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The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

nytimes.com

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Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#161

Post by autotune »

StreamBright wrote: post #125
autotune wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Probably not if they have actual work to do rather than memorize easily google-able trivia questions.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#162

Post by johan_larson »

vinceguidry wrote: post #102
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 trea…

Maybe the answer then is to push the decision down to someone for whom the hiring is a big decision, and who does not have to work at scale. An individual group manager has a lot of incentive to make a good hiring decision if the person being hired will be working in his group. And the manager does not have to hire so many people that he needs to consider it a large-scale project and adopt corresponding expediencies. Things can remain personal.

And if the organization for some reason needs to work at scale, add an initial lightweight sanity-checking and routing to the correct group. But keep the main hiring decision with the group the engineer would be working in.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#163

Post by bnegreve »

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…

Of course we should be more critical, the methodology here is far from perfect. But right now, people have much faith in interviewing, and this research suggests that this faith may not be justified. As you mentioned, this is not the only research that reaches this conclusion. There is also the work by Daniel Kahneman[1] which I find pretty rigorous and draw the same conclusions about interviewing.

So obviously, the title of this article should be "Maybe interviewing is not that useful" instead of "The utter uselessness of job interviews", but besides this I find your comment unjustified. In fact, it's quite the opposite, I believe this type of work contributed to make us more critical by questioning some basic facts about interviewing, that i would have never questioned just a couple of years ago.

> Over time I’ve become more skeptical about this kind of psychology research (as more studies fail to replicate)

ok, this is interesting, where is it mentioned?

[1] Think fast and think slow. There is this short article which mention some of the results and has been discussed on HN a couple of times already. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/dont-blink-the-ha...

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#164

Post by trishume »

jotux wrote: post #37
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…

The research likely behind the book: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2853669

Easy link to the relevant table from the paper: http://imgur.com/a/YRFTh

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#165

Post by wpietri »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #22

Once we get to the point where most people have several jobs with separate contracts, interviews become superfluous because you can just hire someone for a few hours at a time and then fire them. The only reason that doesn't work today is we're still clinging to the idea that you only work for one entity at a time. Never mind that most people already manage at least a couple bosses within the same company.

I've done a bunch of consulting and contract work, and that can be fine. But it's expensive, because to be continually finding new work, you must continuously invest in marketing, and every time you do something new there's a lot of switching cost. A company also needs a lot more supervisory capacity to be monitoring people who come and go, so it's not cheap for companies, either.

It's also limited. I can be much more productive when I do one thing full time than a bunch of things part time. Depth takes time, as does keeping up with changes. You just can't get as far with fractional attention as with serious focus.

And uncertainty is also uncomfortable. Many people just want to settle into a solid, reliable situation and do the work. They want to be able to plan their future with some confidence. Even if they can make more money juggling a variety of things, they'd rather make less and have less chaos.

So I don't think we'll ever get to the point you suggest.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#166

Post by howitworks88 »

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…

> 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.

Are you suggesting anything out of the ordinary is going on here? Doesn't one have to present their work as legitimate and wait for feedback? So long as they are open to that feedback, I don't really get this argument?

> 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.

So present that back them as a refutation? Are you waiting for someone else to do it? Why are you debating the reliability here?

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#167

Post by vvanders »

nostrademons wrote: post #57
inetknght wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 st…

Everyone loves to put Big-O up on a pedestal, however many times the constant costs can outweigh the rest of the algorithm. Cache access times in particular can be brutal for non-linear access patterns.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#168

Post by ljw1001 »

derefr wrote: post #145
ljw1001 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I understood, but I think recent evidence in the US suggests that a great many people absolutely take as objective fact what a politician claims. A similar number probably absolutely believe the opposite with little or no evidence. Net, I think citing politicians was perhaps not the best analogy.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#169

Post by vonnik »

The traditional recruiting and hiring process is broken. I say this as a former technical recruiter. I wrote about the problems of recruiting for a closed-source startup here:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisvnicholson/recent-activity/...

I mention closed-source for a reason. For technical hiring, there is nothing better than open source. Open-source projects allow engineers and their potential employers to collaborate in depth over time. The company can experience whether the engineer is competent, reliable and friendly. The engineer can judge the team's merits in the same way. And they can both decide whether the fit is right.

Closed-source and/or non-engineering jobs are the opposite. You get a resume, a Github repo if you're lucky, and a half-day's worth of interviews and tests. Then you roll the dice on that imperfect information.

This is one reason why a lot of recruiting and hiring happens through the networks of people that a company can tap into. It may seem corrupt or nepotistic, but the advantage of those referrals is that someone with more information than you is willing to stake their reputation on a candidate's performance.

Large companies with lots of historical data have the opportunity to train algorithms to learn how job applications and long-term performance/flight risk/etc. actually correlate. From what I can tell, most haven't.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#170

Post by wpietri »

andrewmutz wrote: post #17
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…

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?

Only if you use a small, static body of questions. But there's nothing wrong with, say, each interviewer coming up with a couple of questions and rotating it them in a while.

You do want to try out the question and criteria before depending on it too much, but it's easy enough to try it out on a colleague.

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