criteria?

> Maybe. Or maybe it's luck. People are particularly bad at assessing which when it comes to their own history

You did see the part where I would find it perfectly acceptable to show the behavioral traits by working any job? Of course you do have to have technical experience - not even in the stack we are using. I can teach the specific technology.

> Sounds like you had a good first job.

My first job was a computer operator working on mainframes.

[blincoln]

I like your "tell me about a time when" approach,[1] and I've used it successfully in the past, but I've never seen a good way to formalize it. Have you ever been able to delegate that responsibility to a team of other people and get results more or less consistent with what would have happened if you'd conducted all of the interviews?

My current opinion is that while it's effective, it means there's a significant bottleneck (sometimes a single person) for the hiring pipeline. i.e. you still need at least one earlier tier of interview to winnow the candidates down to a volume that's manageable for the bottleneck, and the earlier tier needs to be something more standardized that can be delegated to a larger group of people. i.e. "can this person explain common technical details A, B, and C of work in this department well enough to demonstrate solid understanding?"

[1] I read years ago that border guards in some countries use a similar technique, because if someone is being deceptive, it's unlikely they can handle a random walk to an arbitrary depth of detail.

[scarface_74]

I have a framework now that I’ve been developing based on my time at AWS. I’m now at a company where I’m building out an “application modernization” practice.

It’s based on the Leadership Principles at Amazon. Not that Amazon is a great place to work in practice (I just got Anazoned two months ago).

But they talk good game.

https://managementconsulted.com/amazon-leadership-principles...

I have a sticky note of the LPs I care about. A lot of times when I just ask a generic “tell me about yourself” question, they will talk about their experience and I can just ask them more details around their project that let’s me get the information I want.

Other times, I have to specifically pull out my questions. For instance, I really care about having someone who is willing to speak up in meetings and is willing to express their opinions and even someone who is willing to tell me they think I’m wrong. I speak very authoritatively about my areas of expertise. But I always try to emphasize “strong opinions weakly held”.

In LPs terms it’s called “Have backbone disagree and commit”.

My favorite question for that is “Say I’m your manager and you are in the meeting with me , the CTO and other managers and we come up with an idea that you think is completely stupid. What would you do?”

And that starts an entire conversation. I’ve given a thumbs down to people who give me an answer that I don’t think is a fit for what I’m looking for.

I love for people to give me feedback and I hire people who help my team fill in technical gaps. I need people to speak up

[aleph_minus_one]

> [1] I read years ago that border guards in some countries use a similar technique, because if someone is being deceptive, it's unlikely they can handle a random walk to an arbitrary depth of detail.

Such people are not necessarily deceptive; in my experience, much more often

- the person does not have the best memory, but loves to talk

- the person has a tendency to "hallucinate" (i.e. has some mild (typically harmless) schizophrenic traits)