The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews • Hacker News Board

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#141

Post by douglasjsellers » Sun, Apr 09, 2017, 8:15 PM UTC

All that this article says is that past performance, in terms of GPA, is the best performance of future performance - rather than a 30 minute interview predicting future performance. This sees like a basic truism to me and the main lesson that tech hiring processes can take away from this article.

In my experience (having hired > 100 engineers) one of the basic problems that tech hiring, as a whole, has is that it misunderstands the point of a technical interview. Organizations and hiring managers see the interview process as a way of improving the brand of the engineering organization - "We have super high standards and to prove this our interview process is really hard - therefore if you think you meet these standards you should apply". This leads to the current interviewing trends of super academic/puzzle/esoteric technology based interviews. Applicants leave those interviews saying that it was super hard reinforcing the brand messaging (classic marketing).

Rather, in my experience, the best results come from viewing the hiring/interviewing process for what it is - an attempt to predict future performance (and specifically performance at your organization) using a variety of techniques which interviewing is one. In this context, of attempting to predict future performance, interviews are not a great tool - better to look at specific past performance.

Past performance is always the best predictor of future performance and the point of a technical interview, in my mind, is to critically inspect that past performance to understand how closely it relates to the future performance that your organization needs.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#142

Post by daenz » Sun, Apr 09, 2017, 8:15 PM UTC

crispyambulance wrote: post #75

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…

Good advice, thanks. My experience so far has been difficulty appearing confident on the technical portions of the interviews. Other devs seem to sense blood in the water when nerves and shyness have you fumbling through whiteboarding obscure topics.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#143

Post by cat199 » Sun, Apr 09, 2017, 8:15 PM UTC

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…

> I argue that it cannot be done consciously. It's gut/instinct thing. If you have a mechanical approach, anyone can game the system and get a job because humans can be like chameleons to present themselves as the right candidate, and they can study for the interview.

If it were only a gut/instinct thing, you would have no basis to reject 'wrong action' other than it feeling bad for the gut..

At some point, the 'set' of circumstances will/will not intersect the 'set' of actions such that it is clear that the person acted/didn't act 'correctly' according to ones heirarchy of values.

Ethics, philosophy, and theology exist for a reason - the fact that our society tends to ignore this , presuming and not investigating the subtleties within a relative-individualist framework doesn't make these frameworks correct, or even a very coeherent set of doctrines with which to gauge things..

but yes, a 30 minute interview, or even a 1 week trial period is not a very good means by which to judge character, since the potential reward is great enough, and the period to observe inconsistencies short enough, as to allow a deviant personality to 'fool people' for the trial period.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#144

Post by creatine_lizard » Sun, Apr 09, 2017, 8:17 PM UTC

throwaway71958 wrote: post #129

emodendroket wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sy…

Could the performance of the lottery winners have been "environmental"? That is, they benefited from being surrounded by competent people (which was, in turn, guaranteed by those people having gone through the interview process) and "leveled up" due to that?

In other words, maybe as long as you let in a small number (but only a small number) of non-performers, you're fine (which is bound to happen anyway - I'm sure there is some noise in the interviews).

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#145

Post by derefr » Sun, Apr 09, 2017, 8:21 PM UTC

ljw1001 wrote: post #126

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.

I think the parent means, we don't take as objective fact a politician's claims that their policies worked; we interpret it as self-aggrandizement and scrutinize the claims quite heavily. And that—given the push to publish and the fact that null-result studies aren't very publishable—we should likely do the same for research conclusions.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#146

Post by pebers » Sun, Apr 09, 2017, 8:25 PM UTC

Merad wrote: post #131

cwyers wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're pretty much limited to hiring either only the jobless or someone with the ability to work two jobs at once for an extended period of time while you hold your tryout. There are a lot of people who can't devote that kind of time to a second job (some candidates burn a week's vacation!) And it's not some mere formality, according to their stats they hire about a third of the people they try out.

> or someone with the ability to work two jobs at once for an extended period of time while you hold your tryout. This is the part that's crazy to me. If you think you can accurately judge someone based the work they perform after a full normal workday/week, I have some beachfront property on the moon to sell you... I have a feeling their conversion rate is so low because a lot of people get another offer during thei…

> I have a feeling their conversion rate is so low because a lot of people get another offer during their trial and immediately jump ship.

