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Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

blog.interviewing.io

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Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#81

Post by derefr »

moxious wrote: post #59
fecak wrote: post #56

Thanks for writing this Aline. As a recruiter for almost 20 years, I wish I had access to all my data and then the time to compile it, and anecdotally I'd expect the finding about MOOCs would be similar. The most selective of my hiring clients over the years tended to stress intellectual curiosity as a leading criterion and factor in their hiring decisions, as they felt that trait had led to better outcomes (good hir…

> Unfortunately, demonstrating intellectual curiosity often takes up personal time, so someone with heavy personal time obligations and a non-challenging day job is at a significant disadvantage. This is true, and one of the things that tends to stack disadvantages against people who are older in the industry. There's a good correlation between free time and age in some ways, as people get to mid-career they tend to…

It'd be nice if we had on hand a lemma that stated that intellectual curiosity, once "proven" as a property of one phase of a person's life, will remain as a property of that person in all later phases, even if the indicator signal for it disappears. Then we could just look for people who look like they once were intellectually curious (perhaps in college) and then hire them on the basis that they'll be able to pick it right back up if given the time and the motivation.

Of course, nobody has ever done any experimentation to prove such a hypothesis so that it could be used as a lemma.

I often wish there was some sort of prediction market of I/O-psychology hypotheses that you could just throw a random prediction onto. The stakes on the most contentious results would then prompt the investors to leverage their bets with research organizations into grant-funding to study those questions.

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#82

Post by pkd »

kimcheekumquat wrote: post #66
nickbauman wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Top school is also serving as a proxy for wealth and privilege. Good grades are also a proxy for wealth. Kids who have rich parents get private tutoring.

Wealth also correlates with intelligence. Intelligence is mostly determined by genetics (studies show ~70% to 80%).

> Wealth also correlates with intelligence

Can you cite a source for this?

I can see how it might follow from the assumption that intelligent people are more likely to succeed in their careers but keeping the GP in context, it should also be noted that not all intelligent people succeed because of various factors.

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#83

Post by k2xl »

Interviewing is a funny thing.

I remember when I graduated from a "Top School" and interviewed at "hot startups" from the valley. I aced a lot of the interviews - why? Because I had just taken classes on LinkedLists, Binary Trees, HashMaps, etc... So when they asked me to whiteboard a "shortest path algorithm" it was just rehashing what I did in school.

Years later, looking back, I fail to see the relevance in most of the technical questions. In fact, if I had to do those questions over again today I would probably fail miserably. Yet, I have been in the industry for a while now and have worked with countless more technologies and have accomplished far more than my younger self.

Just because someone performs well in a technical interview doesn't mean they will do a good job. That is the data that really matters. I've interviewed hundreds of candidates as a hiring manager for some big startups, and from my experience technical interviews are not a great indicator of success.

I'm saying this coming from someone who has gone to a "Top School" and done multiple Coursera/Udacity/etc classes.

Yes, someone might be able to whiteboard a random forest or write a merge sort, but do they know how to engineer a system? Can the candidate:

> Communicate well with others in a group?

> Solve unique technical problems?

> Research and learn new technologies effectively?

> Understand how to push back to product owners if there's scope creep?

etc...

These are all things that are not really analyzed in many technical interviews.

As I'm reading this analysis all I can think of is that it is pretty useless - if not dangerous for the industry.

What I've found is that it is critically important that someone knows how to code at some basic level. But their ability to code and explain algorithms on the fly, while probably relevant in academia/research, is such a minor part of the day-to-day of a programmer - At least from my experience.

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#84

Post by hcatlin »

ditonal wrote: post #5

Very unsurprising for me. You are measuring your ability to solve algorithm puzzles. Most engineers don't actually do many algorithm puzzles in day-to-day work, especially the types of algorithms that interviews tend to focus on like sorting and dynamic programming. So "years of experience" is not measuring experience in what you're actually being tested on. On the other hand, you do exactly those types of things in…

Yes! Yes! Yes!

