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The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

nytimes.com

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Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#241

Post by jimmywanger »

inetknght wrote: post #48
nostrademons wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google tries to keep interview questions confidential - that's why candidates sign an NDA - and periodically rotates out questions that have appeared in public. Many engineers are also continually trying to think up new questions as well, usually based on their work. For most questions, there's no "right" answer, but there are a set of points that the interviewer wants to see you touch on. For example, they might fir…

What about when you know what the concept of big O is, know why it's often touted as important, and disagree that it's as important as it's touted? My opinion is that big-O often ends up being used as a premature optimization effort hindering "just get the right answer first". Maybe that brute force method will work in a reasonable clock-time cost, despite having egregious algorithmic cost. You won't know if you're b…

The questions about BigO isn't about premature optimization or actual implementation. It's about understanding exactly what a particular program is doing and how it's doing it.

Any sort of technical solution given at a Google interview would generally have the following questions:

1) What big O time does this algorithm run in? Why? What big O space requirements does it take.

2) If space were more/less expensive, or time more/less important, how would you change the solution and why?

Understanding those tradeoffs and being able to analyze code at that level is a big part of most software engineering jobs.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#242

Post by mahyarm »

jernfrost wrote: post #237
andrewmutz wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 towar…

Of course people know interviews aren't the greatest, but it's the best tool they have right now. What people are pushing back against is criticism without solutions.

There are a bunch of other testing methods that are illegal in the USA too, such as IQ tests.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#243

Post by jameshart »

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.

The problem is that there are some people who will need to go through that process in their head to produce an estimate of 16 million - and then there are people who have had cause at some point in their life to know of the existence of the concept of '24 bit color' and that the number of colors expressible in 24 bits (8 bits each of R, G and B) is exactly 16,777,216.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#244

Post by pseudalopex »

scottshepard wrote: post #63
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…

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…

The trick is asking the right questions.

I know a couple that divorced because one of them didn't want to be monogamous anymore. They tried to make it work, first one way, then the other, but in the end they couldn't. Do you think the other one is more likely to cheat or file for divorce than someone who's never been married?

Children of divorced parents are more likely to get divorced, but I've never seen that statistic controlled for personal and cultural attitudes about divorce.

What I've read suggests that whether someone has experienced a healthy relationship is more predictive of relationship stability than whether they've experienced trauma.

A flawed heuristic may be better than no heuristic, but too much confidence in a flawed heuristic can backfire.

(Incidentally, most divorces happen after 8 years for both first and second marriages.[1] The 50% figure applies to first marriages as well.[2] That doesn't tell the whole story, because young adults now are divorcing less than young adults a generation ago. On the other hand, we don't know if that will remain true; divorce later in life has increased.)

[1] https://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/p70-125.pdf

[2] https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2016/06/08/life-table...

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#245

Post by AlexCoventry »

abritinthebay wrote: post #205
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. A…

Getting candidates to jump through crazy hoops is a sensible strategy for a big organization. It selects for compliance, which is important when your enterprise is too complex, uncertain or fast-moving to operate by consensus

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#246

Post by mjevans »

employee8000 wrote: post #200
wpietri wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree, and it's interesting that you know -e, while I've memorized -axuf ; I guess it's more portable?

Again, this is one of those, "Here's what I've got cached, and here's where I'd look up what I don't know offhand" questions.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#247

Post by hobls »

muyuu wrote: post #208
hobls wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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;…

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

Nope, I said the engineers I work with now are consistently better. "My current team is very good" is MUCH different from "my last team was very bad." (And I'm not in a job interview.)

> Some people will struggle to take credit because of politeness. Isn't taking credit trivial to do?

No, it's not so much about credit, it's about specificity and the ability to talk about the different parts of the project. A lot of people get stuck on, "We made a project that sold widgets." I want something more along the lines of, "In our widget selling application, I worked on backend services for payment processing and fraud detection." Some people get really stuck on generalities and won't dive into specifics. It just makes it impossible to evaluate your contribution. Maybe you didn't do anything. I have no idea, you're just not generating useful information for me.

> Most people don't get to decide the general point of what they do unless they are the CTO.

I totally disagree. So many tiny choices that engineers make from day to day have a tangible impact on customers. Even if you're a junior engineer, you have an impact on the latency of service calls you're responsible for, as an example. Do you pick the lightweight framework that loads quickly, or do you need the features of the bigger one? It's that kind of tradeoff that people should consider, and "I saw something shiny" is not a good answer.

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

Yep, for sure. I'm positive that I've rejected good candidates. That's the side you want to err on though, especially if you have lots of good candidates.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#248

Post by pdimitar »

wpietri wrote: post #165
erikpukinskis wrote: post #22

Once we get to the point where most people have several jobs with separate contracts, interviews become superfluous because you can just hire someone for a few hours at a time and then fire them. The only reason that doesn't work today is we're still clinging to the idea that you only work for one entity at a time. Never mind that most people already manage at least a couple bosses within the same company.

I've done a bunch of consulting and contract work, and that can be fine. But it's expensive, because to be continually finding new work, you must continuously invest in marketing, and every time you do something new there's a lot of switching cost. A company also needs a lot more supervisory capacity to be monitoring people who come and go, so it's not cheap for companies, either. It's also limited. I can be much mor…

You both have a good point.

I too quit my freelancing for a stable remote job but looking at it 18 months later I found out that I sucked a lot in managing my freelancing gigs.

So IMO with some good contract and budget management -- and confidence, and actually having a choice -- you can reap most the benefits of freelancing and almost none of the drawbacks, if you can take the thought of switching customers every 3-6 months.

I understand not everybody can pull this off -- I am not sure I am yet ready to do this that well. But I've seen people doing it very successfully and almost stress-free.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#249

Post by AlexCoventry »

ythn wrote: post #101
j2kun wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yet why do some marriages last forever (till death do us apart) while others fail miserably or crumble even after 20 years? Well, you don't exactly "date" for years before getting a job. You're acting like people get married on a hunch, or that people don't work hard to present themselves as "marriageable." (Incidentally, it's also not clear to me that a 20-year marriage is a failure, and certainly not in this anal…

> In most of the places I've worked where there are short-term contracts before full-time hiring, the employer has a far better idea of the skills and quality of the candidate. At the place I work we offer paid internships to college students who haven't graduated yet. By the end of a summers' worth of work, we have a really good idea as to which interns we would like to hire full time, and we give them an offer on t…

Contingent on graduation for ethical reasons, or because you still see the degree as a relevant signal on top of the insight gained from working with the candidate?

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#250

Post by oculusthrift »

projektir wrote: post #223
oculusthrift wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

it cares about you staying together long enough to raise kids. remember that also half of marriages end in divorce so it's not that great
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