91–100 of 261 posts
About a year and half ago I was applying for a software engineering internship at Goldman Sachs and they made me take a Pymetrics test. One of the tasks was to press the spacebar as many times as possible in 30 seconds. I didn't do the task and withdrew my application.
Fun fact: Pymetrics has hired a lot of former C64 game programmers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds like it could be discriminatory against people with certain disabilities. Besides the fact that it's stupid and somewhat embarassing.
I literally was embarrassed. I didn't want to work for a company that selected talent like that.
We had some of those too there’d also be this webcam screen thing where you answer vague interpersonal questions as the camera looks at you.
FWIW (at least in tech industry), apparently the automated filtering systems are a myth spread by companies who make money on the promise to optimize your resume to get past the filter. https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1292909844886945792 (The OP of the tweet was an engineering manager in several big tech companies, wrote The Software Engineer’s Guidebook last year, and talked with many recruiters in the proce…
Reading this tweet in depth disagrees with a lot of my experience in Fortune 500 tech companies. Can’t figure out the misunderstanding.
I was part of a very in-depth evaluations of both Pymetrics & HireVue for a large company recently (2 different evals, among others). Some interesting things we observed: (1) It was not clear to us, with any level of certainty, whether either tool did anything more useful than filter out people who don't want to take the test / don't trust "AI". (2) It was not clear to us, with any level of certainty, whether (1) was…
The pymetrics test mentioned in the article involves among other things, clicking on a balloon till it pops and pressing the keyboard as many times as possible in a minute. As much as people love to hate on leetcode-style interview programming questions, they are at least remotely related to performance on the job. Personally, I've found it to be a good filter in terms of deciding where to interview at. Companies tha…
Emphasizing this point for others. This is the best way to approach it IMO.
The company should work to impress you as much as you work to impress them.
10 years ago I was so excited and optimistic about the future technology was going to bring us. As that future comes closer it's quickly becoming quite clear that this entire industry is bringing us a giant dystopian future. Tech companies have more power then governments, individual privacy is gone. Corporations, already pretty impersonal, have completed the transition to treating people as "resources", completely d…
This makes me think of the (most likely apocryphal) story of the hiring manager faced with a huge stack of resumes. He divides the stack in half, and tosses the top half in the trash. "We don't want to hire those people. They're terribly unlucky."
See 'the secretary problem' [0], which is a more sophisticated version of the above. It's a process that can be summarised roughly as follows. Given a pile of CVs Read approximately 40% of them (actually 1/e, or ~0.368) Dump that 40% Select the first candidate that is better than the ones you have just dumped [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
It is possible to review all the CVs and then decide which one to pick.
I was part of a very in-depth evaluations of both Pymetrics & HireVue for a large company recently (2 different evals, among others). Some interesting things we observed: (1) It was not clear to us, with any level of certainty, whether either tool did anything more useful than filter out people who don't want to take the test / don't trust "AI". (2) It was not clear to us, with any level of certainty, whether (1) was…
How do you find good psych people? Showing my bias but it’s a genuine question. I remember in school all the psych and social psych folks being total jackoffs in blowoff classes. How do you find people you can take seriously? Who don’t just quote psychology today and act like it’s insight? Like I know the field is professional and has skilled professionals - but how do you find them?
10 years ago I was so excited and optimistic about the future technology was going to bring us. As that future comes closer it's quickly becoming quite clear that this entire industry is bringing us a giant dystopian future. Tech companies have more power then governments, individual privacy is gone. Corporations, already pretty impersonal, have completed the transition to treating people as "resources", completely d…
I can't help feeling that the habit of removing identifying markers (names, ages, etc) from resumes to try to ensure equality in hiring is also part of the same ill-fated direction.
I dearly wish that the world I was leaving my kids wasn't so dehumanised.
The next logical step would be to train an adversarial AI against the hiring AI. You'd have the system generate your resume and application to maximize your chances. Then the hiring AI would need to be re-trained to account for this. And so on. In the far future, this feedback loop creates an economy where every job application is total gibberish. No human can possibly explain why their resume is a recipe for carne a…
I have a section on my resume called: 'Technologies I'm Unfamiliar With' Underneath is a Laundry list of today's sexiest technologies. It's not quite as advanced as your suggestion, but it's pretty effective. It's also a good icebreaker when you have the in person interview.
The value provided by this "AI" solution is that it diffuses accountability for a decision away from any individual making a hiring decision. Would it be ethical if it were used to operate a food rationing system, or maybe a vaccine rationing system, and at what point does the level of plenty make it acceptable? I could convolve or convolute any scheme to make the attribute I was selecting for seem "random" and then…
While there is cliche angst about being mediated by machines that has existed since bueracracies - but the parts were humans. Sadly the bueracracies qualify as an improvement over literal fiefdoms.