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The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

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Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#201

Post by thecardcheat »

mooreds wrote: post #174
johan_larson wrote: post #171

Earlier 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.

> Or, put another way, they choose to accept a high rate of false negatives to avoid false positives.

Which is how it is typically presented because it sounds much better than "reject a lot of candidates who would probably have worked out just fine". It is useful to perceive both the potential value in an approach like this and the shortcomings. Google can absorb the massive expense in man hours, lost opportunity, etc. that comes with trying to craft genuinely predictive interview processes, but a lot of the companies trying to emulate them can't. Too often, interviewees don't realize a process of this sort is stacked against them, and interviewers don't appreciate the negatives of adopting a still-nascent approach that sounds more reliable simply because it is quantitative - and assuming since Google does it it must work.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#203

Post by employee8000 »

jplasmeier wrote: post #24
andrewmutz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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…

And yet most people are memorizing solutions to hundreds of different questions and getting great jobs because of it. I know this because I have several friends who do this.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#204

Post by projektir »

manarth wrote: post #61
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…

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...

I think instead of instinct "intuition" would be a better word. It is gut feeling, but developed from environment rather than innate.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#205

Post by abritinthebay »

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…

Google's interview process is the single shining example of the worst interview process I've ever been through. So much so I actually took the interviewer to task for it.

It may be good at screening University graduates but it's pretty awful at anything else. It's also really obvious that the interviewers don't actually know how to interview people and are pretty much cargo-culting the same process that hired them.

Awful. It totally destroyed my perception of the company.

Now granted this was... 7 years ago, no (or more) but from colleagues who have interviewed there (or been hired!) it's not changed fundamentally that much.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#206

Post by lomnakkus »

jaredsohn wrote: post #192
ubernostrum wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then they should probably ask people to estimate a thing that's even remotely relevant to the job.

(I mean, I get it, this kind of general estimation and/or ball-parking can be incredibly valuable, but this doesn't sound relevant in any way.)

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#208

Post by muyuu »

hobls wrote: post #179
dlandis wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I actually don't think that's the most common thing we give a "no hire" for. Can you cite any of the more common things you give no hires for?

Some common ones: - Lack of self awareness and introspection. Not being able to give specific examples of times you've made a mistake and how you learned from it. - Shit talking old coworkers, general attitude that you're great and nothing is your fault. - Being unable to talk about YOUR specific contributions; "we did this, we did that, the project made money..." Okay, what did YOU do? Surprising amount of people fa…

>- Lack of self awareness and introspection. Not being able to give specific examples of times you've made a mistake and how you learned from it.

>- Shit talking old coworkers, general attitude that you're great and nothing is your fault.

These are fair enough, although you did say above that the other coworkers in your old scrappy startups were much worse.

> - Being unable to talk about YOUR specific contributions; "we did this, we did that, the project made money..." Okay, what did YOU do? Surprising amount of people fail on that one.

Some people will struggle to take credit because of politeness. Isn't taking credit trivial to do? Especially when the interviewer cannot possibly check up on that. I'm absolutely not convinced about this one, although I do make a point to talk about my contributions when I interview (which frankly doesn't happen much at all, since I tend to stay in the same job for long periods if possible and try to make things better there).

>- Not thinking about the end user; "I used this technology because it sounded cool" instead of "I wanted this result for my customers." Tell us about the situation and why you made the right or wrong choices.

This sounds like bullshit too, to be honest. Most people don't get to decide the general point of what they do unless they are the CTO. However I do realise that this is absolutely the kind of stuff interviewers look at and you need to prepare for it.

>- Interrupting the interviewer and not asking questions. This is a weird one. We want you to do well, so sometimes if you're going down the wrong path we'll try to help. I've had candidates talk over me and just barge ahead down a totally incorrect path. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Fair.

>Obviously most weaknesses can be overlooked if there are serious strengths.

Which you really won't know until months later.

>I've done a lot of interviewing, happy to answer questions.

I know people who'd do badly on several of these accounts and are completely brilliant at getting the job done.

The problem is that you cannot possibly know how well would the ones you rejected would have done.

If you can have a probation period of 3 months or so, that should be the main yardstick. Of course someone's attitude can become shittier over time but no interviewing process can reliably catch that.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#209

Post by valuearb »

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…

Psychology is a science like astrology is a science. Sample sizes are the least relevant of the flaws with its studies.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#210

Post by emodendroket »

ravitation wrote: post #155
emodendroket wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fina…

I didn't say it was based on hard data, that's why it's a hypothesis... But, if you really believe that it's a huge leap to hypothesize that interviews would be a better measure of subjective social skills than metrics like GPA, I don't know what to tell you.

I mean let's go further back. I question the assumption that selecting for "culture fit" does much more than shut people out whose ethnic background or social class is too different.
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