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The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

nytimes.com

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Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#331

Post by nol13 »

hobls wrote: post #179
dlandis wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I actually don't think that's the most common thing we give a "no hire" for. Can you cite any of the more common things you give no hires for?

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."

I'd venture that not being able to answer this question and others like off the top of their head is less an indication that they are unaware of/don't learn from their mistakes than it is an indication how well they practice for bullshit interview questions and can give you a bullshit answer to your bullshit question that gets past your personal bullshit-o-meter well enough for you not to be offended.

But since you're also probably trying to filter out cynical assholes like me, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#332

Post by throwaway9475 »

inopinatus wrote: post #79
throwaway9475 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, because poor management, crippling technical debt, and a toxic work environment are totally plainly presented to you in an interview. /s

Not plainly, no, but easily inferred.

You should publish because I know I and a lot of other people would be incredibly interested in divining this information during a job interview.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#333

Post by emodendroket »

curun1r wrote: post #313
emodendroket wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

But you have no control. How do you know your success can be attributed to the interview?

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#334

Post by pdimitar »

hobls wrote: post #326
pdimitar wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> It does however still leave the question "but whose fault that legacy code is?" Heh, I can do this all day. "We accumulated a lot of tech debt on a previous project because of very short deadlines." Or, "the previous owner learned the technology while building the system -- I'm sure he would have done it differently today." What I'm looking for is that you understand what leads to this sort of situation, and it isn…

> Heh, I can do this all day.

I can see that! :D Thanks, you've been very helpful. Believe it or not, I am learning from this interaction.

> Tact is important.

I don't disagree and I'm with you here. But herein lies the dilemma -- I've been tactful and diplomatic way too many times for my taste. I've had my fair share of politics. I am not horrible in it; I simply started lacking any patience for it and thus my mood started leaning heavily towards being blunt and somewhat inconsiderate. I am not outright offensive but I am no longer tactful and diplomatic (sigh).

I started standing up and heavily protest in the face of bad politics however. I have less patience now because I expect everybody else to do the same -- and they don't.

That's why I get easily irritated. I absolutely agree with ALL of your points -- the people might have had horrible customers (or team leaders), they might have drained the budget close to the end of the project so they probably had to cut tens of corners, they might have been gaining experience along the way... and a plethora of other possibilities. I agree.

I do have empathy and tact. But I have lost almost all patience in the last few years.

I appreciate that you might not believe such a polarized message in an interview. But I got slightly carried away sharing. :)

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#335

Post by FT_intern »

PlaceFan wrote: post #54
nostrademons wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This accusation is almost always from people who haven't studied that particular pet topic. In my experience, the pet topics you list - parallelism, dynamic programming, networking, etc. - are needed quite frequently for those jobs at AmaGooFaceSoft. In other words, those candidates would be poor fits for those jobs, which is exactly what an interview is trying to test. I think the Google hiring process is fucked up…

> This accusation is almost always from people who haven't studied that particular pet topic Well sure, but you only have so much time to study for these interviews. So, you make sure you review your basic data structures, algorithms, and complexity analysis. The things that will most likely show up. Then you have to consider the more advanced topics. Realistically, you're not going to have an expert-level understand…

> Well sure, but you only have so much time to study for these interviews.

Considering the payoff (potentially a $40,000 to $100,000 raise on a 40 hour work week), I think that the amount of time to study for these types of interviews is very trivial. Interviewing skills can be used for interviews at many well paying companies because this type of interview has been standardized, so it's not like you're only studying specific knowledge for one company.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#336

Post by solipsism »

throwaway71958 wrote: post #330
solipsism wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't take this the wrong way, but the anecdotes of people who didn't make it through "the gauntlet" are quite likely to be biased. Those of people who did make it are as well. This is not data.

Did I say it was "data"? The closest anyone has come to "data" on this (that I know of) is Google, in that experiment where they just hired people at random. But they decided to ignore the results and stick to the soul crushing 5 hour interviews anyway, so data did not change the relevant people's minds.

Looking up the actual experiment, you're completely misrepresenting the conclusions. Here: https://www.google.com/amp/business.financialpost.com/entrep...

These were their conclusions: 1. The ability to hire well is random. This is referring to individuals, not the system as a whole. 2. Forget brain-teasers. Focus on behavioral questions in interviews, rather than hypotheticals 3. Consistency matters for leaders 4. Grades don’t predict anything about who is going to be a successful employee. School grades, that is.

So, stop making stuff up from behind your throwaway account.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#337

Post by JDiculous »

mooreds wrote: post #174
johan_larson wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I don't think their process is magic. Google gets a good workforce because they are generous and prestigious, which means a lot of good people apply there. And Google is willing to say no to a lot of people in their search for good people. They reject a lot of candidates who would probably have worked out just fine.

Or, put another way, they choose to accept a high rate of false negatives to avoid false positives.

It's more than they're optimizing on a very specific set of skills/experience - the ability to answer a particular type of problem (eg. from "Crack the Coding Interview") on a whiteboard in under 45 minutes.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#338

Post by tacomonstrous »

Spooky23 wrote: post #325
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…

Yet, literally every professionally employed person is in their current gig via that process. It works good enough.

That's a syllogism and I'm not sure it tells us anything. If you replaced interviewing with a footrace across hot coals the same assertion would be (just as vacuously) true.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#339

Post by hobls »

pdimitar wrote: post #334
hobls wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It does however still leave the question "but whose fault that legacy code is?" Heh, I can do this all day. "We accumulated a lot of tech debt on a previous project because of very short deadlines." Or, "the previous owner learned the technology while building the system -- I'm sure he would have done it differently today." What I'm looking for is that you understand what leads to this sort of situation, and it isn…

> Heh, I can do this all day. I can see that! :D Thanks, you've been very helpful. Believe it or not, I am learning from this interaction. > Tact is important. I don't disagree and I'm with you here. But herein lies the dilemma -- I've been tactful and diplomatic way too many times for my taste. I've had my fair share of politics. I am not horrible in it; I simply started lacking any patience for it and thus my mood…

Happy to help!

At the very least, just prove that you can keep your mouth shut if you think someone is the worst, heh. That's really all I'm looking for. ;)

I also totally understand getting frustrated. I've been a total dick to my coworkers in the past, for lots of different reasons. I was burnt out, I was young, etc. I've mellowed out a lot over the years. A good chunk of that is also just being on a good team; it's really hard to be the best version of yourself of you're not well supported.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#340

Post by tacomonstrous »

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.

In my experience, IQ tests are a good indication of your ability to take IQ tests and very little else. Of course, you can differentiate an absolute dunce from someone who's not, but nothing more subtle than that.
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