The Caps Lock Tell: What I Look For When I Hire

There's a habit I notice more than I'd like to admit. Someone needs a capital letter, so they press caps lock, type the letter, and press caps lock again to turn it off. Then they keep typing.

It works. The letter comes out capitalized. But the shift key has been there the whole time. It showed up on typewriters with the Remington No. 2 in 1878, and typewriters first went on sale in 1874. So this isn't a gap in someone's computer skills. It's a typing skill that has been around for almost 150 years and never got learned.

I don't bring this up to make fun of anyone. Plenty of capable people do it. What interests me is what it says about how they got there. Nobody sat down and decided that caps lock was the best way to type a capital letter. They figured out one way that worked, early on, and never went back to ask whether there was a better one. The problem isn't a missing skill. It's a habit nobody ever questioned.

Once you start looking for that pattern, you see it outside the keyboard too.

Here's one I've seen. A manager builds the monthly schedule in Excel. Then they print it, make copies, and make sure everyone gets one. At best, the floor staff have a board with a copy posted on it. And what do the staff do? They take a picture of it with their phones so they'll remember when they're working.

Think about that for a second. Almost everyone has an email address, even if it's a personal one. Saving that spreadsheet as a PDF and emailing it would have put the schedule on every phone in the building. The staff already landed on the right answer on their own. Their photos are a workaround for the PDF that never got sent.

The manager isn't lazy. They're doing real work every month: building the schedule, printing it, handing it out, chasing down whoever missed a copy. It's just the same work they've always done, and it never occurred to them to ask if it still made sense.

In most jobs, that kind of habit costs some time and some paper. In tech, it costs a lot more.

My job runs on change. Tools get replaced. Processes get rebuilt. Security practices that were fine a few years ago aren't fine now, and the ones that are fine now won't stay that way. Every one of those shifts needs people to stop doing something the old way and start doing it a new way. Someone who is set in their ways doesn't push back once. They push back on every change, because each one asks them to question a habit they never planned to question.

I'd love to say I've seen a lot of those people turn around. I haven't. In my experience, very few of them change, no matter how much training, explanation, or patience goes into it. That's not a judgment about them as people. It's just what I've seen, and I've learned to take it seriously.

So when I hire, I'm not just looking for what someone knows today. Skills can be taught. What I'm really trying to find out is whether they go looking for a better way on their own.

The question I ask is simple: "Tell me about something you did a certain way for a while, then found a better way to do. How did you find it?"

The strong candidates answer fast. They don't have to think about it, because this is how they work all the time. They give me something specific: a shortcut they found, a process they rebuilt, a tool they swapped out, and how they came across it. A lot of them give me more than one example without being asked.

The candidates who are set in their ways have a hard time with it. There's a long pause, then a vague answer, or something that sounds made up on the spot to fill the silence. They aren't bad at interviews. They just don't have a story to tell, because they've never had a reason to go looking for one.

That difference tells me more than most of the résumé does. I can teach someone a new system. I can't teach them to wonder whether there's a better way to do what they're already doing.

So yes, I notice the caps lock thing. Not because it's a big deal on its own, but because it's usually a sign of something that is.