In February, 2014, I shut down a business I'd built and run for 18 years. I took my staff to a Startup Weekend to show them what entrepreneurship looks like, and I wrote about it in Quartz: http://qz.com/173080/why-i-forced-my-staff-to-attend-startup...
Someone told me that he thought that only four of the people presenting showed any passion; I was one, and two of the others were employees of mine. (BTW, one of them - my youngest employee - won the weekend and has just recently graduated from Y-Combinator).
That got me thinking about what passion really is, and I've concluded that it isn't good enough merely to "like" something. There needs to be something about the status quo that you dislike so much that you're willing to work at addressing it, even when sometimes the work is so hard you hate every second.
This came out of a game design class on Thursday night (10/29). How many ideas can you folks generate by Halloween night? Feel free to re-post this elsewhere.
Since then I've become more public about how the job market is broken and how it might get fixed.
A year ago when I retired from Wall Street finding ways of improving the market for work has become a major passion project of mine. I have connected with many people and helped them change how they hire or helped them with an article or blog post they are writing.
But one downside is that I often get requests from total strangers to help them get a job and - to be frank - I find these requests a imposition.
I did not understand why I felt this way until reading this piece by Nick Corcodilos.
I agree that nobody should take me too seriously. I often take myself too seriously and it is exhausting and thankless work.
On the other hand, I disagree with your assertion that I made people take a course as part of a hiring process. I simply said that I’d hire someone if they knew some things and 27 of my candidates who didn’t know those things asked if I would teach them for fee. I agreed to offer a three-week course on condition they wanted to learn for its own sake and that they were NOT doing it to get a job because I wasn’t guaranteeing anyone would get hired and, besides, the chance any one person would get hired was perhaps 4%. In the end a bunch of them proved to be superb and I hired two instead of one as I’d originally hoped. And I got a few others jobs elsewhere. I didn’t have to do that, but I did. And they didn’t have to learn what they did, but they did.
You can accuse me of being biased in favor of people who like learning things for its own sake and who know how to do the job I need done. But if you are going to accuse people of forcing time-consuming education on candidates then I’d hope you’ll spend time going after employers who force you to have an irrelevant degree from a costly university before they will even let your resume past some idiotic filter.
ON PREJUDICES: Often I don’t get what I want because other people have inaccurate judgments concerning me. But what can I expect; who has the time to really do due diligence. And who am I to judge their judgments of me? If I were a judge at court I’d have to recuse myself because I am way too close to my own case.
This is not to say prejudice doesn’t exist. It does. And it is not to say it isn’t harmful. It is. Prejudice harms us all and the prejudices that harm me the most are my own; they keep me from being all I can be.
When I overlook good candidates because I judge them on irrelevant characteristics then I am constraining my options and that does me no good. Although it would be wonderful if the world was perfect I’ve found it most fruitful to concentrate on the problems closest to me and interestingly they usually involve something about me I could improve upon or resign myself to. I’m happier and more productive when I spend so much time trying to be part of a solution (and not the precipitate) that I don’t have time left over to theorize about what people beyond my influence should be doing.
ON MENTAL DISABILITIES: If you spend any time with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders I’m sure you can find yourself and everyone you know in there. It seems to me that strengths and weaknesses of the mind should be considered only if relevant just as with things in the physical realm. I’m not sure where to draw the line, however I rue the day when sociopaths cannot be discriminated against. In any event, I’ve concluded that life is a terminal spectrum disorder we just have to deal with as best as we can (until we don’t have to any more).
ON SELF-DISCLOSURE: As a practical matter, if you have an obvious disability the best time to bring it up is right before it becomes obvious. For example, if you have a stutter and you ask for forbearance at the beginning of an interview then you can win people’s hearts and they will be rooting for you. But if you don’t then often they cannot wait for the conversation to end. If your disability is not obvious but might require accommodation later on then probably the best time to disclose it is after you get a job offer and before you accept.
If you choose to go public with your issues and make them a cause célèbre then in order to win broad support it will need to be clear that you are doing it for the benefit of people in your circumstances and not just as cover for your own failings. Even then, the recognition you deserve might only come posthumously, but that is irrelevant unless it is recognition that you seek.
PEOPLE I’D LOVE TO HEAR FROM: Although this discussion is interesting I wonder if any of you out there would like my help improving how you hire people. If so, please contact me.
I am retired and don’t need to do this, but I want to. If you are stinking rich I can be expensive and if you’re sincerely broke then I can be free. Either way, you have to tell me who you are. I’m at BrookeAllen.com.
