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Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept

matt-rickard.com

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Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept

#31

Post by mcherm »

Suppose my interviewing process is rather limited and I can only measure the y-intercept with pretty severe error bars... like to within +/- 30%. Also, my interviewing process is even MORE clueless at measuring the slope... it could be tilted +/- 30 degrees from where it is (note: that means the slope might well be negative) and also THAT measurement is especially subject to unconscious racial and similarity bias.

Then what do I do?

I might choose to focus more on the y-intercept because I at least have a vague idea of what that is by reviewing the resume plus a few hours of writing code on a whiteboard (which is a terrible assessment), whereas my ability to measure slope is almost meaningless.

Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept

#32

Post by Dumblydorr »

How does poaching relate to this? Obviously higher Y intercepts will get a lot more done initially, but they'll then be poached away. Same could be true of the slopey person, who may show more drive in their career and want to hop out once they've sloped up through your training.

Also, will that Y intercept person come at a huge premium? Can you afford that initial added burst of capital, or can you wait longer and hopefully see return on the sloper?

Anyway, you can't know someone's slope in the future at your job, as if that slope is even a constant value. It's much easier to know someone's Y intercept, you look at what they've done and what they can do now. That's the actual facts of hiring, vs a belief in potential slope, where uncertainty is more dominant.

Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept

#33

Post by rckrd »

dyeje wrote: post #27
rckrd wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two lines to represent the difference between (high slope, low intercept) and (low slope, high intercept)

I see. When would the low slope ever seem attractive though? When its Y starts out higher?

Yep. We all start from different starting positions. That makes a big difference early on (what school did this person go to? what have they already accomplished?) and less later on

Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept

#34

Post by tommysydney »

whatshisface wrote: post #6

How do you tell who will learn faster, IQ tests and personality inventories? I don't see how you can put this in to practice when all known forms of interviewing test where the candidate is today, not how fast they can learn.

In our interview set, there is always a question that requires expert-level knowledge about a topic that the interviewee likely not know (well we'll ask them an easier question first and see if they can answer), then allow them to Google, and we watch the way they do it, their reading comprehension, analytical skills, generalization, assumption checking, .etc will all review. Harder to fake than leetcode questions.

Edit: our assumption is that someone can pull that off in 40-60 second Googling is a super-fast learner. So far we're doing great with our team.

Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept

#35

Post by Panini_Jones »

whatshisface wrote: post #13
Panini_Jones wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internships are a form of interviewing and provide a duration over which you can test how fast the person learns.

People coming in from internships only make up a small portion of your staffing needs, and with the general practice of never giving raises and expecting 2-year turnover, you will never see your intern in a senior or even midrange role.

Your parent comment states that there exists no known form of interviewing that captures the trajectory of the candidate. I stated the existence of one, thus showing that there exists a known form of interviewing that captures the trajectory of the candidate.

I didn't state that internships solve all of your hiring problems. I also seem to work in a different company than you because our tenure is higher than 2 years and many interns make it to the senior level.

Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept

#36

Post by murderfs »

vp8989 wrote: post #29
kzrdude wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's far from the only facet, but slope vs y-intercept could be recast as young vs old or newly graduated vs tenured.

Agreed. It's not explicitly stated in the post but why would amount of experience (aka age) and Y-intercept even be mentioned at all if not to imply that more experienced people have a less steep slope. I think this is a false axiom that young people have more potential. You actually have very low signal about people that age. They just went from a very structured context to a very unstructured context, so you may be…

> I think this is a false axiom that young people have more potential. You actually have very low signal about people that age.

That's exactly why they have more potential: they're much higher variance. A lot of the "high-potential" people that have a bunch of experience will have already demonstrated this, and they'll be making $500k+ at a FAANG, which most companies won't be able to compete with.

Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept

#38

Post by ilc »

Dumblydorr wrote: post #32

How does poaching relate to this? Obviously higher Y intercepts will get a lot more done initially, but they'll then be poached away. Same could be true of the slopey person, who may show more drive in their career and want to hop out once they've sloped up through your training. Also, will that Y intercept person come at a huge premium? Can you afford that initial added burst of capital, or can you wait longer and h…

You CAN estimate slope. Look at past performance.

If a person switches from a role doing front end, to a role doing back end... what does that say about their slope? Now they goto DevOps/SRE? What about shifting towards UI Design?

What do you do when you are in a situation where near nobody knows your tech stack... you'd better be able to estimate slope.

Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept

#39

Post by BossingAround »

ilc wrote: post #38
Dumblydorr wrote: post #32

How does poaching relate to this? Obviously higher Y intercepts will get a lot more done initially, but they'll then be poached away. Same could be true of the slopey person, who may show more drive in their career and want to hop out once they've sloped up through your training. Also, will that Y intercept person come at a huge premium? Can you afford that initial added burst of capital, or can you wait longer and h…

You CAN estimate slope. Look at past performance. If a person switches from a role doing front end, to a role doing back end... what does that say about their slope? Now they goto DevOps/SRE? What about shifting towards UI Design? What do you do when you are in a situation where near nobody knows your tech stack... you'd better be able to estimate slope.

> If a person switches from a role doing front end, to a role doing back end... what does that say about their slope? Now they goto DevOps/SRE? What about shifting towards UI Design?

Absolutely nothing.

I've seen people switching from role to role because they were bored, and because they got an opportunity elsewhere, while not learning much in their short 6-12 months on the previous role.

I'm not saying that one can't learn a lot within 6-12 months on a job. I'm saying you won't know as an interviewer if this is your only data point.

Re: Hire for slope, not Y-Intercept

#40

Post by nitrogen »

flashgordon wrote: post #26
AvocadoCake wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a large part of learning faster is having a better willingness/eagerness to learn. That's something that can be gauged to some degree during both the technical and non-technical sections of the interview.

Mostly yes but a lot of tech hiring interviews penalizes asking too many questions and expects you to solve x leetcode problems in y time.

penalizes asking too many questions

Nothing was more frustrating when interviewing a candidate to be given like 5 minutes notice, put in a room to pair interview with a fellow engineer, and the fellow engineer running things like a pop quiz gameshow mixed with a courtroom interrogation, while I was trying to more subtly coax the candidate into comfortably showing their skill level and working style. The candidate basically shut down and stopped answering my fellow engineer's questions, but still answered mine. My colleague interpreted this as personal hostility, and things went downhill from there.

All that is to say, you will definitely learn more about a candidate if you take an interactive, rather than interrogative, approach, and you really need to be on the same page with your fellow interviewers about that.

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