Love it. It has been a while since I read a P.G essay, although this was what first attracted me to HN. It also means that it is OK to work on your idea without entering YC. After all, being accepted into YC is just another test by authority at this point.
The Lesson to Unlearn
511–520 of 588 posts
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#512Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being a hiring manager at a big company, I can tell you this is just as frustrating for me as it is for candidates. I hate “leet code” and frankly find algorithmic interviews to be very low signal compared to more practical, open-ended, domain-specific problems. I will say though, the problem is one of “standardization” across an organization where it’s too big for everyone to fit in a room. Suppose you give each tea…
> But as you grow, that ten percent of underperforming people becomes large in absolute numbers, and is very painful to deal with. I think you could reduce the 10% to 1% simply by actively firing bad employees, and the easiest way to do that is with a probationary hiring period (let's say 6 months, maybe a year). I am fully aware of how systemic rot can be, and how hard it can be to remove. The real problem is when y…
Stack ranking was invented for this exact case, cutting the rot out when it's already metastasized.
It has a bad reputation as it's often used year on year - it's meant to be done just once or twice to get back on track after years of over-hiring and reluctant firing.
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#513Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being a hiring manager at a big company, I can tell you this is just as frustrating for me as it is for candidates. I hate “leet code” and frankly find algorithmic interviews to be very low signal compared to more practical, open-ended, domain-specific problems. I will say though, the problem is one of “standardization” across an organization where it’s too big for everyone to fit in a room. Suppose you give each tea…
"do something like pay candidates to come on site and work for a week" by doing this you've essentially cut your hiring pool down to 3 categories: new graduates; mediocre engineers who were fired from their last job; or terrible engineers who can't find a job.
The other option is taking leave. In many countries people might have a week saved up, or maybe they work for one of those fancy companies with Unlimited Leave*
* conditions apply.
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#514Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haha here is the email i have from my facebook interview thats coming up. "Your initial Facebook interview is coming up and we want you to ace it! Here are some tips and resources so you know what to expect and can prepare adequately. Preparing is key. Our initial interview determines whether to continue with a full series of onsite interviews. This initial interview is primarily a coding interview that will take pla…
Actual questions in phonescreen i got were these https://leetcode.com/problems/powx-n/ https://leetcode.com/problems/product-of-array-except-self/
For the second one:
> Please solve it without division
This is just an absurd constraint…
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#515I'm glad he made the leap from school tests to funding tests, as it seemed to be a thinly veiled analogy from the start. I'm disappointed, though, that he didn't take the final step and admit that money itself is also a poor, hackable test. Funding, growth, usage -- these are all still one level removed from something worthwhile or beneficial. Cigarettes have amazing usage numbers even in 2019. I'm waiting for the en…
The real final step is admitting that the "worthwhile and needs doing" judgment in your head is also a test, which isn't always more reliable than the tests you face in university or the test of money.
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#516Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've often wondered as well why tech companies seem to go out of their way to ignore portfolios. First I thought it's a misguided but honest attempt to make the process look more like a blind meritocracy, to basically turn the interview into a modern version of the Imperial Examination of ancient China. Then I read "Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder, a book that documents the design process of a minicomputer in…
Portfolio's don't play nicely with NDAs.
an NDA doesn’t prevent you from taking credit for specific features
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#517Yes, most tests are bad, but there is a quick advice that improves them immensely: never ask questions that are not at least Level 3 in Bloom's taxonomy of knowledge: https://blog.testdome.com/blooms-taxonomy/ I cofounded a technical screening startup, and despite our efforts to educate our customers that enter their questions on our platform, 95% of their custom questions are bad questions. They tend to ask trivia q…
Thanks for the article.
The advise against level 5 questions is interesting. I found them to be very useful for answering if a candidate has really applied in the field before, especially comparing two big fields against each other. For example asking if they prefer sql or nosql. Anyone who doesn't answer some variant of "it depends" has probably not had enough hand on with either of them. But regardless if the candidate has a strong opinion or not, and regardless if it's the same opinion as yours, the answer is going to give you endless amount of openers for dialogue and follow-up questions on how they reached that conclusion and in which projects they used such techniques and how it worked out.
As the articles notes, the questions can easily be misperceived as checking if the candidate has the same opinions as yourself, or you becoming outsmarted by eloquence. Since you are yourself asking and evaluating the questions you have to ensure this doesn't become the case, by putting opinions aside and only asking about fields which you yourself deeply understand. Not sure if it might be off-putting for a candidate to get this type of question though, if they don't understand the deeper purpose of the question? Should you give a disclaimer that you are not actually not interested in their final opinion?
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#518As somebody who has designed some of the tests Paul Graham is complaining about, it really is hard from the other side! For example, it's long been known in the physics education research community that students come away from introductory courses with very little physical understanding, even if they can do the plug and chug problems on typical tests just fine. Students can all recite Newton's third law, but immediat…
> any standardized measure will miss the mark
Goodhart's Law (Popular formulation): When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#519I'm glad he made the leap from school tests to funding tests, as it seemed to be a thinly veiled analogy from the start. I'm disappointed, though, that he didn't take the final step and admit that money itself is also a poor, hackable test. Funding, growth, usage -- these are all still one level removed from something worthwhile or beneficial. Cigarettes have amazing usage numbers even in 2019. I'm waiting for the en…
I think this is an excellent point. I really agree with pg's thesis, but I think it would be worthwhile for him to go more in depth into the "edge cases" he talks about in passing, mainly because I think these edge cases actually bolster his thesis, not detract from it. Companies like Theranos and WeWork succeeded for a short while because they tried to "hack the test". E.g. Theranos hacked the metrics of "buzz", "in…
What's about homeopathy? It is advertised to have medical benefits, presumably has none, and is a multi-billion business, with many companies which exist for decades and decades.
For any non-trivial product there's information asymmetry problem, so pretty much everything is hackable, but to different extents.
Re: The Lesson to Unlearn
#520I'm glad he made the leap from school tests to funding tests, as it seemed to be a thinly veiled analogy from the start. I'm disappointed, though, that he didn't take the final step and admit that money itself is also a poor, hackable test. Funding, growth, usage -- these are all still one level removed from something worthwhile or beneficial. Cigarettes have amazing usage numbers even in 2019. I'm waiting for the en…
The real final step is admitting that the "worthwhile and needs doing" judgment in your head is also a test, which isn't always more reliable than the tests you face in university or the test of money.
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