Or because they're just selecting against good candidates in the first place; if you've got a good job and are performing well elsewhere, you're less likely to jump through that kind of hoop. It's easy to persuade yourself you're hiring the best candidates by being strict about selecting from a pool that is already heavily biased (I'm pretty sure Joel Spolsky wrote something along those lines years ago, so this is hardly a new insight).

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#147

Post by throwaway71958 » Sun, Apr 09, 2017, 8:27 PM UTC

creatine_lizard wrote: post #144

throwaway71958 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sy…

Could the performance of the lottery winners have been "environmental"? That is, they benefited from being surrounded by competent people (which was, in turn, guaranteed by those people having gone through the interview process) and "leveled up" due to that? In other words, maybe as long as you let in a small number (but only a small number) of non-performers, you're fine (which is bound to happen anyway - I'm sure t…

Yes. Getting hired by Google is only part of the deal. Actually _succeeding_ when you're already there is much more difficult. It's a high pressure environment with a lot of very smart overachievers. Because of this it's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy, and people who don't measure up also don't feel welcome, as it were. Since performance reviews are largely derived from peer feedback, hiring mistakes tend to be self-correcting. Most of the time, though, I've seen great people leave just because they didn't like the pressure. The amount of pressure depends on the team. The higher the profile -- the more pressure (but also more rewards, greater career potential, etc). But the general bar for what's considered "good work" is pretty high, and more uniform than in any other large company I have ever worked at.

Then there's the issue that by the time you even get an on-site, you're already very much not a random candidate. Recruiters actually do look at your track record, etc. You can bullshit there, but I don't recommend it, since references will be spot checked, and they better line up.

Google interviews are largely a roll of the dice above certain level of basic engineering competence. I.e. if you don't know the basics, you will almost certainly not pass them. But if you're a more senior candidate, Google doesn't really know how to interview you, and their interview process turns into a random number generator biased heavily towards "no hire".

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#148

Post by xapata » Sun, Apr 09, 2017, 8:27 PM UTC

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 don’t get to write about the successes of their own policies

Politicians boast about successes constantly. I don't understand what you mean by "get to".

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#149

Post by Houshalter » Sun, Apr 09, 2017, 8:29 PM UTC

rntz wrote: post #76

scottshepard wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 victi…

Isn't that true for any system you use to predict? If you rely on "gut instinct", then you filter out people who aren't good at fooling gut instinct. Ugly people, short people, people with poor social skills, autistics, etc. That's hardly fair either.

If you want to make the most accurate predictions possible, you absolutely should not use gut instinct. If you want to be fair, then have a lottery or select randomly. You can't have both. There's nothing remotely fair about gut instinct. See, e.g. judges giving unattractive people twice the sentences of attractive ones. I can provide tons more examples of stuff like that. Gut instinct should be illegal.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#150

Post by Top19 » Sun, Apr 09, 2017, 8:30 PM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #96

It's the whole process that's useless. Remember a few years ago when this forum was drowning about how to find and hire "10x" people? 98% of employees were useless in the face of the 10xer. The reality is, most of the time screening for general aptitude, self-motivation and appropriate education is good enough. I've probably built a dozen teams where 75% of the people were random people who were there before or freed…

This I think is a very a good point. The scariest point about Lazlo Block's book is that he is very against the idea that people can improve or be trained better. To him there is this idea of predestination. You're either always good and always have been, or you're not good and won't get better and there is nothing Google can do.

I feel like as a company you could exploit a lot of value by just hiring people and training them. Training btw doesn't mean at work. Think how much you learned in college lectures vs. reading the actual textbook. It means going home and studying, and the incentive should be that you're getting things that make you more employable, so this shouldn't count towards hours (if it was say a very proprietary old programming language though I could see this argument falling apart).

Not saying this is the best way but shocked that everyone is "trying to find the best". What kind of world will that leave us in if all companies want to hire the same 3% of people? Businesses move slower, talent is lost, and inefficiencies accrue.