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The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

nytimes.com

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Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#211

Post by lomnakkus »

ljw1001 wrote: post #134
alexbecker wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience as a Google engineer, this is mostly false. None of the work I or any of the people I know well at Google is on petabyte datasets; most people just aren't on the hot path of indexing/websearch/youtube. In fact almost none of the stuff I was asked about in my interview has been relevant to my work. I have thought about complex algorithms two or three times in the past year.

Not only that, but (in my experience as a Google engineer), factors relating to the location of data (distribution and disk vs ram, etc.) often greatly outway algorithmic performance. Constant factors often dominate variable factors.

Exactamundo! Cache/memory/disk locality dominates almost all other factors[1] unless you're doing something very special. (Speaking as a non-Google person who also likes to think that he knows what he's talking about.)

[1] Well, it's really the amazing amount of throughput that modern architectures can achieve. Latency hasn't improved quite as much given the inescapable limitation of the speed of light.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#212

Post by gjm11 »

ubernostrum wrote: post #183
rocket_woman wrote: post #138

Earlier 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

The question there was something like "roughly how big is 2^24?". I actually think that's a reasonable enough question, but anyway there's a nice story about this same question in another context. The mathematician Solomon Golomb was (as an undergraduate, I think) taking some sort of biology class, and the lecturer described some process to do with cell division and said "... so the number of ways to do that is 2^24, and we all know that that is, don't we?" (meaning, of course, "and no one knows what that is but it's OK because I'm about to tell you". But Golomb happened to have been memorizing numbers of the form n^n, and 2^24 = 8^8, so he immediately called out "Yes, it's 16777216".

As a result of having read this story, I can now always instantly remember what 2^24 is too :-).

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#213

Post by dba7dba »

I believe a lot of places hire a candidate through a consensus, meaning some members in the team accept or reject a potential candidate. When enough accept the candidate, the hiring is done.

Is there any company that tracks who rejects a particular candidate during an interview process, and how often that negative feedback turned out to be true. I guess with the turnover rate at todays tech places, such tracking of a record of an interviewer is not really possible?

I always wonder about this.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#214

Post by nebabyte »

> not one interviewer reported noticing that he or she was conducting a random interview. More striking still, the students who conducted random interviews rated the degree to which they “got to know” the interviewee slightly higher on average

Yeah well, when you're asking questions of someone who looks thoughtful very briefly, then answers almost immediately after, it sounds like you might have more reason to think you know them better than the one actually considering their answer

Might be introducing a confound or two that you then proceed to completely ignore and even conclude past lest someone accidentally draw other conclusions

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#215

Post by pdimitar »

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…

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

There's a gulf between "nothing is my fault" and "some of my old coworkers were shit and they deserve the shit-talk they get from me".

I don't think it's fair to judge people universally on the base if they shit-talk or not. Being 100% kind and never saying anything bad about people in your past is vastly overrated.

> - 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.

You're polarizing this way too much. If I go after a "cool technology", there are several things MANY interviewers don't take in consideration:

(1) It's only their own interpretation I chose a "cool" technology over the customer needs. Cognitive bias and all. Not to mention most people really have no qualifications to even claim this.

(2) In the senior programmer area (where I believe I belong) often times you have to make calls nobody can inspect for a while, you have to trust your experience and intelligence and make a decision quickly. If Ruby on Rails consistently fails you on a single website project of yours, it's very okay to start switching out its slowest parts with Elixir's Phoenix (3) Many times there's no immediate benefit to your work. It's easy for a manager to blatantly reject a hard mid-term decision implemented by a tech lead as "he's after the cool tech only because he's bored" and only I know in my head that the results from that "cool tech" will start showing in a month from now (it also doesn't help at all when I tell them that and they don't believe me).

> - 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)_/¯

I admit I've been in the wrong on this one but I want to give you another perspective. I wanted to make a certain point -- 99% of the time it's the "why did I do this" or "why did I fail doing this" or "how did I succeed by doing this" -- and sometimes I digress because there are sub-points and I overdo my tries of being crystal clear. Granted, that's up to me to perfect as a communication skill but I've been extremely annoyed by interviewers who can't seem to trace my initial line of thought and try to coax me back in it. Instead they give you a smug expression along the lines of "this guy talks too much" and they form a negative impression right there and then. I can see it in their eyes and quite frankly I lose respect for them immediately as well -- they can handle such a situation much better. Interviews are a two-way process and both sides screw up in every single interview.

So overall, I believe you're over-generalizing on a few points.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#216

Post by tptacek »

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.

That's only a good tradeoff if the false positive generator carries the weight it generates in false negatives.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#217

Post by projektir »

imh wrote: post #68
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…

If you ask someone to predict a coin toss, and use the methods we use today for interviews, you'll end up with a 50/50 chance at best. Yet some people guess the coin toss correctly. It must be some unmeasured "gut" that's doing a good job for those people, right?

I think there absolutely are people who can guess correctly, but how do you tell who they are and how many of them do you think are actually out there? I'd guess not many at all.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#218

Post by tptacek »

peripitea wrote: post #151
tptacek wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good and important question. Also: while I have a lot of respect for people at Google trying to innovate on hiring, make no mistake: Google's heart is in the right place, but they aren't at the forefront of structured hiring, and their hiring processes are notoriously capricious. The reality is that generating good questions for a structured interview is difficult. You can't just pose a programming problem.…

Making sure I understand you: When you refer to work sample tests here, that refers to the crypto challenges and things like that that you published at Matasano? And you're saying that was much more predictive than the list of facts methods, right?

That's what people ordinarily assume I mean, but while our work sample challenges were similar to the cryptopals and Microcorruption stuff, they were not the same, or even derived from them. They were designed specifically to qualify candidates, and in fact predated our public challenges.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#219

Post by pdimitar »

Apocryphon wrote: post #190
Top19 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 trai…

One wonders what exactly happened to this industry, why instead of training, companies are offloading the work to universities, MOOCs, and boot camps.

All about cost and trying to offload it somewhere else. Sadly it's very predictable, most businesses work that way.

Then again, theoretically this gives a huge edge to the proactive learners.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#220

Post by emodendroket »

andrewmutz wrote: post #197
bnegreve wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That feels a bit like saying we should just stick to blood letting and leeches because we don't know any more effective way of treating disease. Just because we don't have a superior alternative doesn't actually mean the current method is effective.
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