HELP - I need a variable name soon because we are about to go into production!!!
This story is about the one characteristic every employer wants in a boss and every boss wants in an employee. You can tell what it is as soon as you read the story, but I am looking a short name for this thing, something that can serve as a self-evident variable name in code that would keep track if someone has it or not.
And I need this variable name soon. So the more people who can make suggestions the better.
This can scale but not without a lot of people doing a lot of work that they want to do. And they need to care about the people on the other side; whether they are job candidate you don't hire or employers you don't want to work for.
You cannot care about a resume (because a resume is not a person) or a corporation (because although a corporation is person in the eyes of the law it has no soul). That is why the default way we hire is inhumane and beyond reform.
Caring about strangers is about the most soul-satisfying thing you can do; much better than going to another ball game with your kids. That is why I've taken my kids to my hiring events. (And I am glad to know that at least one job seeker at our Staffup Weekend brought a kid and everyone took turns babysitting.)
Even if you only care about the problem but not the people, once you get going on this approach you'll start caring about people because you cannot help yourself. There is something addictive about that, and addictive things tend to scale whether they are a good idea or not.
I agree but I think we must make it clear that the work we ask people to do should be similar to the work the employer wants done, but not work the employer would benefit from. I believe it is important to pay for work done for my benefit. When I've been the hiring manager, once I need to determine if the candidate can do the particular work I need done I'll pay them to do it. Often one day for $150. Usually they offer to do it for minimum wage but the difference is trivial. Many offer to do it for free but again I won't let them.
On the other hand, I tell job seekers to get to work doing things for others whether for pay or not. This is perfectly legal because you are working for yourself and the only person who can pay you less than minimum wage is you.
But the thing you probably don’t get, and I didn't get until much later, is that I did not create a hiring process.
And it sure wasn't a contest with a job at the end (as many of you think).
It was an experience.
For the people who engaged with the experience it was life-changing. For those who didn't it wasn't.
Certainly for the people I hired it was life changing.
Changing jobs will change your life – what would be the point otherwise?
And certainly going from unemployment to employment changes your life; how could it not?
And working for me will definitely change your life because I grok this better than almost anyone you’ll ever meet.
But I want to change everyone’s life whether they work for me or not because I never wanted to be a programmer, or an analyst, or a hedge fund manager or all those other things I have had the accidental good fortune of becoming.
Most of the attendees experienced a hackathon because they couldn't figure out how to experience anything else. After all, this was held in the Bay Area in 2014.
The exact same thing could have been held in London in 1842 and yet nobody could have possibly experienced a hackathon back then.
When you read her article, notice that Deborah poses a question but doesn't answer it. She talks about her experience of the other attendees but doesn't offer to introduce any of them to readers who might be hiring. She ends the article with a really good suggestion that someone should create Smartup Weekend to slap some sense into employers. She asks, “Who wants in?” But she doesn't even buy the domain name. Doesn't she know that you shouldn't mention a domain name you don’t own in a coffee shop anywhere near San Francisco because the guy next to you will buy it and then try to sell it to you for $10,000. And NEVER EVER do that in print. (Of course, as soon as I read her piece I snapped up SmartupWeekend.com and I offer to transfer it to anyone who can convince me they will actually build something rather than just talk about it. I’ll give it to you for free on condition that if you don’t do much with it then I get it back.)
In short, so far Deborah has reported on her experience, but hasn't fully ENGAGED WITH IT.
Deborah’s experience of Staffup Weekend is only beginning now. I am confident that someday she will see that weekend as a pivotal point in her life.
I’m less sure about the rest of the attendees because I have seen no evidence they have engaged with the experience as anything but a contest they have lost. After all, Deborah organized a 1-month reunion and nobody showed up.
There is still hope if these folks reflect on what happened, refer to their notes (surely they took notes), then refactor the whole thing and reflect on what they can still learn.
But even if they don’t do that, I’m sure every one of them could be excellent employees under the right circumstances because, as Woody Allen says, 80% of success is showing up and they did way more than that. You can see everyone here: http://staffupweekend.org/2014/11/22/report-on-staffup-san-f...
If you’d like to meet any of them then let me know. I’ll gladly make the introduction.
If you are looking to hire someone just let me know. I cannot vouch for their skills but I can attest to their grit. As Woody Allen says, 80% of success is showing up and these folk did way more than that.
