It's not surprising. Employee selection is basically voodoo. Outcomes don't get fed back into redesign of the process, and the process is far more based in tradition than data. When the process gets challenged it's ripe to fall apart.
The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
51–60 of 410 posts
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#52I have some major issues with their conclusions... and the title of the article (which is mostly nonsensical clickbait).
The real conclusion should be that "unstructured interviews provide a variable that decreases the average accuracy of predicting GPAs, when combined with (one) other predictive variable(s) (only previous GPA)."
This conclusion seems logical. When combined with an objective predictive measure of a person's ability to maintain a certain GPA (that person's historical ability to maintain a certain GPA), a subjective interview decreases predictive accuracy when predicting specifically a person's ability to maintain a certain GPA.
To then go on to conclude that interviews then provide little, to negative, value in predicting something enormously more subjective (and more complicated), like job performance, is absurd - and borderline bad science.
There are numerous (more subjective) attributes that an unstructured interview does help gauge, from culture fit to general social skills to one's ability to handle stressful social situations. I'd hypothesize all of these are probably better measured in an unstructured (or structured) interview than in most (any) other way. To recommend the complete abandonment of unstructured interviews (which is done in the final sentence of the actual paper) is ridiculous.
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#53Earlier 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.)?
Having done interviews at a few of time, I'd say that's mostly false, at least for the last 2-3 years. As far as I can tell, there's always a pre-defined pool of questions. Some of them are pretty 'open ended', but still targeted towards getting a good impression of a certain area of knowledge. That being said, I had an interview with Google at some point in the past where one of the interviewers almost seemed appall…
Careful. First and most obviously, the "pool of questions" concept is structured only if you have a Google-scale volume of candidates and reliably assigning specific subsets of those questions to candidates.
But even then, for such a process to be rigorously structured, the questions themselves need to be determined a priori and without reference to the candidates background or preferences. Otherwise:
* You're subject to the interviewers and judges (probably subconscious) biases about the merits of different questions.
* You're more exposed to the candidates own innate ability to interview well by navigating themselves to more easily-answered questions.
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#54Earlier 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…
> This accusation is almost always from people who haven't studied that particular pet topic
Well sure, but you only have so much time to study for these interviews.
So, you make sure you review your basic data structures, algorithms, and complexity analysis. The things that will most likely show up.
Then you have to consider the more advanced topics. Realistically, you're not going to have an expert-level understanding of all of them. None of them are extremely difficult concepts to understand necessarily, but you need the kind of mastery to understand such a problem quickly and under pressure (since it's a short, timed interview).
The most effective way to study, then, is to simply run through a battery of dynamic programming questions and hope you get lucky and the interviewer asks you a variation on one you studied.
I've had more than a few AmaGooFaceSoft interviews ask me slight variations on the change counting question. They're really testing my ability to recall the solution to that problem, not any sort of deep understanding of dynamic programming.
On the flip side, the interviews I've failed almost always involved some pet topic that I wouldn't dream of studying. I once (no joke, and not THAT long ago) had an interviewer at AmaGooFaceSoft ask me do a bunch of calculus questions involving power series (turn a function into a power series, determine the radius of convergence, etc.). Why would I study that for an interview?
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Recently I failed an interview at Facebook because I chose to serialize a binary tree into a list of N items, rather than a list of N items and O(N) sentinels. Most of the interview was spent convincing the interviewer that this could possibly be correct.
was it a binary tree or a binary search tree? a BST can be uniquely identified by one of pre/post-order traversal, whereas a binary tree requires an in-order traversal and one other. or placing sentinels that specify a state machine [PUSH_LEFT, PUSH_RIGHT, POP] that specify how to move down and up the tree structure.
It was a BST.
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#56How do you know that the person you'll be marrying won't cheat on you and won't leave you in hard times? If you apply the methods we use today for interviews you'll end up with a 50/50 chance at best, a coin toss. Yet why do some marriages last forever (till death do us apart) while others fail miserably or crumble even after 20 years? The search for the global optimum cannot be performed by asking a set of questions…
It goes both ways. Companies are often not trustworthy and will fire people for their own reasons. They may not pay very well. There are so many things. I am not Mr. Right, I am Mr. Right Now accurately describes the business arrangement. It's a one or a few nights stand. Not a lifetime commitment.
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fir…
What about when you know what the concept of big O is, know why it's often touted as important, and disagree that it's as important as it's touted? My opinion is that big-O often ends up being used as a premature optimization effort hindering "just get the right answer first". Maybe that brute force method will work in a reasonable clock-time cost, despite having egregious algorithmic cost. You won't know if you're b…
That's a big red flag, at least in a Google setting.
The reason is because when your dataset is in the petabytes, any algorithm bigger than O(N log N) is not going to terminate. You're not going to get any answer at all; your MapReduce is going to sit there burning CPU time for a day, and then you'll kill it, and you won't have any idea what went wrong. (This is learned from experience, if you couldn't tell.)
In a startup context, I'd certainly agree with you - that's exactly the approach I'm taking with my startup, where I'm doing a lot of the debugging and code-wrangling on my local laptop after verifying that the data I want exists and calculating its size with a couple cloud-computing passes. It can sometimes be useful to prototype & iterate with a small subset of the data until you've got the algorithms down.
But many of the algorithms Google cares about don't give any useful results on small data sets. I remember running a few collaborative-filtering algorithms and finding that they gave zero answers because within my small sample of 0.01% of the total data, nobody liked anything else that anybody else did.
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes. This is the reality of distributed computing: most of the problems you want to solve do not have off-the-shelf libraries. Rather, you need to know an algorithm, and various algorithmic-design techniques, well enough that you can decompose it into steps and then recompose steps so that they can be partitioned among many different computers, with appropriate failure modes if machines or network connections go down…
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Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#59As someone with many interviews coming up in the near future, this scares me. It's easy to get in a self-conscious feedback loop when you know every behavior, response, and gesture is being fed into a fundamentally irrational character-judging process.
The best interview I've ever been on was one for a young startup. They gave essentially a homework problem, a day to solve it, and then in the interview we talked about the problem and my solution. The worst interview I've been on was sitting in front of multiple engineers as each one threw out a random CS question (from seemingly the entire space of CS) and asked me to talk intelligently about it. When I seemed unsure of myself, they glanced around nervously and disapprovingly.
Interviews are the worst. I've spent my time trying to bolster my OSS projects, so that I can point to them as evidence of my competence, but I can't help but prepare for the worst anyways.
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#60Known useless indicators:
* Resumes
* Skills tests (hacker rank)
* Whiteboard interviews
* Unstructured interviews
* Employee referrals
No wonder headhunters have such a good business. Not that they're more discriminating, but they can pretend to be the solution to an intractable problem.