from Hacker News

My hiring experience as a submarine sonar operator in the Norwegian Navy

by drtse4 on 11/21/18, 5:24 PM with 56 comments

  • by toomanybeersies on 11/22/18, 12:21 AM

    Hearing ability and having an "ear" for sounds are two orthogonal skills.

    My hearing is, for lack of a better word, fucked. I'm in my 20's and I have quite bad tinnitus from years of shooting rifles without proper hearing protection [1], using power tools without any hearing protection, and standing next to large speakers at nightclubs for 16 hours every weekend.

    Recently I have actually started looking after my ears. I wear high quality earplugs any time I'm somewhere with loud noises.

    Anyway, my hearing isn't exactly great, especially in higher frequencies. But I've still got an ear for sounds. Back when I was shooting I'd be able to tell different calibers apart. When listening to a song I'll be able to pick the different samples and instruments apart. I'm also fairly sensitive to how speakers or headphones have been EQed.

    It's a bit of a curse really. I really struggle in nightclubs and at raves with poor quality speaker systems. I was at a nightclub a few weeks ago and I spent the whole night being bugged by how off the EQ was. If a club hasn't got its acoustics right and has sound bouncing off the back wall it really bugs me too.

    [1] Even for a .22 you need hearing protection, even if your ears don't hurt, the high frequency impact will still damage your hearing. And for shooting hundreds of rounds with AR-15s, foam earplugs are not suitable.

  • by johan_larson on 11/21/18, 6:59 PM

    From the hiree perspective, it's clear that many companies are over-listing requirements and it makes sense to apply if you approximately match the position but don't tick every last box in the formal requirements.

    I'm not sure why companies over-list. Some think it's so they'll have a defensible reason for saying no in subjective cases, others think they are just being lazy and listing every possible thing they would like to see in the candidate.

  • by vmlinuz on 11/22/18, 6:24 AM

    See headline... Think "hmm, I knew a guy in London ages ago who had famously served on a sub in the Norwegian Navy"... Check blog.

    Yup, same guy. Guess there aren't that many former Norwegian submariners in the tech world!

  • by sytelus on 11/22/18, 4:20 AM

    There are 3 major things that matter in hiring great people: passion, curiosity and drive. If these 3 things exist then rest typically falls in place. For example, if you are hiring a mechanical engineer, do your initial basic tech vetting but the most important thing in your interview would be to understand why this candidate is interested in mechanical engineering (passion)? What does s/he do to learn things in mechanical engineer that are not related to job (curiosity)? How hard this candidate worked when faced with extremely difficult problems (drive)?

    If you can frame these questions right and practice this skill over time, you can minimize passing up great candidates who don't look good on paper but are jackpots in disguise.

  • by i_am_proteus on 11/21/18, 8:39 PM

    Militaries are massive bureaucracies whose management-by-numbers methods often fail to accurately capture individual talents. Glad you found a way through the cracks!

    And from a fellow submariner: pound a few at the Periscope Hut for me, and keep a zero bubble.

  • by ghostly_s on 11/21/18, 6:42 PM

  • by turtlecloud on 11/21/18, 7:38 PM

    Isn’t it so the recruiters can have “plausible deniability” for when they discriminate based on age, gender, race etc?

    If the feds look into some of these startup hiring practices, they have an excuse that the candidate didn’t meet all requirements. But that kind of defeats the spirit of the law.

  • by stcredzero on 11/21/18, 6:45 PM

    I wonder how many proxy requirements are pre-optimizations with no empirical support?

  • by sunsure on 11/21/18, 6:38 PM

    Welcome to the Brothers of the Phin.