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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?

#121

Post by risforrob »

wodenokoto wrote: post #84
neilk wrote: post #5

Interviewing.io is a startup that does some research into candidate evaluation. To their credit, they have even posted research with negative results. http://blog.interviewing.io/posts/

Has anyone here done interviews with interviewing.io? How was it, did it lead to a job?

Yes and Yes. Interviewing.io was great for kicking some rust of the ol' interviewing tires and also led to an offer that I accepted.

I have a longer reply to a different HN thread with more detail about my experiences here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11679844

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

#122

Post by A2017U1 »

_v7gu wrote: post #77
cs02rm0 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^ Where do you report bugs around here? That reply button's in italics?!

It seems you can italicize your reply button by putting a star at the end of your comment

Please don't anyone report this bug, let the italics roam free

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

#123

Post by IshKebab »

ma2rten wrote: post #109
dcolkitt wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The research shows that structured interviews do have better predictive performance than unstructured interviews. But that effect is entirely mediated by their higher correlation with IQ. In other words, structured interviews are better because they're less noisy measures of intelligence. The takeaway very much is IQ uber alles. [1] https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?refer...

I am not familiar with the research, and don't have time to review it right now. However, it seems like common sense to me that there are some factors beyond intelligence that matter such as motivation, interpersonal skills and character traits.

I think you're right but those are really hard to measure in an interview. Motivation especially.

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

#124

Post by webmaven »

jrumbut wrote: post #34
sampo wrote: post #2

To correlate with job success, you need to define and measure job success. A sub-question: How's the academic research into measuring programmer job success?

I've always thought that surveys of team members and managers could be a pretty cheap and effective way to do this (in a research setting, where you aren't basing pay or contract renewal on it). It may not give you much in an absolute sense, but should give you a good idea of the relative ranking of programmers. Of course software engineering research in general has always been a little unimpressive because what you…

> This could cost millions, and would only settle the bet between methods A and B.

Even worse: it would only settle the bet between methods A and B in a particular context.

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

#125

Post by hpkuarg »

_v7gu wrote: post #62
hpkuarg wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also known as reading Arthur Whitney's code.[0] [0] http://kparc.com/b/

I hope hell is as engaging and rewarding as that.

The only difference between hell and heaven is that in one, you end up understanding what you read. ;-)

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

#126

Post by webmaven »

rightbyte wrote: post #91
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 enginee…

> 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.

It's when that bad engineer starts protecting "their" turf at the expense of the rest of the org in order to provide themselves with job security that things start to really go south.

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

#127

Post by EpicEng »

vthallam wrote: post #21
EpicEng wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it seems to work fine How do we know that? Interviewing is near a total crapshoot from what I can tell based on my 13 years of experience (~8 of which being actively involved in the process, 3 as a decision maker.) I have yet to find a method that weeds out people who can whiteboard, but can't deliver, or those who seem to have a great personality and work ethic, but stop showing up to work and/or throw tantrums whe…

> How do we know that? As the sibling comment mentions, companies are able to build large scale systems by engineers who got in through these kind of interviews. I am not saying this is the right way or wrong way, but it definitely works. Of course when you do this, you miss out on some amazing candidates, but the big companies which started this can afford to do that because of the insane num of applications they ge…

Some are. Some fail to even pull of moderately difficult projects. I didn't mean to say that interviewing is literally a coin flip, but I can dig a trench with a pickaxe. Doesn't mean it's a good way to do it.

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

#128

Post by [deleted] »

leeny wrote: post #73
pmiller2 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t really see what’s special about their process other than the resume-blindness aspect. That’s been validated elsewhere by Triplebyte. Other than that one aspect, the process is exactly like your standard technical phone screen, except that you have to do a really easy Hackerrank problem to get invited to the platform. If I am wrong here, someone please correct me.

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.

[deleted]

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

#129

Post by rightbyte »

webmaven wrote: post #126
rightbyte wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 enginee…

> 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. It's when that bad engineer starts protecting "their" turf at the expense of the rest of the org in order to provide themselves with job security that things start to really go south.

Ye, but not really a big problem where I live where it's a lifo que for firing people. On stack ranking US corps on the other side the Atlantic I imagine it's another story ...
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