31–34 of 34 posts
Are 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?
This 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.
Gladwell 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.)
I 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…
You're being skeptical for the wrong side. We humans have a long, inglorious history of inventing objective metrics that absolutely fail to be useful at predicting the things we want to predict. From the IQ tests to the NHL combine, we're traditionally quite awful at inventing predictive tests of performance. Which is to say: if you're being intellectually honest, you should be far more skeptical that a test does wha…