Hey guys, this is Brooke Allen, the fellow Deborah was talking about. And yes, I am the guy who changed how he hired in 2004 and wrote about it in How My Life Was Changed When I Began Caring About the People I Did Not Hire. (On: http://BrookeAllen.com)
And I am the guy who offered to all takers a free three-week course in a little used language called APL, and I am the guy who helped the folks who did really well find jobs elsewhere if I couldn’t hire them.
I am also the guy who talked about how I learned APL in "I owe EVERYTHING to some funny symbols" (also at: http://BrookeAllen.com). In that I describe how in the spring of 1972 I was just falling in love with programming language when the semester ended and they took it off the mainframe and so I convinced a book author to give me 11 copies of a textbook that used the language and I rounded up 10 students for the summer and I got IBM to waive the $10,000 licensing fee and I got the computing center to put the language up for the summer and waive the CPU and connection fees. That is how I came to teach a class all summer for free to a bunch of eager young people all because I wanted to learn a language a chapter ahead of my students. I got so much for free and gave so much for free and luckily there wasn’t Hacker News then so none of us had to defend ourselves against people with keyboards, opinions, and too much time on their hands.
I am also the guy who, in 2009 became sick and tired of my unemployed friends at a finance industry conference bellyache about how there is no work. I was sort of annoyed that half of them helped engineer our financial collapse, but I still told them about how I used to believe that crap about “no work” until the morning of May 6, 1982 when I was unemployed and the first speaker at a conference I attended began by saying, “Never ever in the history of human endeavor has there been a shortage of work, and when the money dries up the work piles up.” He said I should forget about finding a job but look for worthy work and roll up my sleeves and start doing it. I started doing stuff for free but within two weeks I was working for pay at Morgan Stanley and that is how my career in finance got started. I’ve been unemployed for about a week in 1993 but I’ve worked as much as I’ve wanted to ever since. I have gotten rich because I believe that money is the soil, not the spoil, and if you have a choice do something of value for others and "what's in it for you" will take care of itself.
So in 2009 I started http://NoShortageOfWork.com where our motto is, “Even when you’re not doing something for pay, do something anyway.” I invited a few dozen unemployed people from the conference for a dinner and instructed them to all get to work for each other. Within a few weeks they were all busy and soon thereafter they were landing paying jobs left and right.
It is obvious to me that if you want to get work you should never fall out of the habit of working, even when nobody is looking or paying you a bribe to do it. But boy did I attract the cranks and complainers who criticized my message – one woman even told me I shouldn’t build my website for free until I got someone to pay me to do it. I told her I’d respond if she sent me $50 and I have heard nothing from her since.
Eventually I couldn’t take it so I created http://HumongousShortageOfWork.com where the motto is, “No teaching without tuition. No learning without grades. No work without pay.” Sometimes people have no idea how ridiculous their complaints sound until you get them to make the case for what they want instead of against what they don’t.
The default way people hire sucks for most people. I’ve innovated how I hire and helped others do the same and many of the ways I’ve come up with suck for some people too. They are especially unpleasant for the kind of people I don’t like working with, which is fine, because there are plenty of bosses who hate their work and hate working with people who do, so these complainers should go hang out with them.
My favorite complaint is how my approach advantages people who are unemployed. Actually it only advantages kind-hearted generous curious hard-working unemployed people who wish they weren’t discriminated against because of their hard luck. But so what; the employed shouldn’t bemoan the fact that someone doesn’t care about them if they don’t care about loving work. Or, if you love your job then congratulate yourself and let someone else try for the job I'm offering.
I love to work and I love to work with people who love to work and I don’t like working with people who won’t do anything – no matter how interesting or valuable to others – unless they know what’s in it for them.
Nobody is paying me to do it and I’m not looking for anyone to be impressed and hire me as a consequence. I do what I do because anything is better than daytime TV (and posting complaints on blogs) and if any of you out there feel the same then I hope to meet you on the Playa or at a Staffup Weekend – they are both one and the same in spirit if not in dustiness.
You are correct in that you accurately describe the problem and human behavior.
What Jeb taught me that day was that I should put a lot more effort into thinking about what is right and wrong and not assume that just because everyone around me is doing something - or it has always been done that way - that it is right in a moral, legal, or ethical sense.
But if it is not illegal, immoral, or unethical in its implementation or in its consequences then why not try? All you risk is failure. So what?
Many people's sense of ethics really boils down to their selfish interests. They don't blow the whistle until they are denied a raise but until then they don't mind lying to clients, for example.
There are people who tell me that how I hire people is "wrong" because many of my job prospects put in a lot of work learning something that did not lead to a job.
