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The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

nytimes.com

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Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#281

Post by pdimitar »

hobls wrote: post #253
pdimitar wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 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…

> "some of my old coworkers were shit and they deserve the shit-talk they get from me This is just such a red-flag in an interview. I have worked with some terrible people, for sure. But I would never talk about them in an interview. > t's only their own interpretation I chose a "cool" technology over the customer needs. Heh, I swear to god when I asked the question, "Why did you pick X technology?" they said, "Becau…

Now that you clarified, I actually think we're very much on the same page. ^_^

> This is just such a red-flag in an interview. I have worked with some terrible people, for sure. But I would never talk about them in an interview.

Of course! Don't get me wrong. I am not making it a goal to shit-talk former coworkers in an interview. I try to avoid it, but what am I to do when I have to share that I maintained a Rails 4.0.x app for 16 months and was unable to upgrade it even it to 4.1.x because the previous team did a horrific job? It wasn't my fault at all and I actually sunk several weekends trying to upgrade it but was drowned in mysterious and horrifying errors (like an ancient state machine gem having very rigid dependencies and utilizing 80+ monkey patches practically made any upgrade impossible) before giving up? Lie that I suck? No I don't suck, they sucked, and I ain't taking the blame for them. That being said, I have better uses of my leisure time, and my work time as well -- having in mind I am not expected to refactor at all. So I tried sinking 35-40 hours of leisure time in that problem and moved on.

> Heh, I swear to god when I asked the question, "Why did you pick X technology?" they said, "Because it seemed cool."

You'll hear a very hearty (and non-sarcastic) "I am sorry for that awful experience, man" from me. I never do that. I always explain myself. I went out of my way to rehearse in my spare time, just asking myself the question "why did you pick tech X?" -- I am a firm believer of Einstein's saying "If you can't explain it to a 5-year old then you don't understand it"!

> Sometimes the candidate has just obviously misunderstood my question though.

Perfectly fair. Never objected to that and I also went to apologize for the misunderstanding because in an interview every minute counts.

Thank you for being constructive.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#282

Post by throwaway4job »

cubano wrote: post #272
jernfrost wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I still don't understand why employers can't simply set up a two week "trial contract" where as promising candidates simply work for two weeks so everyone can actually see and judge, with real world empirical data, how well the person does in the environment at the actual job. Yes yes..of course I know this could be gamed as well, but no matter...you can't really argue that this wouldn't be magnitudes better then the…

Most good candidates are already employed, and don't want to take two weeks off to take a chance on a single interview.

As such, this sort of arrangement happens to some degree with students (it's why internships exist), and with some contractors, but it's not a generalizable solution.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#283

Post by wpietri »

tptacek wrote: post #222
wpietri wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends on how you think of the interview process. The theory at work here is that if you get a number of domain experts to give an independent evaluation of a candidate and then compare notes, you'll get a decent outcome. Requiring them to use a structured, repeated question with a formal scoring rubric is to subtract certain sorts of bias from each individual evaluation. When hiring somebody doesn't work out, you go back and work on the interviewers and their interviewing skills, not the questions themselves.

I take it you're working from a different theory, where you try to put the expertise in a machinery of questions and answers, relying less (or not at all) on the interviewers themselves. I think that's also a valid approach, one with different limitations.

Personally, as I mentioned elsewhere, I'm not a big fan of interview questions anymore period. If I want to know if somebody can do the work, now I try to create situations where they just do the work. But if one is trapped in the dominant tech interview paradigm, I personally favor investing in interviewers more than the questions themselves.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#284

Post by yorwba »

frankc wrote: post #271
mafm wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the better way that is banned?

I suspect he is referring to iq tests. They have a pretty high correlation to success and are banned.

I wonder how much correlation with IQ is allowed before custom algorithms questions qualify as an illegal IQ test.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#285

Post by jaredklewis »

bnegreve wrote: post #163
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…

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…

People have too much faith in the efficacy of interviewing, ergo we should give slipshod journalism and science lacking rigor a free pass?

