Matt Mullenweg advocates audition/tryouts instead of job interviews.
https://hbr.org/2014/04/the-ceo-of-automattic-on-holding-aud...
The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
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Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#32Laszlo 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?
There few questions that you can learn to answer but it is probably very hard to reach the 5 star answer if you do not understand what you learned in detail. An example question would be: what happens when you type www.domain.com into your browser and hit enter. You can answer this many different ways and levels.
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#33But surely structured interviews just test a candidate's ability to improvise plausible stories? Whether they are truthful or not is a different matter..
The best part about structured interviews is that it gives you historical data on the interviews performance.
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#34Once 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.
It took months to become familiar with the existing tech at the company I'm currently working for. Still learning their internals
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#35I'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 evaluat…
Which of the companies paid the best/has the best benefits?
If it's the tech giant, it's very possible they attract better candidates because they offer more.
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Truly structured interviews are better than even the most rigorous traditional interviews. They are also more expensive to design and much more painful to deliver. Some kind of interview is probably necessary for every serious tech hiring process. Organizations should be realistic about the low quality signal they'll get even from structured interviews. Take time away from interviews and feed that time to off-site work-sample testing.
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#37Laszlo 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…
The research likely behind the book: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2853669
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#38Laszlo 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?
Google tries to keep interview questions confidential - that's why candidates sign an NDA - and periodically rotates out questions that have appeared in public. Many engineers are also continually trying to think up new questions as well, usually based on their work.
For most questions, there's no "right" answer, but there are a set of points that the interviewer wants to see you touch on. For example, they might first want to see that you can code up a naive brute-force variant of the algorithm, checking whether you know the programming language claimed and can think through the problem, and ask you the algorithmic complexity. Then they'll want to see if you can get a divide-and-conquer or dynamic programming variant with lower time complexity. Then they might ask "What if it has to be an online algorithm, where new input arrives before the computation finishes?" Then they'll ask "How would you distribute this over 1000 machines, and what are the failure modes?"
At each stage, they're watching how you answer, and where you get stuck. If you ask clarifying questions or spend time to think before diving into coding, that's a plus. If you have never heard of the problem before (this is frequent - many questions are not in textbooks), they want to see how you would reason through it, and break it down into subproblems that are similar to textbook problems. If you miss language trivia, most people don't care; when I did interviews I'd usually volunteer the answer if they missed some API call, and when I interviewed my interviewers did the same. If you don't know how to solve the problem and can't make any effort to move forward through a solution, that's a big negative. Similarly if you don't know what the concept of big-O is or why it's important.
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#39> The key psychological insight here is that people have no trouble turning any information into a coherent narrative. This is true when, as in the case of my friend, the information (i.e., her tardiness) is incorrect. And this is true, as in our experiments, when the information is random. People can’t help seeing signals, even in noise.
People see patterns where there are none. I think this is fundamentally why humans fail at statistics. If every fiber of your being wants to see patterns then you will see patterns. Probably why people hallucinate when in sensory deprivation tanks as well. The brain will make up patterns just so it can continue to see them.
The paragraph right after follows up with the statistical failure that pattern seeking leads to
> They most often ranked no interview last. In other words, a majority felt they would rather base their predictions on an interview they knew to be random than to have to base their predictions on background information alone.
So people would rather do busy work in order to continue to satisfy established pattern seeking habits than figure out a better way.
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#40Take a second to read about the experiments this author conducted. They included:
Dummy candidates mixed in with the interview flow that gave randomized answers to questions (interviews were structured to somewhat blind this process), and interviewers lost no confidence from those interviews.
Interviewers, when told about the ruse, were then asked to rank between no interview, randomized interview, and honest interview. They chose a ranking (1) honest, (2) randomized, (3) no interview. Think about that: they'd prefer a randomized interview to make a prediction with over no interview at all.
Of course, the correct ranking is probably (1) no interview, (2) a tie between randomized and honest. At least the randomized interview is honest about its nature.