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The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

nytimes.com

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Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#221

Post by tptacek »

wpietri wrote: post #181
bshimmin wrote: post #132

Earlier 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…

I feel pretty comfortable with my Unix abilities, and have held ops roles in the past, and I would have bombed this question.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#222

Post by tptacek »

wpietri wrote: post #170
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?

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.

Among the many things wrong with this approach is the fact that you aren't generating a body of questions and responses that you can evaluate against your choices and the resulting performance of candidates you hire, making it impossible to effectively iterate.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#223

Post by projektir »

oculusthrift wrote: post #118
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 see some faulty reasoning there. humans have billions of years of evolution in them that contributes to their mate selection instinct. Notice that monkeys and birds also have good mate selection, it isn't a big-brained thing. Not sure how that has anything to do with selecting good engineers.

Mate selection in evolution is not at all geared at the same things. If anything, I think instincts from that actually cause a lot of the failed relationships rather than improving them, since evolution doesn't really care about you having a long happy marriage.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#224

Post by BigJono »

xapata wrote: post #148
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".

They also run expensive ad campaigns promoting their own policies, at least here in Australia. They don't even have to be successful policies to be able to talk about them...

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#225

Post by tptacek »

gatsby wrote: post #29
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?

This is a great point. There are absolutely candidates who are "good interviewers." I think one of the most helpful methods of determining a good interviewer vs. a good future employee is taking a structured, situational interview question, i.e. "How would you go about selling a new product to a customer?" and turning it into an actionable work sample that is tailored to your company. "We make this piece of software…

This is the "calibrated interviewer" system. It strikes me as funnily similar to machine learning models, in that it's a black box that somehow demonstrates statistically it's effectiveness at a business problem, and you just have to hope there isn't some glaring bias or fatal flaw in the model that only occurs sporadically.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#226

Post by tptacek »

vacri wrote: post #176
tptacek wrote: post #40

Take a second to read about the experiments this author conducted. They included: Dummy candidates mixed in with the interview flow that gave randomized answers to questions (interviews were structured to somewhat blind this process), and interviewers lost no confidence from those interviews. Interviewers, when told about the ruse, were then asked to rank between no interview, randomized interview, and honest intervi…

The interview is also selecting for a single thing - GPA. You can be an utter arsehole and have a high GPA. You can have personal hygiene that stinks out any room you're in and have a high GPA. Basically, you can be completely impossible to work with and have a high GPA. The research they've done is suspect, because they weren't interviewing for an ongoing role, but for a single KPI. Similarly, the people doing the p…

Like everyone else, I agree a face to face interview is the best way to verify a candidate doesn't smell bad.

I assume that interview could be pretty short.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#227

Post by kafkaesq »

wpietri wrote: post #181
bshimmin wrote: post #132

Earlier 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…

They'll usually look a bit uncomfortable, because they are the sort of person who likes knowing things.

So the process is, in fact, designed to make people feel uncomfortable, for a little bit (or at least you're definitely aware that this is a frequently occurring side effect).

Does that not suggest to you that there may be a negative tradeoff at play here? (To wit: yes you do manage do efficiently extract a few bits of information from them... but at cost of having them feel like they're being, well... interrogated. And are already "losing points" by that point in the conversation with you).

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#228

Post by RichardHeart »

You hear lots of these stories about stupid interviews. You rarely hear the stories about the horrible, terrible employees that weren't weeded out, got hired and did great harm to the company and their coworkers.

Interviews can be good and bad, I'd venture to say that many the horrible hire has been avoided by any interview at all. Thus, don't make perfect the enemy of good, and try to improve on good.

The set of potential bad hires is vast compared to the good hires, and that ratio is only remedied by good filtering before and during the interview.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#229

Post by dragonwriter »

RichardHeart wrote: post #228

You hear lots of these stories about stupid interviews. You rarely hear the stories about the horrible, terrible employees that weren't weeded out, got hired and did great harm to the company and their coworkers. Interviews can be good and bad, I'd venture to say that many the horrible hire has been avoided by any interview at all. Thus, don't make perfect the enemy of good, and try to improve on good. The set of pot…

> You rarely hear the stories about the horrible, terrible employees that weren't weeded out, got hired and did great harm to the company and their coworkers.

Actually, stories about horrible co-workers that weren't weeded out by interview or any other hiring process are quite common workplace stories in every field, including tech.

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