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seaknoll | 4 years ago

From the website -

> Out of the people I had hired at my last startup:

> 12% of hires where exceptional hires (I would instantly hire again)

> 42% of Hire were good hires. (I wouldn’t hire again but they did a fine job)

> 29% of hires were bad hires. (They didn’t do a good job and were eventually let go)

> 17% of hires were very bad hires (They had a negative effect on the company culture and other staff)

These seem like extremely poor numbers. I haven't hired a ton of people but all of them have been excellent, though some that I was peripherally involved in hiring have been just good. I'm curious what other people feel that their ratio is.

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shaggyfrog|4 years ago

> (I wouldn’t hire again but they did a fine job)

This alone makes no sense to me. It's a contradiction.

So I assume the website/author thinks they're a kind of mega-hustler 1000x developer or something.

chinchilla2020|4 years ago

Most likely. Also the extremely specific numbers provided.

version_five|4 years ago

This could roughly be saying half of hires are below average, and the distribution is bell shaped (or triangular to a first approximation). For many jobs, below average can be equivalent to bad.

If you have money to spend, or can wait to hire, you can beat the averages. I've hired a fair amount and done well too, but only by refusing to hire anyone if there are not suitable candidates that applied, which can burn a lot of political capital (your boss sees you've spend x time and money and had y applicant and z interviews and you refuse to hire anyone).

Good, cheap, available, pick two.

sokoloff|4 years ago

Employees aren’t scratch tickets. The on-boarding, training, engineering culture and practices all contribute strongly to whether the prospective employee will turn out to be excellent or not. (I leave it to your judgment to guess how a place where 42% “were good hires, did a fine job, but I wouldn’t hire them again” falls on that spectrum.)