301–310 of 460 posts
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"A minority of your applicants are going to perform badly in that situation because the adrenal glands will effectively reduce the output prefrontal cortex below an acceptable level" I have an off topic question. I don't see what the problem being discussed has to do with how glands reduce activity in certain parts of the brain. Sounds to me like a fancy way of saying 'people don't perform well under stress'. You cou…
My thought is that it's a real phenomenon that occurs in a certain subset of people during a job interview, therefore, its obviously relevant
"What happens in job interview is that adrenaline binds to a variety of adrenergic receptors, which triggers a number of metabolic changes" [1]
It'd be just as real, also clearly connected, but also quite clearly not what the conversation is about.
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One thing you're testing for is how well their brain works with an excess of adrenaline floating around in their body. All of the best interviewers I've known take great pains to make the interviewer feel comfortable and chatty - after all, they aren't going to be filled with interview anxiety when they're actually working there. A minority of your applicants are going to perform badly in that situation because the a…
"A minority of your applicants are going to perform badly in that situation because the adrenal glands will effectively reduce the output prefrontal cortex below an acceptable level" I have an off topic question. I don't see what the problem being discussed has to do with how glands reduce activity in certain parts of the brain. Sounds to me like a fancy way of saying 'people don't perform well under stress'. You cou…
That's how I read it as well. But this got me thinking, why is it a good idea to test someone under interview stress when what they'll be doing 99% of the time won't be in interview circumstances?
I find some stressors don't have any negative effect on my performance but stress in an interview makes it much worse.
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Once again, it's not designed to find the top talent. It's merely a high pass filter that removes the hopeless from the set of people to consider. I'm sure it is useful in some situations, particularly in big companies with a broken hiring process. I imagine 37Signals don't find it useful as they have a more effective screening process, and people coming to interview simply couldn't possibly be that bad as they're re…
'select the second highest number in this list' is actually O(n) and does not require sorting.
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That still doesn't help the candidates who just don't see the trick. What if you know memoization and dynamic programming, but it just doesn't occur to you that day, that to correctly split on spaces (not adding empty tokens at the beginning and end of the string, etc.) you need to use a state machine? You could give the candidate that "step" of the solution and continue on to see if they know the rest, but the candi…
If your point is that these sorts of tests don't have any statistical power, I would whole-heartedly agree. Certainly you have to be careful with the types of conclusions one draws from the results of such tests. But they are not useless. The probability that a candidate will work out after having solved the problem with the best and most efficient solution is certainly much higher than if she only gave a middle-of-t…
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You can interpret the response more broadly, though. In this case, it was probably pretty apparent that the person hadn't worked through the problem before, so it is indicative of problem-solving and attitude. If he'd recited the answer from memory that usually comes across and then you have to pick something from a different area. If, as an interviewer, you literally can't find a problem that the interviewee hasn't…
It's easy to game your answer as an interviewee though. HN actually had a post a while back about someone who "interviewed" for a living while on unemployment; by the time he was done, he had mastered pretending to think deeply about the answer to any interviewing question.
This is something that's pretty easy to test out in practice interviews with friends. My experience is that it's a lot easier to come up with questions that require thought and insight to answer than it is to answer them.
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A job interview is going to take at least a day of your time anyway. What does it matter if that time is spent programming, talking over coffee, sketching on a whiteboard, or whatever?
Well with a "regular" interview, it's pretty unlikely that the company is going to make any money off of the direct output of the interview. When helping them develop a feature or product, it's slightly different.
I'm in academia. I've had job interviews where I've literally gone office to office discussing people's research projects and helping them come up with ideas. It was fun, and it never occurred to me that I was being taken advantage of. Worst case scenario, they might think of me as a potential consultant down the line.
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I don't know if this is a Silicon Valley thing or what, but the idea that someone would basically do a day's unpaid work on projects they know nothing about with three different people is just about the most foreign thing I can think of. That being said, I've never done any pairing so maybe it would work better in that type of environment.
A job interview is going to take at least a day of your time anyway. What does it matter if that time is spent programming, talking over coffee, sketching on a whiteboard, or whatever?
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It's impossible to get real insight from them, because you can't differentiate between those who worked it out, and those who have read about it. The fact that they're involved enough in the industry to know about fizzbuzz is still a strong signal. It will only come up if participate in some sort of developer community, which, I suspect, is something that the completely incompetent don't do, as a rule. Once again, it…
Once again, it's not designed to find the top talent. It's merely a high pass filter that removes the hopeless from the set of people to consider. I'm sure it is useful in some situations, particularly in big companies with a broken hiring process. I imagine 37Signals don't find it useful as they have a more effective screening process, and people coming to interview simply couldn't possibly be that bad as they're re…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"A minority of your applicants are going to perform badly in that situation because the adrenal glands will effectively reduce the output prefrontal cortex below an acceptable level" I have an off topic question. I don't see what the problem being discussed has to do with how glands reduce activity in certain parts of the brain. Sounds to me like a fancy way of saying 'people don't perform well under stress'. You cou…
"I don't see what the problem being discussed has to do with how glands reduce activity in certain parts of the brain. Sounds to me like a fancy way of saying 'people don't perform well under stress'." That's how I read it as well. But this got me thinking, why is it a good idea to test someone under interview stress when what they'll be doing 99% of the time won't be in interview circumstances? I find some stressors…