While I do think that interviewing is broken, I would love to see the raw data with this. For example, did Udacity courses have other related traits associated with them, IE: did these candidates that also have a certain number of years of experience, degree etc.? 3000 is a small sample size and I'm wondering if there is some sampling bias here.
Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews
101–110 of 330 posts
Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews
#102It's rather shocking how much effect Udacity/Coursera had on interview performance - more than graduating from a top school or being employed at a top company: "...only 3 attributes emerged as statistically significant: top school, top company, and classes on Udacity/Coursera."
> 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 d…
I don't buy the high socioeconomic status bit. MOOCs are hugely popular in countries like India where education is extremely competitive. I help run an international science camp for late-teenage kids. More and more we're seeing applicants who list the MOOCs that they've taken, and most often they're not from 'developed' countries.
If anything the opposite is true. MOOCs have enabled vast swathes of economically challenged people to learn from high quality video material, whereas before they were limited to textbooks.
The key is that these kids are absolutely determined. And similarly if you really want that job at one of the Big Four, you might also consider soaking up as much prep material as you could.
Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews
#103The 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…
$6,600 [1] for a master's from a top 10 computer science program [2] is an absolute steal! My master's program costs that per semester.
[1] https://www.omscs.gatech.edu/prospective-students/faq
[2] http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-gradu...
Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews
#104Earlier 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…
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'
Yes, it is.
More to the point, it's built-in bias toward recent college graduates. Once someone's actually been out in the real world programming for several years, any space in their brain's metaphorical working set that was ever dedicated to remembering how to do this stuff has long since been paged out in favor of the actual day-to-day knowledge they need to do their job. Implementing basic data structures and algorithms is not part of what they need to do their job; that stuff's already provided by the platforms they use.
So when you get to the interview, if you just put someone on the spot and ask them to do one of these things, you're inherently biasing toward an inexperienced recent college graduate who will have this stuff close to the top of their head (on account of having just done it in school and not yet swapped it out of working memory through time on the job).
Which is in turn why there are now books you study -- as an already-qualified programmer -- in order to freshen your memory and ability to quickly regurgitate problems that have nothing whatsoever to do with your day-to-day work, in order to be able to perform them on command in interviews.
Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews
#105The 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…
I'm studying a 3 year coursework masters that allows people with no background in CS (just had to do an additional semester of courses) to participate and it aims to give a pretty well rounded CS education. Not a common thing, apparently.
I completely agree, the motivation and environment that it gives you, the reinforcement that you're actually doing something official and serious as opposed to doing something that very few people outside of the software industry take seriously, the structure it gives you, the fellow students you meet and befriend, it's all huge. Additionally, looking at the Udacity/Coursera material, a lot of it is shallow, poorly taught, and would not have taught me nearly as well as my master's program has taught me.
Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews
#106The 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…
> Keep in mind that a traditional degree program does have a huge advantage over a strict MOOC: accountability.
I wonder if this is a contributing factor to the success of those who completed MOOCs. There was zero accountability but they STILL manage to complete the coursework and assignments.
Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I don't think curiosity diminishes with age, even if the ability to explore that curiosity may. You can still talk to someone and find out if they are interested in experimental technologies, what they choose to tinker with in the limited discretionary time they have, and so on. You can ask about their opinion on new technical developments and whether they follow any trade publications or forums and the coolest thing…
> I don't think curiosity diminishes with age, even if the ability to explore that curiosity may.
Anecdotally I'd assume that intellectual curiosity often increases with age, although that might be attributed to the availability of learning materials now compared to years ago. Some people here on HN would likely be shocked as to how many people in the industry consume almost zero content outside of what is necessary for their jobs.
Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews
#108It's rather shocking how much effect Udacity/Coursera had on interview performance - more than graduating from a top school or being employed at a top company: "...only 3 attributes emerged as statistically significant: top school, top company, and classes on Udacity/Coursera."
Some schools, and now some bootcamps and online courses, include a separate unit on technical interviews, covering common types of problems and how to approach them and come off well.
So this is unsurprising. The thing people should really be thinking about is why, "how to pass a tech interview" is considered a separate and unrelated skill from "how to code", given how many people claim their interview processes are supposed to separate people who can code from people who can't.
(spoiler: it's because those interview processes don't accomplish their stated goal)
Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews
#109 If you know me, or even if you’ve read some of my writing, you know that, in
the past, I’ve been quite loudly opposed to the concept of pedigree as a
useful hiring signal. With that in mind, I feel like I owe clearly
acknowledge, up front, that we found this time runs counter to my stance.
Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews
#110I thought the most interesting finding was that completing Udacity or Coursera courses on programming/algorithms (for non-top school graduates) was highly predictable of strong interviewing performance.
I know some schools and bootcamps now have a separate "How to pass coding interviews" unit in their curriculum (since this is a separate skill unrelated to how to write good code on the job, sadly). If those courses include such a unit, it would explain the performance on stereotypical tech interviews.