On hiring

John Carmack on hiring in a series of Tweets

People like the idea of hard and fast rules, but putting +/-infinity as a factor in a policy decision is almost never the best plan. Hiring is an obvious example, with "requirements" that filter out large chunks of applicants that don't have some kind of back channel
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) September 7, 2021

influence. Disqualifications are rarely explicitly stated, but they exist. If a company has a reasonable flow of applications, just tossing out all the ex-cons is an easy call. On the other hand, applicants often don't appreciate that interviewing prospects is a very non-trivial
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) September 7, 2021

cost to an organization, and "interview everyone" is not viable for places in high demand. Given imperfect signals, a degree of random exploration is mathematically optimal, but "add up your stats and roll a D20 to see if you get a job interview" is unlikely to be very popular
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) September 7, 2021

on either side. It is a really hard problem, but the workforce is clearly nowhere near an optimal distribution. Thinking about this while considering the challenges that @UnderdogDevs face in trying to help the previously incarcerated into software jobs.
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) September 7, 2021

I avoid posting tweets here because there is no guarantee that it will survive. However, I have included the thread-reader link and the PDF below:

[embeddoc url=”https://radoncnotescom.files.wordpress.com/2022/01/db934-hiring.pdf” ]

I will follow up with my ideas later, as I balance my viewpoints with the recent developments that happened while I was interviewed for the job. I wasn’t selected, but my failure has given me more insight than the committee could ever give to me! I don’t let my sense of self-worth be defined by a group of people, but it is clear that people are constrained by their narrow parochial point of view.