There's a nauseating bias here against people who've had horrific childhoods.
"Let me tell you about the years of physical/emotional/sexual abuse I've suffered though." That's just not going to happen - and if it did happen the interviewer is probably not going to come away with "What a brave person to overcome all of that!" but "What a damaged person, I don't need them around".
Well done, you've weeded out people who've already suffered enough.
Thank you. I found the part where the author throws in "cared for a dying parent" particularly distasteful, it's like a benchmark for "palatable damage"
The author appears young. I would give them the benefit of the doubt. It has been my experience that people who have lived a fortunate, trauma free life cannot really understand the trauma experienced by others. They might appear to understand, say all the right words, and so on. Then a few days later or weeks later be confused or upset because of how you react to something. A good friend once said to me, "Wow, that is still upsetting you?" He wasn't being a jerk, he was just surprised.
That may be true, but it doesn't mean that I have to submit to an interview with people like this who are lacking empathy. It also wouldn't be great if these kinds of interviews proliferate.
Empathy comes from being able to put yourself in other people's shoes. Reading fiction has been shown to increase empathy. If so then these guys need to do more reading.
Not just trauma necessarily, but many of our defining moments include things like, leaving a religious community we grew up in, coming out as LGBTQ+, being too broke to pay bills and taking out a risky loan, experiencing racism/sexism/ageism.
Not things I'd be inclined to talk about when those things are ripe for opening myself up to discrimination.
At first I agreed with you, but then I remembered: Where is our sensitivity, empathy and tact for the person who said that, who may have their own trauma and own issues?
The reality, the beauty of human relationships is that they are between people with all these issues and dimensions, all the nuance and detail that make up human beings. In the wild, there's no laboratory people - no clean, perfect specimens in simple environments.
My rule is, I don't know what someone else has been through and is going through. Never, ever judge. If absolutely necessary (e.g., I need to decide to partner with them or not), make my best guess but don't judge.
Well said. In addition to that, I think a speaker's intended meaning is also important to consider.
imo, people often take what people say literally or default to a first-instinct interpretation, rather than trying to understand what the speaker is attempting to convey. I try to interpret what people say charitably (a few of my friends think much too charitably), but I really believe that the vast majority of people seldom intent any malice in their comments.
In the example, it might have been intended in an empathetic way - "Damn, sorry, I didn't realize you were still hurting. I would have extended a shoulder to you if I realized". Or a pragmatic way - "I think the situation isn't as bad as you think, want to talk about it?" It could have been bluntly honest (personally, I typically appreciate honesty over politeness) or a totally aloof statement made on reflex. It could also just have been someone being a jerk, but I suppose the point of my rambling is that there's a myriad of ways to interpret a comment, and it's largely based on both the speaker's experiences and how they communicate.
Those are essential points. I'd just adjust the first to say, I think people tend to choose the interpretation - literal, metaphorical, reading emotions, etc etc - that suits their own emotional drive.
I find that the person I'm talking to, if I treat them as if they are a*holes, act as if that was their intent the whole time. If I treat them as if they in good faith, they act that way.
It's hard to resist the flow of conversation, to not go along with the way it's framed. I think that's why people act how you treat them; I think that's why people even confess falsely to crimes - the interrogator talks to the suspect as if they did it. Other sophsticated communicators also use that intentionally.
This interview style seems bound to create a psychologically enmeshed workplace with no healthy boundaries. Or a workplace full of people with charming, easily-shared backstories and nuclear families but no yucky problems. Would not want to work here, personally.
Any competent HR department would have a fit if they knew these kinds of questions were being asked. It's way too easy to wander into illegal discrimination when you're making hiring decisions based on people's backgrounds like this.
You'd think this was true, but I've seen some crazy shit in interviews, even at companies that were big enough and had a robust enough legal team, where you'd think they'd have their shit together.
I once interviewed at a medium sized, name brand Silicon Valley darling everyone on HN has heard of, where an interviewer outright asked me if I was married and if I had kids! Like, holy shit, just read your interview training manual! The very first sentence is probably "Do not ask any questions where the answer would even imply information about things that would get us in trouble discrimination-wise." Yet this person overtly asked! Here I was in the stairwell walking down to the second floor and she hits me up with one of the few totally forbidden questions! I thought about saying "What would HR think of that question?" but the asker was the HR manager! Totally bonkers.
