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The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

nytimes.com

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Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#101

Post by ythn »

j2kun wrote: post #80
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 anal…

> 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.

At the place I work we offer paid internships to college students who haven't graduated yet. By the end of a summers' worth of work, we have a really good idea as to which interns we would like to hire full time, and we give them an offer on the spot (contingent on graduation), no interview needed.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#102

Post by vinceguidry »

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…

Interviews happen at scale, dating doesn't. Once you find someone, the getting-to-know-you period before marriage is months / years of one-on-one time where you really can get to know them.

It's not the unstructuredness or the judging humans part that's the problem, it's the fact that this is all done at scale by people with more important things to be doing.

If companies all did like Apple in the early days and treated every hire as a bet-the-company decision, bad hires would go away.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#103

Post by cthalupa »

cricfan wrote: post #70

I wonder if we can extrapolate to marriages and to how arranged marriages (at least in India) having a higher success rate. Usually the parents on either side decide on a match based on family background, financial stability, education background etc,. rather than letting the to-be married decide.

What is 'success'?

My evidence is anecdotal, but I've spoken with multiple Indian women who are in arranged marriages, have zero real love in the relationship, and aren't particularly happy, but the idea of divorce is entirely unthinkable to them. The lack of divorce probably makes this a 'success' by most metrics, but doesn't seem particularly successful to me.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#104

Post by meowface »

Merad wrote: post #65
redthrow wrote: post #31

Matt Mullenweg advocates audition/tryouts instead of job interviews. https://hbr.org/2014/04/the-ceo-of-automattic-on-holding-aud...

That has to be one of the most employee-hostile hiring strategies I've ever read.

"I'll pay you $50/hour to work on a project here, Monday to Wednesday. At the end, you'll either get the job or we'll find a different candidate."

I'd take that over every other bullshit interview process I've gone through in the past, while also feeling satisfied that it's a more accurate assessment of how I would actually perform at the job.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#105

Post by mquander »

nostrademons wrote: post #47
ZanyProgrammer wrote: post #26

Earlier 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…

Is that actually a majority of jobs at Google? I know something about the work that several of my friends working as SREs and SWEs do and it doesn't sound like it involves a lot of distributed systems programming.

Let's say you work on some part of Android. Obviously you need to interact with things like Google's build system which are distributed, but are you really implementing some distributed computation in the course of your every week, or even every month?

I get that Google wants to test during the interview for suitability over a large space of possible specific roles, but I seriously doubt that "distributed systems stuff" would be in the list of top 10 programmer domain knowledges that are useful in those roles. Is it more useful than knowing how to work with version control well? Everyone at Google has to do that, but they don't test it during the interview. Is it more useful than being able to read and write idiomatic and readable Java? They don't really substantially test that during the interview either.

(On the other hand, the things that spawned this conversation were "dynamic programming, parallelism, and networking" and the latter two are much more obviously generally important things.)

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#108

Post by schmit »

I find it quite problematic that researchers get to talk about their own research and present it as facts without anyone taking a critical look.

Over time I’ve become more skeptical about this kind of psychology research (as more studies fail to replicate) and, as is often the case, here the sample size is quite small (76 students, split across 3 groups), predicting something relatively noisy as GPA. It is unclear to me that one would be able to detect reasonable effects.

Furthermore, some claims that make it into the piece are at odds with the data:

> Strikingly, not one interviewer reported noticing that he or she was conducting a random interview. More striking still, the students who conducted random interviews rated the degree to which they “got to know” the interviewee slightly higher on average than those who conducted honest interviews.

While Table 3 in the paper shows that there is no statistical evidence for this claim as the effects are swamped by the variance.

My point is not that this article is wrong; verifying/debunking the claims would take much more time than my quick glance. But that ought to be the responsibility of the newspaper, and not individual readers.

Politicians don’t get to write about the successes of their own policies. While there is a difference between researchers and politicians, I think we ought to be a bit more critical.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#109

Post by cwyers »

meowface wrote: post #104
Merad wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That has to be one of the most employee-hostile hiring strategies I've ever read.

"I'll pay you $50/hour to work on a project here, Monday to Wednesday. At the end, you'll either get the job or we'll find a different candidate." I'd take that over every other bullshit interview process I've gone through in the past, while also feeling satisfied that it's a more accurate assessment of how I would actually perform at the job.

> The most significant shift we’ve made is requiring every final candidate to work with us for three to eight weeks on a contract basis. Candidates do real tasks alongside the people they would actually be working with if they had the job. They can work at night or on weekends, so they don’t have to leave their current jobs; most spend 10 to 20 hours a week working with Automattic, although that’s flexible.

It's far more extensive than three nights.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#110

Post by d357r0y3r »

evervevdww221 wrote: post #107

We had 2 slackers on the team. One jumped directly to Google. The other jumped around for few years, got laid off by some company, recently joined FB.

One of the most incompetent developers I've ever known got hired at Facebook, then Apple. Every line of code the guy right was just...exceptionally bad and poorly thought out.

I guess he was good at whiteboard exercises, though?

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