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Ask HN: Has there been any academic research into software interviewing?

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Re: Ask HN: Has there been any academic research into software interviewing?

#91

Post by rightbyte »

dudul wrote: post #50

One thing I've been wondering for a long time when I see the quasi-sado-masochist relationship between engineers and hiring processes is: are bad hires that 1) costly, 2) frequent ? In my 12+ years career, I've worked with so-so engineers, but never truly bad ones that would ruin a project. And even the ones that weren't great, what damages did they really cause? I've seen many more companies failing because of a bad…

Let's define "bad" as the second worst to forth worst engineer in your class of 30 engineering students that made it through.

I would say bad engineers tend to know they are bad and either tend to go into managing, coordination roles or grab a subset of tasks they get good at, like being the only one on the company working with eg. a specific third party system and doing support and integration for that.

Bad engineers that have worked with the same system for three years are way better with it than super-engineers that have never touched it for at-least a couple of months.

As you said, I have never really had problems with bad engineers messing things up.

EDIT: Reluctance to hire engineers and saving pennies for a dollar on the other hand have messed up some projects.

Re: Ask HN: Has there been any academic research into software interviewing?

#92

Post by pmiller2 »

hunter23 wrote: post #90
dcolkitt wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't agree with this enough. The most consistent finding in industrial psychology is that general cognitive ability is by far the best predictor of job performance in virtually every role ever tested. Even jobs that don't seem cognitively demanding, like janitors or infantry. Higher IQ candidates almost universally do better, even if they start with much less experience. The takeaway as it applies to modern software…

What is the correlation between IQ tests and algorithm interviews? Do people with better IQ scores do better on algorithm interviews?

With or without months of preparation on some of the exact problems interviewers use “grinding LeetCode”?

Re: Ask HN: Has there been any academic research into software interviewing?

#93

Post by mratzloff »

I haven't found any academic research about this specific area, although there is of course a wealth of research into interviewing in general. The closest analog to a technical exam is probably in the finance industry.

My suspicion, however, is that these kinds of problems have limited predictive success and yield a lot of false negatives.

Re: Ask HN: Has there been any academic research into software interviewing?

#94

Post by kradroy »

hunter23 wrote: post #90
dcolkitt wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't agree with this enough. The most consistent finding in industrial psychology is that general cognitive ability is by far the best predictor of job performance in virtually every role ever tested. Even jobs that don't seem cognitively demanding, like janitors or infantry. Higher IQ candidates almost universally do better, even if they start with much less experience. The takeaway as it applies to modern software…

What is the correlation between IQ tests and algorithm interviews? Do people with better IQ scores do better on algorithm interviews?

I wouldn't expect that. Algorithm interviews as they're practiced tend to favor memory abilities and not cognitive. It's hard to come up with standard algorithms on the spot if you haven't been exposed to them.

I do know that cognitive abilities and long term memory abilities aren't correlated. Cognitive abilities and short term / working memory are positively correlated though.

Re: Ask HN: Has there been any academic research into software interviewing?

#95

Post by noego »

kayoone wrote: post #53
dcolkitt wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't agree with this enough. The most consistent finding in industrial psychology is that general cognitive ability is by far the best predictor of job performance in virtually every role ever tested. Even jobs that don't seem cognitively demanding, like janitors or infantry. Higher IQ candidates almost universally do better, even if they start with much less experience. The takeaway as it applies to modern software…

I can't agree with this. High IQ can't be everything. Wouldn't this value experience and knowledge (like everything you learned in university) at zero? Imo there are a lot of great/amazing and productive Software Engineers that wouldn't do well in a whiteboard algorithm interview. The people that tend to do well, are the ones that have a lot of practice with the kind of problems.

My interpretation is that among the pool of people who meet the minimum requirements and are interested in that position/career, IQ is the best predictor. If you're just picking random high-IQ people off the street, I don't think they'll do very well in a software engineering job.

Re: Ask HN: Has there been any academic research into software interviewing?

#96

Post by thanatropism »

szatkus wrote: post #44
organsnyder wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On an inverse scale, sure. Only the best coders have net-negative LOC/hour metrics.

This would end up with a lot of code golf.

Code golf probably correlates with IQ.

Re: Ask HN: Has there been any academic research into software interviewing?

#97

Post by leeny »

pmiller2 wrote: post #89
leeny wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, Aline here. Unlike Triplebyte, we offer people free, anonymous mock interviews with engineers from companies like Google, Facebook, etc. Basically, you get on the platform, practice, and then if you do well in practice (again real interviews not coding challenges), you can book real interviews top companies. Those interviews are also anonymous, which means that if you do poorly, you don't have to unmask.

Well, I disagree with your use of the word “anonymous.” Gender, national origin, and ethnicity are frequently easy to guess (at least at the level of “is not a white, American-born male”) via voice. I know you tried voice masking and it didn’t help equalize the results wrt gender, and I don’t have a better suggestion, so I’m not blaming the process, for not attempting to remove bias. This criticism applies to both th…

We've stopped letting companies do informational chats precisely for that reason. It's all technical from here on out. I'm not a fan of the "informational chat" approach at all.

Re: Ask HN: Has there been any academic research into software interviewing?

#99

Post by [deleted] »

hunter23 wrote: post #90
dcolkitt wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't agree with this enough. The most consistent finding in industrial psychology is that general cognitive ability is by far the best predictor of job performance in virtually every role ever tested. Even jobs that don't seem cognitively demanding, like janitors or infantry. Higher IQ candidates almost universally do better, even if they start with much less experience. The takeaway as it applies to modern software…

What is the correlation between IQ tests and algorithm interviews? Do people with better IQ scores do better on algorithm interviews?

[deleted]
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