The way I understand it, you can legally ask the questions, you just can't consider protected status for hiring purposes. The interview guidelines prohibit asking because "we didn't ask" is a stronger defense than "our interviewers have mental firewalls".
This case is strictly worse because the questions are explicitly being asked to evaluate eligibility for hiring.
It's still a major blunder by an HR manager but maybe there's a chance that they had already decided to hire the person but hadn't made an official offer and it was a mistimed getting-to-know-you chat? I don't know, it seems insane to even ask.
My wife was asked that question ("are you married, do you have kids?") in an interview with a tiny company 30 years ago. She attributed it to ignorance and replied "That's not a legal question to ask". The interviewer apologized profusely and he hired her. He turned out to be a really nice person who was unaware of what was out-of-bounds to ask in an interview. But that was 30 years ago, people should know better now.
>a workplace full of people with charming, easily-shared backstories and nuclear families but no yucky problems
Are you suggesting that this is bad? What do you hope to gain by seeking out obnoxious people with traumatic backstories and broken families with yuck problems? Misery loves company?
Why should someone’s present self be defined by things entirely out of their control (e.g. childhood trauma)? You seem to assume that “obnoxious people” and “traumatic backstories” go hand-in-hand; on the contrary, some of the most obnoxious people are those who have never faced anything in their lives other than minor and routine inconveniences. Neither person is inherently superior to the other, I’m just saying that I’d personally rather not work at a place that selects exclusively for “perfect” people along a metric unrelated to their job performance.
You were the one to make the link between "charming people", good childhoods and lack of "yucky problems". And, while I would agree that there is a strong correlation, it's true that it's not perfect.
Obviously performance is also a critical factor but your comment gave me the impression that you don't see any value (or even harm) in targeting charming people without yucky problems. They do indeed sound like "perfect" colleagues to me!
There isn’t a correlation. I am charming and would like to think generally pleasant to be around. But if you’re going to interrogate me about the entire life story of mine, you aren’t going to think that anymore.
Screening for people with life stories that you/anyone deems acceptable is extremely problematic, because realistically you will never have access to deeply personal information about 90% of your coworkers. As in, you should not be forcing Janet from accounting to disclose to you that she was abused by her stepfather, because if she is a well-adjusted adult it would have absolutely no bearing on your interactions with her at a workplace
You're one of those people who can only deal in absolutes, huh?
All else being equal, a person who enjoyed an idyllic childhood is typically going to be a more well-adjusted adult than someone who experienced the most depraved, violent, extreme child abuse imaginable.
I don't even have any interest in discussing the finer points with someone who completely denies the long-term effects of adverse childhood experiences.
We are talking about specifically work-related scenarios, that usually have pretty straightforward boundaries and surface-level interactions. "All else being equal, a person who enjoyed an idyllic childhood is typically going to be a more well-adjusted adult" - not necessarily in this specific context, people that didn't experience trauma are not immune to being awkward, immature, neurotic, anxious and various other things that makes working with them difficult.
That is not to say that people who have experienced childhood abuse can't have issues with basic human functioning. The point is, neither are necessarily are better or worse to work with just based on their trauma or lack of thereof.
It is irrelevant that people with normal childhoods are statistically more likely to be well-adjusted in most aspects of their lives, because we are only considering workplace interactions.
I was told that asking about resume gaps is a very biased question and a no-no, especially if it is a single gap, as opposed to a pattern.
Usually the answer to a single resume gap is something personal and none of my business as an interviewer, it's not my place to pry if you were raising children, caring for dying relatives or battling severe depression
That whole line of questioning is a HR nightmare and I don't think they'd get away with it in any large company. You are _not_ supposed to ask open ended questions that could reveal a candidate as a member of a protected group. They tell you that their parents kicked them out because they were gay, they don't get hired, and they file a lawsuit saying that there were forced to reveal their sexual orientation and they were discriminated against because of it.
This scenario is unlikely to be an _easy_ win in court, but presents enough headache and just the risk of the company losing in court would most likely result in a settlement offer.
My youth was by no means exceptionally traumatic, but it was no fucking fun, and cumulatively amounted in me being a “from the wrong side of the tracks” figure in software, which was eminently doable when I was getting started and is still doable, but one works awfully fucking hard for the privilege as the ambient level of bad behavior well-concealed, cronyism, insularity, and utterly obliviousness about the public’s feelings hits 88mph.