I'm all for upending the status quo with interviews, but let's not throw out science and reporting just to get there.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#286

Post by leksak »

peripitea wrote: post #263
tptacek wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ahh, interesting. Would you mind sharing an example of how they were different, or how the fact that they were specifically for qualification changed the thought process? I'm working on making tech interviewing better and am fascinated by this stuff.

NDAs? Everything I've done yet is proprietary and judiciously covered by various binding legal agreements.

I wouldn't breach such a contract nor should you hire someone that would be willing to do so. The sole exception being in the cases where it would be the best for the public interest, i.e. whistle-blowing.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#287

Post by schmit »

bnegreve wrote: post #163
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…

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…

My point is not that this work is flawed, or that there should not be an article reporting on this research or the topic of interviewing. Rather, I think it'd be better for a third party to write about the topic in a more objective manner, rather than a professor promoting his own research (and thus with skewed incentives).

In particular, I was disappointed to find a (short) paragraph in the article that I find bogus. That does not mean the article shouldn't have been posted in the first place, but just that this paragraph should have been edited or removed.

I think there is something wrong when I feel like I have to look up the actual research paper and check whether the claims made in an article are supported by data and methodology. I should not be a skeptic when reading New York times articles.

To be fair, it is posted in the opinion section, but should we really just take this article as an opinion? That doesn't feel right to me either.

Then onto your last question and Daniel Kahneman, we can talk about that for a long time, but let me keep it short. The best place I know (though technical) is the blog by Andrew Gelman ([1][2] turned up in a 5 second Google, but there is way more on his blog), and Daniel Kahneman himself has "admitted" flaws in his studies [3][4].

[1] http://andrewgelman.com/2014/09/03/disagree-alan-turing-dani... [2] http://andrewgelman.com/2016/06/26/29449/ [3] http://retractionwatch.com/2017/02/20/placed-much-faith-unde... [4] https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruc...

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#288

Post by LnxPrgr3 »

mahyarm wrote: post #242
jernfrost wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When users of code I've written complain that something sucks to use, I don't demand they come up with a better solution. Probably I don't even want to know what they think the answer is—unless they design user interfaces for a living, odds are their answer will be terrible and they won't even be happy with it if I build it.

This is as it should be—I'm paid to solve problems.

Why is this different?

The more I read about interviewing, the more I realize too many people think they have this problem solved—their amateur psychology is impeccable and their technical screens test for exactly the right things, no more and no less. Did they do a bunch of controlled studies to convince themselves of this, or are they taking sounding good, or intuition about the statistical outcomes of different techniques, to be equivalent to truth?

Maybe the first step is to collectively realize we have close to no clue what we're doing, and are being asked to solve a hard problem: individually, to talk to someone for an hour and make a hiring recommendation. In aggregate, to make the decision based on a handful of these one-hour conversations.

Maybe the first step is to realize this is a problem worth trying to solve.

Maybe the first step is vocal non-acceptance.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#289

Post by xamuel »

nissimk wrote: post #259
sirbearington wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like 90% of writing software is identifying which "trick" applies to the problem you're trying to solve and applying it correctly.

Yeah, but you can look them up.

The thing about looking up tricks is you can only look them up if you remember they even exist to look up.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#290

Post by AndyNemmity »

cubano wrote: post #272
jernfrost wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I still don't understand why employers can't simply set up a two week "trial contract" where as promising candidates simply work for two weeks so everyone can actually see and judge, with real world empirical data, how well the person does in the environment at the actual job. Yes yes..of course I know this could be gamed as well, but no matter...you can't really argue that this wouldn't be magnitudes better then the…

The concept of a two week trial contract is interesting, but also as flawed as anything else.

I switched roles to a new team, and the first 2 weeks were a trainwreck. It was almost of no predictive quality on how I would do.

Now, there are many reasons why that was the case, and perhaps those underlying issues should be addressed, but from all the role changes I've had, the first two weeks shows how well the group you're going into can onboard, more than it shows how productive the individual will be in the long term.

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