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The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

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Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#351

Post by tptacek »

vacri wrote: post #350
tptacek wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In the experiment the authors ran, interviewers felt more confident after interviewing a "candidate" who had secretly been instructed to randomize the answers. Later, they informed the researcher that so great was the value of the information they extracted from interviews, they'd prefer a randomized interview to no interview at all. I think the authors made their point quite well.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#352

Post by wpietri »

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.

Well, yes and no. If somebody just scored it as written, giving points for each argument known, it would be a dumb trivia question. But as I said, that's not what I do.

Try it next time you're mingling with ops people. Say in a bar at a conference. Don't look at what they answer. Look at how they answer. Some people are comfortable not knowing. Some people are excited to discover the ones they forgot they knew. some people get curious and eager to fill the hole they've just noticed in their knowledge. And some people get defensive and peevish.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#353

Post by iterator5 »

tacomonstrous wrote: post #340
frankc wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Much like the way that hackerrank tests how good you are at hackerrank tests?

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#354

Post by tptacek »

wpietri wrote: post #348
kasey_junk wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm pretty confident both of you are people I'd be happy to work with in the future and so I want to use this as an opportunity to point out that your reaction to what Kasey said his reaction would have been to your interview question practically guarantees that you would fail to acquire Kasey for your team. I know Kasey a little bit better than I know you (he's a Chicago person) so I'll just sum this up as "that's not a point in the win column for this interviewing strategy".

I know you're not asking people recite "ps" flags from memory. The problem is, you're looking for a subjective "X-factor" in how someone answers a trivia question.

I used to really like this approach too. I'd think of things that you'd only know if you'd actually done the kind of work I'd done. I had some favorite interview questions: "what are some of the functions you carry around with you from project to project in your 'libyou.a' library", and "where would you start looking if you had to debug a program that segfaulted in malloc"? I think the logic I was using is the same as the logic you're using here.

Ultimately, I think it's a bad approach. Equivalently strong candidates look at their work through different lenses, and find different things memorable. Far more important to me, though, is that some people really suck at interviewing --- and, what motivates me more, having succumbed to this repeatedly as a hiring manager and also being myself I think an example of the phenomenon --- some people just interview way better than they should.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#355

Post by barry-cotter »

tacomonstrous wrote: post #340
frankc wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

http://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997whygmatte...

Why g Matters: The Complexity of Everyday Life

Personnel selection research provides much evidence that intelligence (g) is an important predictor of performance in training and on the job, especially in higher level work. This article provides evidence that g has pervasive utility in work settings because it is essentially the ability to deal with cognitive complexity, in particular, with complex information processing. The more complex a work task, the greater the advantages that higher g confers in performing it well. Everyday tasks, like job duties, also differ in their level of complexity. The importance of intelligence therefore differs systematically across different arenas of social life as well as economic endeavor. Data from the National Adult Literacy Survey are used to show how higher levels of cognitive ability systematically improve individuals’ odds of dealing successfully with the ordinary demands of modem life (such as banking, using maps and transportation schedules, reading and understanding forms, interpreting news articles). These and other data are summarized to illustrate how the advantages of higher g, even when they are small, cumulate to affect the overall life chances of individuals at different ranges of the IQ bell curve. The article concludes by suggesting ways to reduce the risks for low-IQ individuals of being left behind by an increasingly complex postindustrial economy.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#356

Post by flukus »

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…

This will get you the most desperate employees, not the ones you want. I've got a home loan to pay, I'm not switching jobs if you can only guarantee 2 weeks of employment. And if there are multiple offers around, I'll take the 3 month or full time position, even if I'm half way through the 2 week contract.

Also, not all jobs/codebases lend themselves to being productive in 2 weeks, I'd argue they should be, but they aren't.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#357

Post by uiri »

joshuamorton wrote: post #346
hota_mazi wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 certa…

> They pay more than AMZN/MS/FB/AAPL/etc. for equal level, but are stingier with levels.

Google is more generous to good performers via bonuses once you are working there, but if you have two offers in hand, you are going to find Google highly resistant to negotiating. The notion of people taking a pay cut to work at Google sounds plausible to me.

If one's goal is to maximize compensation (particularly in the short term), a Google offer is better used to get a higher paying offer at one of their competitors.

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#358

Post by chrismcb »

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…

Yes, because it would be magnitudes worse. So do you give the assignment to? You have several hundred applicants, do all of them get the 2 week assignment? Who watches over them and answers their questions? After spending that much money, is the answer you get any better than a set of interviews On the other hand, assume I am in a job and want to change positions, for any number of reasons... How many two week jobs do I have to take? Or should I quit my job first?

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#359

Post by joshuamorton »

nostrademons wrote: post #266
mquander wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that actually a majority of jobs at Google? I know something about the work that several of my friends working as SREs and SWEs do and it doesn't sound like it involves a lot of distributed systems programming. Let's say you work on some part of Android. Obviously you need to interact with things like Google's build system which are distributed, but are you really implementing some distributed computation in the c…

It was at the time I was there (2009-2014). There's another Googler above who says it's not like that anymore, which is possible, but these were things you needed to know across Search, GMail, YouTube, Plus, Docs, and Infrastructure while I was there.

It entirely depends on what project you work on. When I interned, I had to deal with a lot of custom datastructures, but since I started full time, I haven't (although my next project might?)

Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews

#360

Post by erikpukinskis »

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 just need an agent. Agents have not been "eaten by software" yet so they have no way to take clients making less that 6 figures of revenue. When that software comes the long tail of contractors will get access to agent services and we'll go from 80/20 salary/contractor to 20/80.
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