I apologize to the author in advance if this assumption is off base, but the biopic at the beginning reads like the kind of life no one from my neighborhood had.
What I will say to the author is: be a lot more careful with the power over people’s lives afforded by your current privileged status, whether you earned it or not.
I didn't have a particularly horrific childhood, but every chapter title would be about social struggles, anxiety, and depression. The positive stuff was random events, and the organizing themes were negative. Isn't that true for most people?
I guess the question tests a person's ability to craft positive, attractive narratives about themselves. Maybe we're returning to a time when being outwardly happy is treated as a universal social obligation, like in the 1950s and 1960s. My parents' generation rebelled against the oppressive conformity of the post-WW2 era, and the tendency to value acceptance and emotional transparency continued through my generation (Gen X), but it could easily swing back the other way. Especially since all the stubborn problems in this country (resistance to awareness of racism, resistance to awareness of historic injustice, resistance to action on global warming, etc.) are seen as stemming from the unearned unhappiness of privileged people, I can see cheerfulness becoming obligatory, and lack of cheerfulness being openly stigmatized, instead of just passively and subconsciously discriminated against.
Edit: The rise of social media influencers as role models would obviously be a huge factor in this, and in the increasing pressure on people who struggle with something (whether it's a societal issue like racism or poverty, or a mental illness) to live up to the "positive representation" of the influencers who earn the power to define the public's expectations by presenting themselves in a charismatic, consumable way.
Even if the candidate doesn't have a horrific childhood, the question is totally inappropriate and irrelevant. Like "get up and walk out of the interview" inappropriate.
This, and the general level of mysticism throughout (really? "Spike potential" WTF), causes me to dismiss the whole article.
Shopify's made the Life Story a major part of their interview process for over a decade now, it doesn't as if they'd ever had problems attracting talent. [1] I think you might be in the minority if you feel that highlights from someone's past are irrelevant predictors in their future performance and that asking about them in an interview is inappropriate.
Personally, I'm really glad I didn't "get up and walk out of the interview" when they asked me to talk about my youth, it ended up being one of my favorite internships and helped position me towards a career in big tech :)
"At Shopify, all candidates begin the interview process with something called the Life Story, an interview in which the candidate sits down and discusses their work history, passions, and aspirations."
None of that sounds like the actual stories about childhood. It's totally appropriate to discuss past work experiences, aspirations and passions as a "Life Story".
Moreover the “Tell me a little about yourself” suggested interview opener is open-eded enough that the candidate can decide what they want to discuss and highlight. Majority of people do not answer that question with "my first memory was when father left when I was 3 years old..."
I agree. This is very off putting. There should be boundaries btwn people we don’t know. I’m not going to share personal experiences for a stranger and be their little zoo monkey they want to evaluate for the circus.
This person is out of touch in such a bad way. Why would you put someone through such a cringeworthy exercise?
There can also be a bias against people who haven't had horrific childhoods or particularly interesting ones, depending on the background or attitude of the interviewer.
"If he hasn't struggled, then what does he really know about anything at all?"
I've by any and all accounts had an extremely privileged, happy and stress-free childhood/life, and I'd still balk at this kind of interrogation. It's just plain inappropriate to ask something like this of anyone in a professional setting, people's life stories are simply of no relevance to the job and more importantly, nobody else's business.
Not to mention the minefield of discrimination avenues present here, conscious ones and otherwise. Hell, even a positive feel-good story about a happy life could lead to a negative reaction depending on who's hearing it, these sort of things are inherently perilous to talk about in professional settings.
> bias here against people who've had horrific childhoods.
I didn't read this as a bias against significant prior challenges, in childhood or after. I certainly had such challenges and I've always thought most people have. Since the author's stated goal is identifying high potential, early career candidates in the absence of prior success or obvious metrics, it seems essential to look for resilience.
To me, understanding how a person has contextualized and integrated prior challenges into who they are today is a key personality trait. So much of attitude is "the stories we tell ourselves to explain what happened to us." In my case, I've always felt my childhood had "some pretty rough patches" but in total "it wasn't too terrible." Yet, the few people I've shared the details with are usually aghast at how institutionally abusive it was. I don't deny the severity of it but it's pretty revealing about my personality that I don't now feel emotionally wounded by what happened. Perhaps it was just my coping mechanism but I've always felt "that's just shit that happened to me, it doesn't define me."
