How To Hire a Hacker

itwbennett writes "If you want to hire a hacker, you need to take a more psychology-based approach to the entire interview process to determine whether he or she has changed their ways enough to be a trustworthy employee, says Mich Kabay in a recent Network World blog post. But this approach is also 'germane for highly skilled staffers, even those that don't come with arrest records or who have done something questionable in their pasts,' says David Strom. For example, in your next interview, ask a question that will suss out how much of a sense of entitlement a candidate has — or how much you or your company has. 'One time when I interviewed with Microsoft in Redmond I couldn't get over this sense of corporate entitlement — it was one of the biggest turn-offs that I had during my interviewing day there,' says Strom. 'I got the feeling that I wasn't going to fit in, no matter how smart I thought (or they thought) I was.'"

Comments

Sounds more like

[wampus]

Sounds more like "how to hire a self important misanthrope" to me.

Re:Sounds more like

[CAIMLAS]

Calling such people "misanthrope" is a bit harsh, I think.

Someone who is intelligent, competent, and has a difficult time finding acceptance (or even a modicum of comfort-with-others) in new environments could very easily get falsely labeled a misanthrope. If they're capable and know up from down, calling them self-important is a wee bit counter-productive - and I dare say, quite possibly why they'd be viewed as misanthropic.

A better characteristic descriptor would probably be "socially clueless". I know a lot of guys who come across harsh - myself included. They are usually some of the most open people I've known; they're also very amiable - but havent' a clue how to relate to others unlike themselves.

Re:Sounds more like

[Nefarious Wheel]

I have a friend in the high energy physics field. Four advanced degrees. I had the good fortune to have hired him as a contractor once when I was in a narrow bind, and I know he's bright. A bloody Klieg light amongst candles.

He's also often distressed by the stupidity of the people he works with. "Mate" I said, "Everybody you work with will be stupider than you. Get used to it."

I don't know if it helped much, but it's indicative. In a world of so-so thinkers, any bright sparks will have trouble fitting in. And it takes a fairly bright spark to be even a mediocre sysadmin, to be honest.

Re:Sounds more like

[Glonoinha]

Actually that's because most 'team building exercises' suck.

You want to build the most amazing team that ever graced your workplace? Send the three or four of them to Vegas or Miami or someplace that has TROUBLE for them to get into under the pretenses of a training class or a seminar, and only get them one car. That will insure they get in a ton of trouble together. When they get back, they will be tighter than any team you've ever seen, and they will get serious amounts of amazing work done. And the three or four of them will work so well together for the rest of their tenure - they will kick the snot out of any teams built over an afternoon playing blindfolded Monopoly and drinking non-alcoholic beverages or whatever the current fad in weak ass team building exercises is this season.

Disclaimer - trouble in moderation. I'm talking going to strip clubs and drifting the rental car around corners, not burying a dead hooker in the desert.
That said - a team that does the latter will be a LOT tighter than the team that does the former. Or so I've heard.

Re:Sounds more like

[TheModelEskimo]

That's nice, unless you work in a place that's even mildly diverse, where you have people like Kevin the married Mormon who is into skydiving, Samir the introvert muslim who regularly takes prayer breaks and loves Sunny-D, and Tammi the feminist who enjoys electronic music and builds analog synths in her spare time.

No, I think your amazing team-building system would work best with extroverted dopey white guys aged 20 - 30 and see nothing wrong with TV. Mooks, basically. It assumes a non-diverse team, so by definition it's a weak way to build teams in general.

Re:Sounds more like

[Opportunist]

Team building does simply not work out. You cannot build a team. It happens or it does not. It's just that simple.

If you really insist in "building" a team out of people who don't know jack each other, simple way: Grab them all for an afternoon, put them in a pub, sit down with them and get them drunk. Really drunk. Then have them talk. You'll have a team the next morning some of the times. And if not, you at least got a good hangover out of it on corporate pay.

Re:Sounds more like

[Mr Z]

There's also the difference between "intelligent" and "informed." There are plenty of otherwise intelligent people that ignorant on topics that they're asked to weigh in on. Ignorance is a bigger problem than lack of intelligence, I'd say. This dovetails nicely into your observation.

To see the effects of institutionalized ignorance, look at all the wasted intellectual effort of the Dark Ages. You have bright minds of the day debating over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, as opposed to advancing science and engineering. Imagine if all that effort had gone into developing the steam engine a few hundred years before James Watt got to it.

Had any scary interviews?

[WaywardGeek]

Like a lot of big geeks on Slashdot, I take pride in always receiving a job offer after an interview... accept once. Once I interviewed with the EDIF reader group at Cadence, and the manager had exactly one technical question for me: "Do you understand recursion?" "Well... yes I do." "Well, then, you have all the skills that matter. What really counts is that you know how to fit in, and you don't impress me there."

I'm still shaken up over that interview.

Re:Had any scary interviews?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you also take pride in fucking up heterographs?

Re:5 min

[Anonymous Coward]

Put a gun to his head, give him a blowjob and tell him to break AES256?

On Personality

[overbaud]

"Another problem is that some criminal hackers may exhibit traits associated with clinical personality disorders such as the narcissistic personality disorder." I'd say a large amount of IT staff exhibit personality disorders. Not just 'hackers'.

Think this one needs a Part 2

[mysidia]

How to Fire a Hacker

(Without getting pwned by her/him or his/her friends)

Because (let's face it), there's a chance you hired one on accident, without realizing it, and that they don't have an arrest record, for one reason or another.

In fairness

[SlappyBastard]

The article is about how to not hire a self important misanthrope.

Re:In fairness

[e9th]

I wonder how Terry Childs would have done if the guy who hired him had read this?

I was hoping there was a joke in there

[SlappyBastard]

When you said that he asked, "Do you understand recursion?" I was hoping that you'd say, "Then after that, he asked, 'Do you understand recursion?' And I said yes. And then he asked . . . (wait for it) . . . 'Do you understand recursion?'"

I'm sorry. It just felt like a setup for a joke about recursion.

Re:I was hoping there was a joke in there

[plover]

Here's a really lame joke about recursion.

Re:I was hoping there was a joke in there

[Anonymous Coward]

A joke from google

The joke was too easy

[MyLongNickName]

The interviewee must answer: "Yes, but to fully understand it, you must first understand recursion"

I have an ironic recursion story

[plover]

A coworker's boss once hired a "programmer" while my buddy was on vacation (avoiding the technical interview in the process.) The guy's first task was a simple program, but it always core dumped. He made no progress trying to get it fixed, so my friend held a code review. Each and every function looked like this:

void foo()
{
...
some irrelevant but incomprehensibly bad code;
...
main();
}

Yes. He called main() at the bottom of each function. When asked about it, the "programmer" said 'that's so it'll return back to main.'

I think the biggest mistake we made was not firing that stupid manager on the spot. But I suppose if we fired managers based solely on incompetent decisions, ... well... you know.

Re:If you can't beat 'em...

[nitehawk214]

... arrange to have them beaten.

Re:This article seems to be anti-hacker

[nacturation]

And I thought "hacker" actually meant someone who (literally) hacked on things. With a hatchet or similar.

So more like Hans Reiser?