More accurately, the article is about the use of unstructured free-form interviews.
The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
191–200 of 410 posts
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the stuff online on Quora etc. are to be believed, the hiring committee will disregard such trivia interviews (and possibly send a node to the interviewer asking him/her to correct their technique). Not sure how well this works in practice though.
Last time I was job-hunting I experimented with Google to see if their interviews were as bad as everyone said. They were. I was asked a ton of this kind of Linux/Unix trivia in one session. As well as just random stuff. For example: https://twitter.com/ubernostrum/status/659182356171874304 https://twitter.com/ubernostrum/status/659182564309995520 https://twitter.com/ubernostrum/status/659182708996706308
Another way to answer this kind of question is to know 2^24 = 2^10 * 2^10 * 2^4 and that 2^10 is 1024 which is roughly 1000.
So 1000 * 1000 * 16 = 16 million would be an easy estimate to make.
If you are designing a system and want to have an idea of how much space or memory an approach will take, being good at this kind of math can be really helpful.
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#193They're useless if it's attempt to prove you know more tham them about some algorithm that's been implemented 150x times (every job interview in California). I'd rather work with someone pleasent, hard working, and concerned with everyone's well being.
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
From my experience, I'd say Google's interviews need to ask harder questions and last longer. Today they ask fairly easy questions (given a list of integers, find the subsequence that has the following property etc. - basically leetcode medium level) that you can solve fairly easily using basic CS 101 knowledge. However, it ends up (again, IME) being a race against time where you have to whiteboard code a simple solu…
I recently suggested to them not to dumb down their interviews as they simply make the equation about talking to them not worth the time. I remember they used to have much tougher interviews in the past, which were super motivating; now it's like standard hackerrank stuff which is pretty uninteresting. OTOH, each company has its blind spots so that they won't be on top forever, so maybe it's better that way as those…
But if you were interviewing for a tennis instructor, wouldn't that be a valid result? You probably shouldn't hire pros who aren't good at teaching when the job involves teaching.
Similarly, as a senior engineer at a large company, you need to be adaptable enough to work with people with less/different experience than you. Adjusting your message to the audience is an important skill.
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
Structured interviews improve the ability to systematically test the relationship between policy and results. Real experiments are then possible. As opposed to a situation where your interviewers are asking off-the-cuff questions, and you're uncertain whether the questions have a systematic bias toward a bad direction -- racism, sexism, or just selecting for something idiosyncratic that adds unnecessary constraint to…
And yet unstructured interviewing basically works and the world keeps spinning. If 'random' truly was a better result (as the article suggests), then in a hiring round for a programmer last year, we might have discarded our candidate that won and is awesome for the one that couldn't conceptually 'get' FizzBuzz. Or put another way: if 'random' was better than 'unstructured', you'd never have a round of hiring where th…
Better to give someone a job related task perhaps?
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
People always talk about the whiteboard interview, and assume it has the greatest weight, but the other questions are just as important. There are plenty of things being measured, and technical ability is often not the one that disqualifies a candidate. The other questions do tend to come from a standardized bank of questions too; the whole thing is very structured.
This. I wonder how many people "think" they flubbed an interview strictly because they got some detail wrong on the whiteboard when it was really far more related to a negative impression of grit, communication, motivation, personality, or work-history.
And we will never know because the vast majority of companies refuse to give even the vaguest of feedback on the reason they are not moving forward. Not even “it was your technical knowledge” or “it was communication skills”
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#197I 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…
It's easy to present data that shows flaws with today's interviewing.
It's a lot harder to present a better way of predicting candidate performance in the workplace, along with substantial data that indicates it's better than today's methods. Corporations would love more effective ways to determine effectiveness/performance before hiring.
Interviewing is terrible, but that doesn't mean there is a better option.
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I don't think their process is magic. Google gets a good workforce because they are generous and prestigious, which means a lot of good people apply there. And Google is willing to say no to a lot of people in their search for good people. They reject a lot of candidates who would probably have worked out just fine.
Or, put another way, they choose to accept a high rate of false negatives to avoid false positives.
bingo
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course. For example, many of the questions for technical interviews involve knowing which data structure to use in a given setting, and applying it to find a solution. The interviewee is more than welcome to study data structures and interview questions about data structures. A poor student will just memorize questions and answers by rote without really understanding the data structure in question. The good studen…
Bullsh*t. Seriously, these questions are all tricks. If you memorize the tricks you can win the game. Even the "really easy" questions like reverse a string involve a trick -- swapping from the ends and stopping in the middle. The interview game involves memorizing tricks and identifying which memorized trick applies to the question.
I feel like 90% of writing software is identifying which "trick" applies to the problem you're trying to solve and applying it correctly.
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to `man ps` on my Mac, there are nearly seventy of them - how many did he want you to know?!
It's been a long time since I interviewed an ops person. But when I did something like this, I'd ask, "Name as many arguments to ps as you can." (Or ls, also good.) I didn't really care about which flags they knew. What I was looking for was a pattern. Anybody good knows some arguments cold. Often they know them so well as part of a phrase that they have to think about what the individual ones mean, which tells me th…
This is a stupid trivia question. I use ps -ef and leave it at that. In my entire career I've rarely needed anything else and if I did I would look it up but never enough to remember. To base an interview question off of that speaks volumes about you.