Except, remember, top company also means experience. If you are at a top company, your second-year CS stuff might be a little rusty.

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#85

Post by adjkant »

sporkenfang wrote: post #37
geebee wrote: post #14

Interesting bit on the MS degree. I followed the link, and I'm not quite as surprised that the correlation is poor, or even negative, given the way the data was collected and analyzed. Absolutely agree that some MS degrees are pretty much less rigorous cash cows by now, that allow students to skip the fundamentals such as data structures, operating systems, and compilers. However, many CS MS degrees actually do requi…

I'm curious what would happen if they looked at, as separate categories, people who mastered out of a doctoral program, people who did the 5-year BS/MS, and people who obtained a doctoral degree as well as a master's.

Agreed completely. I would suspect that BS/MS and Ph.D. interviewees would be very distinct from a straight MS, but this was a missed opportunity to look at that, even if it is just interview performance.

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#86

Post by fecak »

hcatlin wrote: post #80
fecak wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this pattern time and time again in both my recruiting work and in my resume business. Someone gets a rather non-challenging job that pays market rate or better, starts a family, pays little attention to any tech outside their day job, and suddenly finds that their marketability outside the current job has suffered greatly. As developers get older, they need to be conscious of the relevance of their work in reg…

I'm sure this happens, yes. But, that's not what's going on here, IMHO. Asking a person to traverse and modify a linked-list (a very common problem) or to implement a B-tree are not 'tech outside their job' Most of these interviews are more like math problems than anything a practical developer would encounter. Shit, if these interviews were "What do you think of node?" or "What is Go's concurrency model?" I think ex…

I think my words may have been clumsy. My reference to "tech outside their job" was meant more about having relevant skills to a current job market (marketability), not the interview itself.

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#87

Post by unsignedinteger »

FT_intern wrote: post #53
nickbauman wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Top school is also serving as a proxy for wealth and privilege. Good grades are also a proxy for wealth. Kids who have rich parents get private tutoring.

The privilege to value education and to spend time studying, yes. Almost all resources can be found online nowadays. If you've ever been to an SAT tutoring class, you know that the only benefit the kids have is the benefit of being forced to take practice tests. A top school is a good signal for how much time someone spent studying in high school, except for affirmative action students who get into top schools with m…

> Almost all resources can be found online nowadays.

While this is true it highlights a major misgiving in the attitude with regards to the reality of socioeconomic status. If your poor, yes you theoretically have the ability to utilize those resources, but what good are those resources if you don't have a conducive environment to engage in study?

Lower socioeconomic status is correlated with lower stages of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Self-actualization i.e reaching one's potential is more dependent on the satisfaction of basic and psychological needs, which are generally more accessible to those of privilege.

It's not just about resources being available, it's resources being available and making sure people have the opportunity to engage in those resources.

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#88

Post by ajamesm »

FT_intern wrote: post #53
nickbauman wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Top school is also serving as a proxy for wealth and privilege. Good grades are also a proxy for wealth. Kids who have rich parents get private tutoring.

The privilege to value education and to spend time studying, yes. Almost all resources can be found online nowadays. If you've ever been to an SAT tutoring class, you know that the only benefit the kids have is the benefit of being forced to take practice tests. A top school is a good signal for how much time someone spent studying in high school, except for affirmative action students who get into top schools with m…

or, you know, legacy admissions. The way you wrote your post, you'd think the rich are inherently more virtuous and deserving

Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews

#90

Post by lordCarbonFiber »

forrestbrazeal wrote: post #71

The author draws a hard distinction between Udacity/Coursera MOOCs (good) and traditional master's degrees (bad). I'll interject that with Georgia Tech's Online Master's in Computer Science program [0], which is delivered via Udacity and insanely cheap [1], you can get the best of both! (Their "Computability, Complexity and Algorithms" class is one of the top Udacity courses cited in the article.) Keep in mind that a…

Jumping in as another OMSCS student to second your post. The accountability really makes a difference finding the balance between work/life and the schooling (which can be nontrivial considering the courses are certainly rigorous).
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