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The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

nytimes.com

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Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#21

Post by hobls »

I've been a programmer for a bit over ten years. I've worked at scrappy little startups, midsized companies, now for a tech giant for a few years. The engineers I work with at the tech giant are consistently better engineers than my other coworkers have been, and I credit the very structured interview process. We're trained to ask specific questions, look for specific types of answers, and each interviewer is evaluating different criteria.

Also, it is quite often not the technical questions that end up making us decide not to hire someone. That's just one area. I know it's the part that sticks out, and candidates give a lot of weight to it in their memory of the interview, but you shouldn't just assume it was that your whiteboard code wasn't quite good enough. I actually don't think that's the most common thing we give a "no hire" for.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#22

Post by erikpukinskis »

Once we get to the point where most people have several jobs with separate contracts, interviews become superfluous because you can just hire someone for a few hours at a time and then fire them. The only reason that doesn't work today is we're still clinging to the idea that you only work for one entity at a time. Never mind that most people already manage at least a couple bosses within the same company.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#23

Post by tptacek »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #2

It's interesting, because I'd argue that the best companies in tech have have interviews that are very structured and predictable.

As I said upthread, I think this is not true, at least not in the sense that the author is using. Could you describe some of the structured processes you've seen?

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#24

Post by jplasmeier »

andrewmutz wrote: post #17
gatsby wrote: post #11

Laszlo Bock (former SVP of People at Google) did a great job summarizing decades of research around structured interviewing in his book 'Work Rules!' For a quick reference, the two defining criteria for a structured interview are: 1.) They use one or several consistent set(s) of questions, and 2.) There are clear criteria for assessing responses That second point is really important. You can't only ask candidates the…

How does this work in practice? If there are consistently used questions and specific criteria for assessing responses, can a candidate just learn the likely questions and what constitutes the "right" answer?

Of course. For example, many of the questions for technical interviews involve knowing which data structure to use in a given setting, and applying it to find a solution.

The interviewee is more than welcome to study data structures and interview questions about data structures. A poor student will just memorize questions and answers by rote without really understanding the data structure in question. The good student will actually learn and understand data structures in the context of the solution.

One would hope that interviewers are able to ask follow-up questions about the solution which distinguish between the two.

EDIT: During the best tech interview I have done, I had no idea how to solve the question asked (that is, I had not studied its solution despite this being a relatively common question). I was able to ask articulate questions and invoked understanding of data structures as I went along. Memorizing solutions is a game of luck, and not recommendable.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#25

Post by jotux »

andrewmutz wrote: post #17
gatsby wrote: post #11

Laszlo Bock (former SVP of People at Google) did a great job summarizing decades of research around structured interviewing in his book 'Work Rules!' For a quick reference, the two defining criteria for a structured interview are: 1.) They use one or several consistent set(s) of questions, and 2.) There are clear criteria for assessing responses That second point is really important. You can't only ask candidates the…

How does this work in practice? If there are consistently used questions and specific criteria for assessing responses, can a candidate just learn the likely questions and what constitutes the "right" answer?

The same way it works for teachers that give tests. Come up with a bunch of questions and only ask a random subset of those questions to each person. Occasionally evaluate the questions and add/remove some.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#26

Post by ZanyProgrammer »

nostrademons wrote: post #6
PlaceFan wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that true? Isn't the generic accusation against AmaGooFaceSoft that your interview performance largely depends on whether you happened to study some interviewer's pet topic (e.g. parallelism, dynamic programming, networking, etc.)?

This accusation is almost always from people who haven't studied that particular pet topic. In my experience, the pet topics you list - parallelism, dynamic programming, networking, etc. - are needed quite frequently for those jobs at AmaGooFaceSoft. In other words, those candidates would be poor fits for those jobs, which is exactly what an interview is trying to test. I think the Google hiring process is fucked up…

Are those topics really needed for (what you're implying) is the majority of jobs at those companies? I'm not sure if there's any way to really test this.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#27

Post by tptacek »

inopinatus wrote: post #7

Articles like this - and the comments that follow - always overlook the primary value of job interviews, which to me is answering the question: "Do I want to work for this company?"

They're not ignoring that value; that's simply not what they're writing about. I don't think anyone is advocating for sight-unseen hiring. The problem is with using interviews as a candidate qualification mechanism, where they simply do not work.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#28

Post by cwyers »

tptacek wrote: post #18
rb2k_ wrote: post #3

It should probably have been titled "The Utter Uslessness of Unstructured Job Interviews", because that's the kind of interview the author criticizes. In my personal experience, structured interviews can be very helpful in determining a candidates abilities.

Are you sure you're using the same definitions as the author? In practice, across a pretty decent sample of large tech companies, I've never seen a truly structured interview outside of Matasano, where I was almost murdered by my employees for instituting them. I think we'd hear far more complaints about them if they were common. It's possible that what you consider to be a structured interview is in fact what this a…

How did you feel about your experience using structured interviews for hiring?

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#29

Post by gatsby »

andrewmutz wrote: post #17
gatsby wrote: post #11

Laszlo Bock (former SVP of People at Google) did a great job summarizing decades of research around structured interviewing in his book 'Work Rules!' For a quick reference, the two defining criteria for a structured interview are: 1.) They use one or several consistent set(s) of questions, and 2.) There are clear criteria for assessing responses That second point is really important. You can't only ask candidates the…

How does this work in practice? If there are consistently used questions and specific criteria for assessing responses, can a candidate just learn the likely questions and what constitutes the "right" answer?

This is a great point. There are absolutely candidates who are "good interviewers."

I think one of the most helpful methods of determining a good interviewer vs. a good future employee is taking a structured, situational interview question, i.e. "How would you go about selling a new product to a customer?" and turning it into an actionable work sample that is tailored to your company. "We make this piece of software that does this. Spend the next 10 minutes writing a cold email to a prospect that outlines our offering." As the interviewer, grade the work sample on structured criteria that is important.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#30

Post by damagednoob »

> In one experiment, we had student subjects interview other students and then predict their grade point averages for the following semester.

Not sure how using inexperienced interviewers proves anything. Would have been more interesting to have lecturers interview the students.

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