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The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

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Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#341

Post by JDiculous »

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…

Is it really a truism? If anything, the general industry consensus is the opposite, that Google engineers are brilliant, the cream of the crop. Every big tech company and Google wannabe emulates their interview process. My Quora feed for whatever reason is littered with questions pertaining to how amazing working at Google is. In my experience, the people who question the effectiveness of Google style interviews seem to be in the minority.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#342

Post by pdimitar »

hobls wrote: post #339
pdimitar wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'…

> I've mellowed out a lot over the years.

And here you have myself at 37 being much more impatient compared to 27. :D Truth be told, I am also much more mellow in general, just not in work lately.

> 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. ;)

Double thanks, this is an extremely valuable advice!

I appreciate you taking the time.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#343

Post by tptacek »

sgustard wrote: post #269
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.

Just to further clarify, by work sample you do NOT mean an example of previously produced work? This still seems fickle: my dozen years of work output (for example, building and running a site with perfect uptime for millions of users) is not as valid an indicator of my future performance as how I happen to score on some arbitrary timed test?

Absolutely not. Samples of previous work are deceptive at the best of times.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#344

Post by hota_mazi »

_m8fo wrote: post #329
hota_mazi wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

A simpler explanation is that they pay well and are prestigious and so get a lot more good candidates. The proof is pretty obvious: what companies pay as much as Google and are as prestigious as Google and have bad engineers?

> what companies pay as much as Google and

Actually, Google pays under the average of top companies, because as a top tier company, they can afford. Most people I know who went to work for Google took a pay cut but don't have a single regret about it.

> A simpler explanation is that they pay well and are prestigious and so get a lot more good candidates.

Their pay and prestige will attract even more bad candidates.

How do you separate good from bad candidates?

That's right: a kick-ass interview process.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#345

Post by mercutio2 »

hobls wrote: post #21

I've been a programmer for a bit over ten years. I've worked at scrappy little startups, midsized companies, now for a tech giant for a few years. The engineers I work with at the tech giant are consistently better engineers than my other coworkers have been, and I credit the very structured interview process. We're trained to ask specific questions, look for specific types of answers, and each interviewer is evaluat…

I say the same thing on many of these threads. Most people rejected a at BigCos aren't rejected for failing to pass the technical bar(s); those people get filtered out in the phone screens.

The by far most common reasons interviewers offer for low scores are: didn't listen/didn't acknowledge when they reached the end of their knowledge/didn't test when they got off the rails/just didn't seem like a cooperative coworker.

These are all filters that may not matter at ye olde startup; but in a stable long lived team, these are red flags that seem corellated in my experience with lowering the morale of a dozen other people. So, even if you're a rock star, you might get rejected.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#346

Post by joshuamorton »

hota_mazi wrote: post #344
_m8fo wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A simpler explanation is that they pay well and are prestigious and so get a lot more good candidates. The proof is pretty obvious: what companies pay as much as Google and are as prestigious as Google and have bad engineers?

> what companies pay as much as Google and Actually, Google pays under the average of top companies, because as a top tier company, they can afford. Most people I know who went to work for Google took a pay cut but don't have a single regret about it. > A simpler explanation is that they pay well and are prestigious and so get a lot more good candidates. Their pay and prestige will attract even more bad candidates. H…

>Actually, Google pays under the average of top companies, because as a top tier company, they can afford. Most people I know who went to work for Google took a pay cut but don't have a single regret about it.

Compared to who? They pay more than AMZN/MS/FB/AAPL/etc. for equal level, but are stingier with levels. You might be correct that certain other companies pay more than Google (Netflix maybe?), but they're certainly above average.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#347

Post by ravitation »

emodendroket wrote: post #210
ravitation wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say it was based on hard data, that's why it's a hypothesis... But, if you really believe that it's a huge leap to hypothesize that interviews would be a better measure of subjective social skills than metrics like GPA, I don't know what to tell you.

