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The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

nytimes.com

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Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#71

Post by numinary1 »

This discussion misses an important element, the skill of the interviewer. It is unsurprising that unskilled interviewers' assessments are poor predictors of future performance. It would be interesting to measure the accuracy of interviewers who have had years of experience interviewing, hiring, and managing people.

Here's how I think it works. Skilled interviewers are biased toward rejecting candidates based on any negative impression. Structured interviewing has the same effect. It's the precision versus recall tradeoff. For this use case only precision matters. Extremely low recall is fine.

Also, in the GPA prediction example, the interviewer is penalized for predicting a low GPA for a person who performed well. But in hiring, there is no penalty for failing to hire someone who would have performed adequately.

(Yes, I understand there is an implicit assumption in my argument that candidates are not in short supply, but that's usually true, certainly at Google)

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#72

Post by autotune »

StreamBright wrote: post #32
andrewmutz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That question has also been asked so many times most candidates who have done a few minutes of googling can give you the "right" answer. See here: https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when/blob/master/README...

I'd probably start here to lighten up the mood due to how cliche the question has become:

https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when/issues/231

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#74

Post by tutufan »

nostrademons wrote: post #38
andrewmutz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fir…

Maybe, but that doesn't sound like my interview at Google, which was interesting but really rather random. Perhaps most notably, one interviewer became irate that I didn't know the "ps -o" flags off of the top of my head. :-/

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#75

Post by crispyambulance »

daenz wrote: post #59

As 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 abou…

"...fundamentally irrational character-judging process" is really the wrong impression to go into interview with as a candidate. Seriously, you will handicap yourself if you see it this way.

Competency is only one component of a hiring decision. After some base threshold of competency, the question then becomes whether or not you, the candidate, is going to be someone that the team WANTS to work with.

Bolstering your OSS projects is fine but you'll get a better return on investment for your time to practice "behavioral interview" questions. This is absolutely the hardest type of interview but in the hands of experienced hiring managers it works better than any other technique, IMHO.

If you can find an experienced mentor who will do mock behavioral interviews with you and give you honest constructive feedback, that will boost your interview skills more than anything else.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#76

Post by rntz »

scottshepard wrote: post #63
uncensored wrote: post #42

How 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…

This article is critiquing the unstructured get-to-know you interview. It is not critiquing highly structured interviews with clear goals, nor technical challenges, nor references checks or past performance. In your example, how would you structure a series of questions and procedures to limit the risk of marrying someone who will abandon you or cheat on you? I think you can apply good interview process techniques to…

The trouble with this advice is that, while it's accurate if your one and only goal is to predict the likelihood of someone divorcing or cheating on you, it seems profoundly unfair.

To examine this "unfairness", let's imagine it at its most extreme: a society in which divorcees are so stigmatized that it's practically impossible to ever re-marry; in which children of divorcees are likewise stigmatized; in which victims of child-abuse are further victimized by a society that considers them potential "snakes-in-the-grass". Do we really want to live in such a society?

Obviously I don't think you were advocating this. But it's a thought experiment which demonstrates a classic class of problem: what's good for the individual isn't always good for society, especially taken to extremes.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#77

Post by ZeroGravitas »

scottshepard wrote: post #63
uncensored wrote: post #42

How 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…

This article is critiquing the unstructured get-to-know you interview. It is not critiquing highly structured interviews with clear goals, nor technical challenges, nor references checks or past performance. In your example, how would you structure a series of questions and procedures to limit the risk of marrying someone who will abandon you or cheat on you? I think you can apply good interview process techniques to…

Seems like point 1 is possibly just confounding age. They've not divorced yet partly because they've not been married long enough yet.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#78

Post by dlandis »

hobls wrote: post #21

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 evaluat…

> I actually don't think that's the most common thing we give a "no hire" for.

Can you cite any of the more common things you give no hires for?

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#79

Post by inopinatus »

throwaway9475 wrote: post #13
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?"

Sure, because poor management, crippling technical debt, and a toxic work environment are totally plainly presented to you in an interview. /s

Not plainly, no, but easily inferred.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#80

Post by j2kun »

uncensored wrote: post #42

How 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…

> Yet why do some marriages last forever (till death do us apart) while others fail miserably or crumble even after 20 years?

Well, you don't exactly "date" for years before getting a job. You're acting like people get married on a hunch, or that people don't work hard to present themselves as "marriageable." (Incidentally, it's also not clear to me that a 20-year marriage is a failure, and certainly not in this analogy)

In most of the places I've worked where there are short-term contracts before full-time hiring, the employer has a far better idea of the skills and quality of the candidate.

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