I want to hold it as far from my heart as corporately possible. I don't want to think about it after work, I don't want to work on it after work. I don't want it to know my secrets nor do I need to know its.
I want to be able to say peace bro and walk away whenever I want with no thought of a sad feeling. Which unfortunately does happen but it's always coworkers or cool tech.
> I certainly had such challenges and I've always thought most people have
Just what the hell do you think emotional and physical abuse is? An overly strict parent? Perhaps you'd like to hear about what me and my siblings went through. It wasn't 'a challenge', it was a fucking deliberate attempt to destroy us as people and it succeeded. You want details? [Edit: don't ask for details]
To sort of echo and expand on what you're saying here, there's a fair argument that if you do go through capital-A abuse, and don't think it effects you, you might just have made yourself blind to the damage as a coping mechanism.
The most famous example that I can think of is Henry Kissinger, who fled Nazi Germany with his family, at age 15, to escape persecution as a Jew. He claimed, to his dying day, that he was not heavily impacted by the experience. Maybe he wasn't. But I wonder if any of the genocides laid at his feet were in part caused by his refusal to accept any impact his teenage experiences might have had on him.
Demanding that people tell an interesting/engaging story about why they have C/PTSD, just to get a job, totally tracks for the late-stage-capitalism narrative though.
It’s literally selecting for people who can tell the best stories. Not great for any company dependent on moving fast with autonomy, with a genuine mission.
Plus “looking for grit” really means “looking for someone to work long hours (typically without good odds of realizing fair equity)”… super unethical to even attempt to be selecting for people with trauatic and toxic Pasts.
If they wanted to select candidates for learning quickly, being adaptive, whatever… just test for that.
While I was, on the contrary, thinking the questions were at risk of finding sociopaths who said the right things, made up the right stories, and then went on exploiting the company and people there
(Just to avoid misunderstandings: I think the article author seems like a good-intentions person, just that the _interview questions_ look partly risky to me)
Yeah I was about to say this. "Tell me the story of your career" is a lot more appropriate.
You're probably still going to get a lot of irrelevant dreamy passion bullshit with that question though when in reality 95% of candidates are just looking for exchanging skills for income and you as an employer need to accept that that's how the world works.
So the interviewee is stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Between the need to have a job to survive, and the need to appease some self-important middle manager who took it upon them to perform a psych eval, with zero credentials, while controlling the future of the candidates, and their ability to put food on the table.
Kindly, make your self as visible as possible so that I know to avoid you.
Exactly. I felt intense revulsion reading GP’s comment. Collaborating in a team where there’s zero concern for people’s life circumstances is a no-go. It’s impossible to maintain work-life balance when life can’t even be acknowledged.
I agree, and personally would have no qualms about walking away from an interview I didn't like.
Would you choose to leave and walk out of an interview if you objected to something? how would you feel? Would you feel like you were walking away from an opportunity maybe? What if your situation was less than ideal?
I think you would find that many people don't feel the same independence or freedom that you and I seem to. Especially if they're not already comfortable financially.
"“Tell me about you. If your life was a book, give me the chapter titles from your birth till now.”"
Would you consider an accurate answer to that to be a traumadump? How quickly do you think people can make up happy childhood stories when put on the spot like this?
It is a completely inappropriate question in a job interview.
Nobody is asking anyone to do that. The bias here is that a person with a traumatic past might seem uninteresting precisely because they unlikely going to share as much detail as this interviewer might want.
I don't know about you or your story. I hope you're doing well.
I've learned that the majority of people just don't want to hear anything negative or anything that makes them feel sad. If I want to have social, casual friends, I have to wall off parts of my life story.
Thankfully, I have a couple of close friends and family who know the reality and that is enough for me.
that's why i don't care about casual friends. i mean i do have some, but that's because we have some hobby that we share. the people in that group however are all replaceable.
what's not replaceable is deep friendships with people that do care and are open to listen.
that's no country. you find these kind of people everywhere. my theory is that the people who don't want to hear those things have not yet dealt with their own traumas (which can take decades).
"Let me tell you about the years of physical/emotional/sexual abuse I've suffered though." That's just not going to happen - and if it did happen the interviewer is probably not going to come away with "What a brave person to overcome all of that!" but "What a damaged person, I don't need them around".
Well done, you've weeded out people who've already suffered enough.