We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work • Hacker News Board

Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work

#81

Post by jameshart » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 4:57 PM UTC

All this post says is that among the candidates who scored highest on this model, a higher proportion worked at these companies.

But there's no inverse analysis: of people who worked at these companies, how predictive was that overall of a higher score on this particular assessment?

'Our five highest scores ever were all people who wanted to leave FooCo' tells you little about the overall quality of FooCo employees. Maybe the rest of them are terrible and these five needed to get away?

Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work

#82

Post by jldugger » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 4:57 PM UTC

lhnz wrote: post #33

It's interesting that Google was not higher for communication. Aren't they known as the big tech company with the "writing culture"? I guess 'communication' means something different here.

> Aren't they known as the big tech company with the "writing culture"?

Are they? I thought that was Amazon.

Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work

#83

Post by valleyjo » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 4:57 PM UTC

My conclusion so that Dropbox has a lot of smart people who want to leave. Higher numbers of interviewees means more folks want to leave and are practicing to do so.

Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work

#84

Post by agumonkey » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 4:58 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #59

What this really tells me is that the best engineerineers at Dropbox are looking to quit.

Interesting interpretation :)

But where would the best go ? where the worst engineers are ? to appear even smarter ? or just a bit below ? to avoid toxic workplace.

Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work

#85

Post by leeny » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 5:00 PM UTC

tedivm wrote: post #46

leeny wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. The data is mostly drawn from how people who work at these companies do in mock interviews rather than how our users do in real interviews with these companies.

The implication in your blog post doesn't make that clear- > At interviewing.io, we’ve hosted over 100K technical interviews, split between mock interviews and real ones.

I'll see if I can word that better. The real interviews in this case were where the interviewEE was from the company, not the interviewER

Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work

#86

Post by ummonk » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 5:01 PM UTC

kieselguhr_kid wrote: post #44

I'm glad to see this getting roasted in the comments, as it's a really good example of how companies put out self-serving pseudo-statistical nonsense in an effort to promote themselves. There's no effort to quantify what "technical" or "communication" skills are - these are left to the interpretation of a the interviewer. It makes no effort to show where these engineers are going, what the interview process they're c…

"There's no effort to quantify what "technical" or "communication" skills are - these are left to the interpretation of a the interviewer."

And yet, these scores are measuring something and averaged across tens of thousands of technical interviews, you have enough statistical power to average out the particularities of each interviewer.

I'm sorry you find the results repugnant, but the results are what they are. And the article did have a large section on limitations of their analysis.

Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work

#87

Post by davey48016 » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 5:01 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #57

paxys wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people put too much effort > spend a reasonable time like a month Spending a month on interview training is exactly what I would consider unreasonable effort. Here's a scenario – I have worked at big tech company A for a decade writing backend code. Big tech company B has many openings for senior backend coders, and is desperate to fill them. B's recruiters are hounding me every day to consider a switch. The job lo…

Have you ever ran interviews? I have, and there's an incredibly wide range of candidates, all of whom with fantastic pedigrees, but some of whom are completely incapable of demonstrating their problem-solving ability. Likewise, some candidates have poor pedigrees, but make it clear to me that they can think, communicate, and code. I'm not saying that some of my rejections can't do that. But I can't measure what I did…

I used to get recruiters messaging me on LinkedIn about my impressive Java experience, in spite of not mentioning Java on my profile. At the time, I was working for a company that used a lot of Java, but I was working on a .NET based product and hadn't touched Java since college.

Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work

#88

Post by leeny » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 5:02 PM UTC

kieselguhr_kid wrote: post #44

I'm glad to see this getting roasted in the comments, as it's a really good example of how companies put out self-serving pseudo-statistical nonsense in an effort to promote themselves. There's no effort to quantify what "technical" or "communication" skills are - these are left to the interpretation of a the interviewer. It makes no effort to show where these engineers are going, what the interview process they're c…

Author here. Yes, the skills are left to the interpretation of the interviewer, but most of our interviewers are senior engineers at FAANG. We've done quite a bit of work internally to make sure your interviewers are well calibrated, and we have a living calibration score for each one (calibration is based on how the interviewees they interview end up doing in real interviews).

The interviews in question are a mix of algorithmic interviews and systems design interviews.

Also, if I ever use "rockstar" or "ninja" in my posts, I hope someone finds me on the street and punches me in the face. I'd deserve it.

Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work

#89

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 5:04 PM UTC

jstx1 wrote: post #3

> There’s also the issue of selection bias. Maybe we’re just getting people who really feel like they need practice and aren’t an indicative slice of engineers at that company. Or that your interview preparation platform prepares candidates better for Dropbox's interview process than it does for Microsoft's. Or that the people who were confident in their interview skills for Facebook decided not to use your platform.…

[deleted]

Re: We analyzed 100K technical interviews to see where the best performers work

#90

Post by ummonk » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 5:04 PM UTC

jameshart wrote: post #81

All this post says is that among the candidates who scored highest on this model, a higher proportion worked at these companies. But there's no inverse analysis: of people who worked at these companies, how predictive was that overall of a higher score on this particular assessment? 'Our five highest scores ever were all people who wanted to leave FooCo' tells you little about the overall quality of FooCo employees.…

No you're misinterpreting it. Go back and reread the graphs.