Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

I feel like things are operating according to the following pattern:

  1. Go to college:

     a. spend many semesters in lectures
        all of which tangentially brush 
        upon the final exam based on the 
        whims of the lecturer.

     b. cram for final exam last minute 
        panic to crunch memory according 
        to advice on content which was 
        brushed upon during lectures.

  2. Interview for job:

     a. cram for interview by going to 
        coursera to crunch memory according 
        to interview memes based on the 
        whims of the interviewer.

     b. spend the rest of term of employment
        exercising skills which tend to be
        tangentially brushed upon during
        both interview and schooling while 
        the majority of actual tasks are often 
        googled and stack-overflowed
        into place based on arbitrary design 
        decisions and politicized stack
        choices.

  3. Results:

     a. good interviewees have learned 
        appropriate memes to reassure interviewers.

     b. good students have learned obligatory cruft
        to reassure professors.

     c. actual necessities are tangential to
        many or most entry barriers.

How accurate is this?

Top school is probably serving as a proxy for intelligence in this analysis...a well known predictor of both interview and actual job performance.

Is 3a "good interviewees..."?

Perhaps you are right. This is a usual argument against canned exams.

It would be interesting to see if all 3 predictors of performance held up in a simultaneous regression. Most likely, the predictors are highly intercorrelated. If so, then only one or none would be significantly related to interview performance in a multiple regression analysis.

> It's rather shocking how much effect Udacity/Coursera had on interview performance

Having done Udacity and also taking a couple CS classes at Cornell, this doesn't surprise me at all. People who take Udacity classes are doing so voluntarily on their own time, so they are going to generally be smarter and of higher socioeconomic status.

If you look at people who take CS classes over the summer at college when they don't have to be and when there are no student loans, you're going to get a similar population.