Making software engineering interviews predictive of job performance

The cited data is from a paper The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232564809_The_Valid... in 1998 as a meta-analysis of other findings, but they are not specific to software development (one account is sourced from 32000 employees in 515 diverse civilian jobs in the 1980s). Maybe software is like any other job (sales, clerical, accounting) but maybe not.

In the end, it's a crap shoot... Even their highest marker of validity is only about 50%.

In the end, if you make it too hard in an employee market, you will have good to great candidates drop off... if you make it too easy, you will wind up at the bottom of the barrel. Market pay will also vary wildly and dramatically, and perception is equally varied.

Where I work now, we have a small pre-interview code challenge... it's not particularly difficult and in general should be resolvable in under an hour. I've seen questions on the other side, that I've literally spent 3+ hours on something that said an hour. I suggest those coming up with these things actually implement their challenge on a clean computer (only tools, no reference code) and time themselves. I now cut myself off at an hour and submit what I have stating as much.

As to structured interviews, it will depend. It bugs me both ways when I see more generic, low level pattern questions in interviews only because the practical implications are usually very limited. On the interviewer side, it does help to ask some of the more quiz-like questions as it tends to give you a decent baseline of what the person being interviewed understands.

In the end, personal questions along the lines of what a person works on (developers) outside of educational or work settings gives a ton of information on how they work as well as what they know.

Culture, for as much of a B.S. thing that it is, is actually very important as well. A functional team or set of teams needs a few different types of personalities and worker types in order to do things well as a team. Being able to get along together is also imperitive.

In the end.. it's a crap-shoot and understanding the needs, fill and fit are all varied a bit... trying to normalize doesn't help much. Also, business needs and talent pools will vary greatly.

They’re the worst form of interview, except for all the other ones.

To boil this interview thing, you are trying to make a very far prediction of someone based on very little data. The industry standard way to gather that data will probably get you to see if that person has done it before but not how well. Unless that person is sorta famous and even then he could be an asshol to the team and a disease

That’s what they think, there is a bias when all you do is the same interviews. Is like eating Your fav cake from the same bakery and thinking that is the best in the world