I mean let's go further back. I question the assumption that selecting for "culture fit" does much more than shut people out whose ethnic background or social class is too different.

I mean, that's an extremely narrow reading of "culture fit".

Believe it or not, there are non-racist and non-classist character traits that are also not represented in one's GPA.

But, I guess hiring for one's willingness to work with specific clients, or for one's happiness with the organization's structure (in, for example, a holacracy) wouldn't be valid things to hire around to you?

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#348

Post by wpietri »

kasey_junk wrote: post #292
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…

I would almost assuredly stop the interview at this point and try to figure out what your malfunction is. To me any question where the obvious answer is "I can trivially look all that up in the man pages" is a gigantic red flag that I don't want to work at that place. If I'm feeling curious that day, I might begin a conversation about what you think you are testing for with that question, as I've spent a fair bit of…

That's fine. If you go into something assuming that anything you don't understand is a malfunction, and you excuse your rude behavior with your mood and/or caffeine level, you're probably not the kind of person I'd want to spend a lot of time working with.

That said, as I've explained elsewhere in the thread, the point isn't to see how many they know. It's to see that a) they know some portion of it that people doing the work would know, and b) have reactions to the rest that indicate useful work habits and attitudes.

A perfectly find first answer to is "I only use ps -aux. I'd just look in the man page if I needed anything else." Because then we could have a good discussion of how they use that output to figure out things, what sort of things they'd expect to see in the man page, and what other tools they use to see what's going on.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#349

Post by wpietri »

nostrademons wrote: post #268
kafkaesq wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'll usually look a bit uncomfortable, because they are the sort of person who likes knowing things. So the process is, in fact, designed to make people feel uncomfortable, for a little bit (or at least you're definitely aware that this is a frequently occurring side effect). Does that not suggest to you that there may be a negative tradeoff at play here? (To wit: yes you do manage do efficiently extract a few bit…

I think part of the point may be to select for people who don't consider "being interrogated" to be a contest. There are plenty of folks who are just like "Here's what I know, here's what I don't know, you decide whether you would want me on your team. If you don't, that's fine, I'll find another team to join." Then there are other folks who, when they're asked a question and don't know the answer, feel like their se…

Yes, exactly. I think to be a good developer, you have to be willing to keep learning. And to be a good developer in a team context, you have to be willing to learn from your teammates, ask for help, and share knowledge in a way that's supportive, not prideful.

And I agree with your PM friend; I think willingness to admit ignorance is even more valuable there.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#350

Post by vacri »

tptacek wrote: post #226
vacri wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The interview is also selecting for a single thing - GPA. You can be an utter arsehole and have a high GPA. You can have personal hygiene that stinks out any room you're in and have a high GPA. Basically, you can be completely impossible to work with and have a high GPA. The research they've done is suspect, because they weren't interviewing for an ongoing role, but for a single KPI. Similarly, the people doing the p…

Like everyone else, I agree a face to face interview is the best way to verify a candidate doesn't smell bad. I assume that interview could be pretty short.

Well, I suppose you could fish out the most trivial part of the comment and refute that. Why not set up a battery of short unit tests for the candidates? "Follow me, Jones, and we'll see how you handle the 'coworker with chewing gum' test next..."

The study was done on students, who almost universally have zero experience selecting people to work under them in an industry setting (or at all). Drawing conclusions from this particularly inexperienced subject pool and then extrapolating out is bogus, particularly given the extremely certain language of the article. The subject pool is at an age (18-22) where people are still figuring out what to make of themselves and others; they have extremely little adult experience of the workplace and judgment of character - indeed, at this age, people are notorious for making bad decisions in their personal lives.

When you look at the actual paper they link, out the window goes the declarative language, and instead the article is unusually full of weasel-words ('can', 'may'). There's a major difference between "utterly useless" and the actual conclusion of their paper: "interviewers probably over-value unstructured interviews".

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