That Wild Ask A Manager Story - Jacob Kaplan-Moss

A fairly preposterous experience in a hiring process. When asked how to stop it, Kaplan-Moss's response is:

A friend asked, “if this was your hire, and you manager asked you to change your hiring practices to prevent this, what would you do?”

Nothing. I would do nothing. I would not try to prevent candidates from getting someone else to pose as them during interviews.

The premise here is simple: designing a human process around pathological cases leads to processes that are themselves pathological.

That is a tremendous statement. One that should be put somewhere to reflect upon occasionally. Organizations usually remember this, but sometimes forget it. And technologists have all the wrong instincts here…

When we design software systems, we learn to think deeply about corner cases. We code defensively, making sure our systems handle all sorts of uncommon events. Amazon promises 99.999999999% reliability on objects stored in S3, and even then I’ve written code that handles the 0.000000001% chance that an object disappears.

Designing human systems is different. Computers don’t have emotions; I don’t need to worry insulting the vast majority of S3 objects when I defensively check integrity every time. But humans are different; when we design a human system around uncommon cases, we do need to consider the ramifications on the majority. There are times – and this is one of them – where addressing outlandish behavior requires steps that are just unacceptable.

Engineers must design to accommodate all the potential outcomes, which makes sense in a world of machine and logic. When we leave logic and enter the messy organic human space we need to design differently.