Malcolm Gladwell on Hiring: the Mismatch Problem
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Malcolm Gladwell on Hiring: the Mismatch Problem
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Re: Malcolm Gladwell on Hiring: the Mismatch Problem
#2Gladwell is wrong about being able to fix the black-white performance gap in three years using better teachers. Not only does his argument go completely against all the prevailing research, but it doesn't even make sense because every white student would have to be assigned a bad teacher for the numbers to add up. (C.f. Equality & Achievement, Hart & Risley, etc.)
Re: Malcolm Gladwell on Hiring: the Mismatch Problem
#3Gladwell is wrong about being able to fix the black-white performance gap in three years using better teachers. Not only does his argument go completely against all the prevailing research, but it doesn't even make sense because every white student would have to be assigned a bad teacher for the numbers to add up. (C.f. Equality & Achievement, Hart & Risley, etc.)
You're missing the point.
The point being that people make tradition-based voodoo over numbers-backed science all over the place. This is a hugely disruptive opportunity. For example a software company that hires people differently can propel itself to the very top in a span of just a few short years.
Re: Malcolm Gladwell on Hiring: the Mismatch Problem
#4Gladwell is wrong about being able to fix the black-white performance gap in three years using better teachers. Not only does his argument go completely against all the prevailing research, but it doesn't even make sense because every white student would have to be assigned a bad teacher for the numbers to add up. (C.f. Equality & Achievement, Hart & Risley, etc.)
You're missing the point. The point being that people make tradition-based voodoo over numbers-backed science all over the place. This is a hugely disruptive opportunity. For example a software company that hires people differently can propel itself to the very top in a span of just a few short years.
"You're missing the point."
Not really, I've been posting about this same idea on news.yc and reddit for years:
Re: Malcolm Gladwell on Hiring: the Mismatch Problem
#5Are those silly riddles about candles and ropes and bridges and shit that they ask you in Microsoft interviews our profession's version of The NHL Combine?
Re: Malcolm Gladwell on Hiring: the Mismatch Problem
#6This is exactly what always bothered me about Google's white board testing (and testing like it at other big firms). It lets them know that you can do pointers and O notation but it completely misses the specific kind of tenacity that seems to make great programmers great.
Re: Malcolm Gladwell on Hiring: the Mismatch Problem
#7This is exactly what always bothered me about Google's white board testing (and testing like it at other big firms). It lets them know that you can do pointers and O notation but it completely misses the specific kind of tenacity that seems to make great programmers great.
But it does filter out people who don't have that tenacity. Those people who do have that kind of tenacity would already have learned about pointers and O notation.
Re: Malcolm Gladwell on Hiring: the Mismatch Problem
#8I think Gladwell has a good point that trying to do a job is probably the best predictor of who will be good at it, and as a general principle moving that point up, via apprenticeships, internships, coop programs, and so on would probably be useful.
What troubles me is he seems to say that because people do a bad job of objectively identifying predictors of future success, that those predictors simply don't exist, or at least aren't strong enough to be useful. Did the "exhaustive survey" of law graduates he mentioned really find no correlations between something that could be measured before a career starts and eventual success at that career? Perhaps there are no good predictors in various fields, but I think I'd like to see some much stronger evidence before I buy that.
Re: Malcolm Gladwell on Hiring: the Mismatch Problem
#9This is exactly what always bothered me about Google's white board testing (and testing like it at other big firms). It lets them know that you can do pointers and O notation but it completely misses the specific kind of tenacity that seems to make great programmers great.
It's hard to see how you can be a great coder without understanding big-O. The better example to use is logic puzzles.
Re: Malcolm Gladwell on Hiring: the Mismatch Problem
#10This is exactly what always bothered me about Google's white board testing (and testing like it at other big firms). It lets them know that you can do pointers and O notation but it completely misses the specific kind of tenacity that seems to make great programmers great.
It might not identify the best hackers (who can agree how to measure that, anyway) but it at least identifies a kind of hacker.