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The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

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Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#311

Post by glangdale »

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.

This assumes the trick is easily-indexed-by-name and can be looked up - so you have to know it exists. A lot of the better tricks are more like 'frameworks' whether specific ("Four Russians", "prefix sum") or general ("dynamic programming", "branch-and-bound").

There's a limit to how far you can get just Googling stuff ("how do I reverse a string") for recipe-book solutions to things. I think practically everything in Computer Science could be Googled ("how does merge sort work", "what is an inclusive vs exclusive cache") at some level but this doesn't mean one shouldn't know a great deal of it. At least, if you want one of these jobs...

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#312

Post by hota_mazi »

throwaway71958 wrote: post #86
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…

Don't take his word as a word of god from heaven. Google's interview process is just as shitty as anyone else's, and shittier than some I've been through. It selects for people who do well on the whiteboard under pressure, which are very often not the best workers overall. It also wastes a ton of time both on the employer and on the candidate side. Source: interviewed ~100 people in my 6+ years at Google.

> It selects for people who do well on the whiteboard under pressure

If this were true, Google would have crashed and burned a long time ago.

Obviously, their interview process selects for much more versatile engineers than that. Engineers who not only produce reliable and maintainable code, but who can actually come up with products that generate billions of dollars over the years.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#313

Post by curun1r »

emodendroket wrote: post #303
curun1r wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're talking about a very high-level position that either requires substantial leadership traits or very specialized knowledge, interviewing has never been about finding the right person for the job, it's been about finding a right person for the job. The reality is that most jobs can be done successfully by a large number of people. The accuracy of the assessment of the candidate's abilities is, to my mind,…

I think you may be misconstruing the argument here. I agree that any number of people will fit -- but the problem is, what if interviews aren't even selecting "a" right person for the job?

> what if interviews aren't even selecting "a" right person for the job?

We know that interviews are selecting a right person some percentage of the time. That percentage will never be 0 or 100. We will always have to accept some bad hires.

I would rather that successful hire percentage be somewhat lower and keep the team engaged in defining culture and hiring standards than to give up team involvement for a higher right-person rate.

My main point is that the people studying this issue and arguing against the interview process tend to only look at less than half of the benefit of the interview process. If we're going to ditch the interview process, whatever replaces it needs to have the same property of involving the existing team or it is, to my mind, automatically worse than what we have now. Because while we're all aware of how flawed the interview process can be, it does work to some extent. When I was hiring, only 2 out of the 50 or so that I hired didn't work out. Would I like to have avoided hiring one or both of them? Sure. Am I willing to sacrifice the team involvement benefits to got to do so? Absolutely not.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#314

Post by hota_mazi »

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…

> 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?

Let's say you created your own company and you're interviewing engineers.

Would you be comfortable hiring someone who doesn't know the difference between O(n^2) and O(2^n)?

Or someone who doesn't even know what these concepts represent?

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#315

Post by jacobr1 »

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…

In the 2004-2007 timeframe, the company I worked for hired software engineers via a staffing company for three-month contracts. We interviewed the candidates with the intention of making a full-time hire. As the contract term approached, the management team did a 360 review, the decided to offer a full-time position or just not-renew the contract. This had some downsides, but overall I found it to be better that alternate approaches I've tried before or since. It stopped being viable once software engineering became a sellers market.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#316

Post by draw_down »

Top19 wrote: post #150
Spooky23 wrote: post #96

It's the whole process that's useless. Remember a few years ago when this forum was drowning about how to find and hire "10x" people? 98% of employees were useless in the face of the 10xer. The reality is, most of the time screening for general aptitude, self-motivation and appropriate education is good enough. I've probably built a dozen teams where 75% of the people were random people who were there before or freed…

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…

Wow, that's really terrible to hear. And of course, conveniently, it lets the employer off the hook for any notion of team or project fit with the employee. If they weren't performing well, then obviously they never will in any capacity in any context. Awesome.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#317

Post by jwatte »

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…

The fact that psychology (and other social sciences and even medicine) have a replication crisis in spades is well known. Just Google it, if you haven't been following the general science news for the last few years.

Even the "hard" sciences have trouble, because journals prefer publishing new and positive results, rather than replications or negatives.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#318

Post by pdimitar »

hobls wrote: post #301
pdimitar wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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? The reason I personally care about the skill of talking about bad coworkers tactfully is that I think it correlates with being able to navigate tricky workplace fuckups without making a big political mess that I have to clean up. The way I…

> The way I would phrase the above situation is:

You're a better diplomat than me. I could've phrased it almost the same, but with me the tone and the wording depends a LOT on my current mood -- I have to work on this, that's for damn sure.

It does however still leave the question "but whose fault that legacy code is?" open, don't you think? With my wording in the above comment I would've aimed at being crystal clear -- and thus somewhat rude in the process, admittedly.

> without making a big political mess that I have to clean up

Could you please clarify on that point? I am curious.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#319

Post by sheepmullet »

solipsism wrote: post #300
throwaway71958 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't take his word as a word of god from heaven. Google's interview process is just as shitty as anyone else's, and shittier than some I've been through. It selects for people who do well on the whiteboard under pressure, which are very often not the best workers overall. It also wastes a ton of time both on the employer and on the candidate side. Source: interviewed ~100 people in my 6+ years at Google.

It selects for people who do well on the whiteboard under pressure, which are very often not the best workers overall. This gets tossed around as a truism. I'm curious, does anyone have any evidence for it? Call me a skeptic, but these kinds of "everyone knows" truths are often wrong. Google and other such companies have a vested interest in getting hiring right. They also have the wherewithal to conduct studies, col…

> Google in particular has shown a willingness to

Google is collecting and analysing data to improve its hiring process... not to improve the hiring process of the industry at large.

There is an effectively limitless supply of great engineers who will jump through hoops to work for Google.

That's just not true for the vast majority of the industry.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#320

Post by jasonthevillain »

Well, the worst interview I've ever had was the ones where the interviewer wouldn't deviate from the script, even after he recognized that these questions made no sense for someone with my background (I was self-taught, and had never managed my own memory or written a sort algorithm. They were also irrelevant to the position in question).

It was painfully awkward.

It was also a fantastic way to accidentally discriminate against women and older candidates.

I'm not saying anyone should conduct an interview completely by the seat of their pants, but please don't encourage this foolish consistency.

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