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The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

nytimes.com

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Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#231

Post by pdimitar »

throwaway71958 wrote: post #84

One thing interviews can't select for: creativity and motivation. And in tech those two criteria are the most vital, especially motivation. I can easily fill in the skills gap in someone who's motivated. I can't do anything with someone who doesn't give a shit, even if they're the second coming of Albert Einstein. So folks, please, don't apply for jobs you don't really care about. Save yourself and your prospective e…

I find it unfair that you're downvoted. I mostly agree with you.

However, "don't apply for jobs you don't really care about" is a very 50/50 advice. Right now I have zero money reserves. If I somehow got fired tomorrow, I'll be in the red even after 2 days of unemployment. So sometimes you have to make a hard choice.

That being said, it's good to be open about this after you get your act together months later and decide what to do with your current employer, during a lunch for example.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#232

Post by tptacek »

mrchicity wrote: post #156
tptacek wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truly structured interviews are better than even the most rigorous traditional interviews. They are also more expensive to design and much more painful to deliver. Some kind of interview is probably necessary for every serious tech hiring process. Organizations should be realistic about the low quality signal they'll get even from structured interviews. Take time away from interviews and feed that time to off-site wo…

I've tried work-sample testing with middling results: -The more hoops a candidate has to jump through, the more likely they are to bail out of your recruiting funnel. This is especially bad for college/postgrad recruiting when you aren't the #1 employer in your field. Everyone wants to work for the Googles and Facebooks of the world. It's hard getting someone to spend a couple hours for your startup job. -People chea…

First: if you make candidates do work sample tests, you should reduce the amount of in-person interviewing you do to account for it. Up to a limit, most candidates would prefer your selection/qualification process to happen from their homes than from your office. Unfortunately, companies aren't serious enough about their tests to trust them, and do indeed tend to make this just another hoop.

Second, incorporate the work sample tests into your in-person (or even telephone) interviews. Now you have a (hopefully interesting) technical problem they ostensibly just solved to talk about. Your evaluation should be by formal rubric, not interview, but it's easy to see if someone actually did it. We had no problems at all with people cheating (of people we hired with this process, over about 4 years, we fired not a single one).

Finally, I could not be less interested in the kind of amateur psychoanalysis tech interviewers hope they're accomplishing as a side effect of quizzing people about code in their conference rooms.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#233

Post by daveFNbuck »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #77
scottshepard wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article is critiquing the unstructured get-to-know you interview. It is not critiquing highly structured interviews with clear goals, nor technical challenges, nor references checks or past performance. In your example, how would you structure a series of questions and procedures to limit the risk of marrying someone who will abandon you or cheat on you? I think you can apply good interview process techniques to…

Seems like point 1 is possibly just confounding age. They've not divorced yet partly because they've not been married long enough yet.

Point 1 is saying that if you're younger when you get married and it's your first marriage, the marriage is less likely to end in divorce. This is the opposite of what you'd expect if getting divorced was just a matter of time, as younger people have more potential time in which to get divorced.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#234

Post by jaggederest »

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.

I strongly disagree. There are all sorts of situations where having a bad option is much worse than having no option, hiring and medicine clearly among them.

> Corporations would love more effective ways to determine effectiveness/performance before hiring.

This is irrelevant to evaluating the current methods. Even if there is no replacement, if they are useless, we should know it, bar none.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#235

Post by kafkaesq »

lomnakkus wrote: post #206
jaredsohn wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

This kind of general estimation and/or ball-parking can be incredibly valuable, but this doesn't sound relevant in any way.

To be fair to Google (in regard to this one filter question only), they actually are up front about expecting a significantly higher baseline of general mathematical awareness (even for non-mathy roles) than most other shops. At any rate, this kind of estimation comes up in capacity planning (both in architecture planning, and for algorithms on a single box) all the time. Which after all is what Google does, at nearly every level of their stack, (nearly) all the time.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#236

Post by jernfrost »

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 don't see the problem. That researchers haven't done a perfect study in every possible way is hardly the issue here, but rather the blind trust in our ability to interview and hire people. This research paper does not come out of the blue. This is something that has been observed by many organizations and people for quite some time, that interviews are broken.

In fact there is an awful lot of wrong stuff society keeps doing despite evidence over many year suggesting it is stupid. The stupidity of high CEO salaries e.g. has been proven quite well, yet business keeps a blind faith in it. Getting employees in complicated jobs to perform by rewarding them on extremely narrow metric has also proven itself counterproductive yet the MBA crowd refuse to believe it doesn't work.

Business practices often seem to be more like religion than founded on reality. It is a GOOD thing that some researchers are trying to do their bit to correct this flawed picture.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#237

Post by jernfrost »

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.

Nonsense. First step is to acknowledge that interviewing doesn't work very well. You can't keep deluding yourself because you haven't found a better way. Accept reality.

This is one of the biggest problems I see with business guys today. They want absolute certainty in a world which can't offer it. Start accepting that there is a lot of stuff we don't know and can't know at the moment and we simply have to work towards getting better.

You can't get better if you don't acknowledge that there is a problem in the first place.

These silly, must have +5 years of experience, and check all these boxes with technologies to get the job clearly shows the industry is completely lost at the moment and isn't willing to acknowledge it.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#238

Post by ppidugu »

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…

You are absolutely right!

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#240

Post by Sevii »

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.

We have had a better way for decades, its banned. What do you think all these algorithm questions are supposed to do?
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