But, look guys, I'm a nerd and a maker. I love learning things for its own sake and making stuff of no use to anyone. I was just looking for fellow nerds and makers and I started out saying that as long as we were not doing anything illegal, immoral, or unethical let's just hunker down and do something hard and fun together.
Some people thought that was BS and dropped out. So, "bye bye." The rest of my candidates just wanted to learn and yet many didn't cut it. So what? Trying to learn something and failing is no sin.
And then they take grief from friends, and the general public: "You loser... you wasted your time and nothing came of it (i.e. no job)."
That's another thing; we nerds take a lot of shit from idiots.
I did not care then and I still do not care that much what people think of me. I care whether I am doing the right thing or the wrong thing.
And I did not care about EVERYONE I did not hire.
But I sure cared about those people who put in the effort whether I could hire them or not because they are MY people.
I was pleasantly surprised when someone posted my story about how my life changed when I started caring about the people I don't hire (although my ISP was not).
In wading through all the comments I categorize the reactions into two camps:
1) That's cool.
2) You're asking too much.
I am preparing an essay addressing most of the issues but I thought I'd share my thoughts on inventiveness because, after all, what happened was that my job candidates and I together invented a new process; nothing had been pre-planned.
My dad told me the secret to success was to not be evil (way before google). He didn't care if I became rich but he would be ashamed of me if I were evil.
This story from a someone who picked me up hitchhiking really makes a point about the relationship between good, evil, and inventiveness. Hope you like it.
Hi, this is Brooke, the original hiring manager. I'm new to HN so please excuse me if I violate protocol.
I agree, life is about treating people well. However, although I find hiring is probably the single most satisfying thing I did on my job, it was very hard emotionally because in the case of nearly everyone I don’t’ hire it is because they say “NO” to me, and boy, rejection hurts. But at least I have a job and my candidates usually don’t.
When I'm lucky enough to talk to programmers I'll describe it this way...
I don’t want to be stuck in Von Neumann’s bottleneck so rather than me processing candidates in series with the question “Who do I want to hire” I take an OO approach and send a different question, “Who wants to work for me?” to my candidates so they can work on it in parallel.
Since hiring is an elimination process I let them eliminate me in the first rounds. I don’t say “no” but I have to take a lot of it, which can be hard on the ego, particularly if I judge people too early and start to want one person over another. Desire is at the root of suffering. (Any fans of the move The Tao of Steve? Formula for getting the girl: 1) Be desireless. 2) Be excellent in her presence, 3) Let her desire you.)
I try to be the most flawed (e.g. honest) but-striving-to-be-excellent person I can be in front of my candidates and hope they will be the same for me (and magically they are). If we’re not going to be who we are before we start working together who do we plan on being afterward?
Because eliminating candidates is the name of the game, I concentrate on the negatives and that way there are only positive surprised later. Arguably many of my “best” candidates might eliminate themselves, but I’m not looking for the best – I can never afford them anyway – I am looking for the most appropriate for my budget, which I state early on and is almost never subject to negotiation. You cannot increases your desirability to offer to work for less, and if you are worth more than I can afford than I’m sorry, but I cannot afford you.
I want what I call hidden talent; those good at doing a job but bad at getting one. After all, the last thing I want you to be good at on my job is getting the next one. I'll help you find a better job before I hire you because afterward we've got to hunker down and get some friggin' work done.
Because I form an intentional temporary community of my candidates, and task them with something hard but meaningful that benefits them (like learning a new skill and/or helping each other find work) then by the time I say “yes” to someone everyone else agrees with the decision. In fact, in 10 years only once did a person tell me he thought I had made a mistake by not hiring him and the other candidates were so outraged they jumped all over him and one – who happened to be a lawyer – offered to defend me pro bono if he tried any funny business.
I never heard from him again but it is my great pleasure to say he is an exception in that regard and I count a few of the people I haven’t hired among my friends. This is a wonderful side-benefit because as I get older it is harder to make new friends, and it is certainly unwise to treat employees as friends as some do.
I seldom tell individual candidates what they did wrong, not because I am shy, but because it can be hard to take and I’m fairly tactless. However, I will offer a class on how to find work in which I anonymize specifics enough so as to benefit those who can identify themselves. Also, most people don’t do anything seriously wrong other than be unqualified or unlucky; no shame in that.
More later, if you’re interested.
After 30 years I’ve retired from the capital markets and they will do fine without me, but the markets for human capital are severely broken. Because I’m not ready to die, stop working, or give up on having a life's purpose, if you would like me to help you crack this nut then please do not hesitate in contacting me.