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The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

nytimes.com

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Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#121

Post by emodendroket »

schmit wrote: post #108

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…

Maybe, but doesn't a claim like "a 30-minute conversation with someone is a strong indicator of job performance" deserve scrutiny of its own?

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#122

Post by magicalist »

inetknght wrote: post #48
nostrademons wrote: post #38

Earlier 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…

> 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?

What if you're ​having a conversation with someone about local politics and you're convinced the local zoning rules don't encourage growth in the way they think they do. Do you force the subject of conversation so you can make sure they know just how wrong they are? Not if you want them to walk away having a good impression of you.

Instead if the talk turns to zoning you put out feelers to see if they'll want to talk about the larger issue, and only engage in the conversation if it seems like the time for it.

The analogy isn't perfect, but if the interviewer wants to talk about the larger issue, you're probably well matched and will have a great interview. If not, and you know enough about runtime complexity to discuss the tradeoffs, then you know enough to just answer the textbook big-O question and move on.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#123

Post by emodendroket »

ravitation wrote: post #52

I 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 p…

> 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.

Well, based on what? Is there any evidence for any of these hunches?

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#124

Post by anonymoushn »

mquander wrote: post #95
anonymoushn wrote: post #12

Earlier 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.

Why did you conclude that you failed because of that? That sounds like a pass with flying colors. Did you specifically get feedback about that segment?

In the few remaining minutes after we agreed that it was possible to correctly deserialize a tree serialized in this way, I did not produce a linear time deserializer.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#125

Post by StreamBright »

autotune wrote: post #72
StreamBright wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Candidates doing a few minutes googling to find this, but will they put in the few months to get to the bottom of every aspects of it?

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#126

Post by ljw1001 »

schmit wrote: post #108

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…

Politicians _always_ promote the success of their own policies.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#127

Post by corporateslave »

chmln wrote: post #89
manarth wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

instinct and sexism/racism are often conflated. What's perceived as instinct is often the outcome of social conditioning, which gives outcomes such as "People See Black Men as Larger, More Threatening Than Same-Sized White Men" [1] [1] http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2017/03/black-men-thr...

Could also be due to the disproportionally high rates of crime among black men. That should never be an excuse for prejudice, however. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-... https://infogr.am/Black-34991937313

Are you sure are it shouldn't? Based on what principle? Should I never use proofs in my decision making?

Your comment is dangerous

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#128

Post by YZF »

Zigurd wrote: post #51

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 sample size is too small to do any useful feedback and humans are too complex to be mapped/binned in the way interviews attempt to do. Not only that but things that happen after hiring may have a bigger influence on the success/failure of the hire than the factors the interview is looking for. E.g. who you end up working with, internal politics, the specifics of the job.

Kahenman's work on the illusion of validity comes to mind. It kind of boils down to our hiring process must be right because we're doing it.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#129

Post by throwaway71958 »

emodendroket wrote: post #120
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…

It ensures consistency, but how do you know that whatever you're measuring for is actually correlated with job performance?

They don't. In fact they even did an experiment and admitted some people at random, irrespective of how well they did in the interviews. Those people were found to perform about as well as the legitimate interview "lottery winners" hired during the same time period.

A lot of people (anecdotally, the majority) at Google have the "impostor syndrome", and the news of the experiment did nothing whatsoever to quell the symptoms. Now they don't know if they are, in fact, not impostors, but they do know that on average they perform about as well. :-)

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#130

Post by dsjoerg »

emodendroket wrote: post #121
schmit wrote: post #108

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…

Maybe, but doesn't a claim like "a 30-minute conversation with someone is a strong indicator of job performance" deserve scrutiny of its own?

Of course it does. However the article and perhaps the underlying paper may be as useless as the interviews they are criticizing.
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