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In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

nytimes.com

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Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

#161

Post by troymc »

These sorts of questions didn't start with Google. They're known as Fermi Problems for a reason: they're named after Enrico Fermi, the physicist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_problem

Knowing how to quickly estimate something is useful.

I imagine that Larry Page does a few quick estimates every day. How many Loon balloons would it take to bring Internet to 90% of Africa?

But not everybody at Google has a job like Larry Page. It's gotten to be a big company full of accountants, HR people, and other jobs that don't require much thinking in unfamiliar territory.

In other words, guesstimation is a useful skill, but not for every Google employee, so it's not going to show up as useful on average.

Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

#162

Post by chris_mahan »

jedc wrote: post #152
raverbashing wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, 30k people, so it's what? Some interview reports, some performance reviews, HR report/history of the employee? It really doesn't look like something big.

1 million applications received. Say 10% of those go into some sort of evaluation process = 100k assessments/year. Say 10% of those go through an interview panel of (on average 3 interviews) = 30k assessments/year For 30k employees with (say on average) 2 assessments per year = 60k assessments/year. So 1 million CVs per year on which to do some sort of evaluations, and 200k individual assessments per year. Over the p…

Even if it's 100 million rows. That's something a single beefy server with SQL Server 2012 can handle. That's not big data.

Big data is a million times 100 million rows.

Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

#163

Post by chevas »

The article also mentions:

"It’s also giving much less weight to college grade point averages and SAT scores"

In 2004 I interviewed for a Creative Maximizer position. I received a glowing review from my brother who was a Googler. I studied all the ins-and-outs of adwords back then and the British interviewer confirmed: "You did very good on the assessment" (which was working through real ads that needs to be maximized). My opinionated experience has been that in these kinds of situations, Brits embellish less than Americans.

However, she told me that my college GPA was "a major question mark" because it was 2.99 and Google only hires people with 3.0 and above (I didn't know what I wanted to do in college). Looking back I'm glad I was never hired, but that burned me bad for a while.

Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

#164

Post by mturmon »

inopinatus wrote: post #24
litewulf wrote: post #7

When I interviewed at Google 5 years ago they weren't using those brainteasers. There are many posts online about the actual, CS-y questions that you can expect in a Google interview, I had just assumed that the mentions of brainteasers were merely urban legend.

I've interviewed at Google. Years, years ago. I didn't get the job. Similarly, no brainteasers, but something worse: they made me write syntactically correct code on a whiteboard. I have never written code without using a keyboard; turns out, I just didn't have the neural pathways for anything else. My brain kinda seized up. I specifically recall failing to recognise the fibonacci sequence (especially horrifying give…

"I ask them to demonstrate their strengths to me first"

Nice. That agrees with some of the other comments here. For example, about asking about past work or projects that they are proud of or that demonstrate their skills.

Another hard issue is what to do, as an interviewer, if things start to go downhill to the point where the candidate becomes flustered and you can tell they're not at their best.

Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

#165

Post by Retric »

hkmurakami wrote: post #18
edent wrote: post #3

The original article - http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-huntin... Distraction free reading and without all the annoying cruft of Quartz. Fascinating use of "Big Data" to cut through the bullshit. Wonder if it will change anything. I suspect the "tough" interview plays well into a company's PR.

>I suspect the "tough" interview plays well into a company's PR. from: "The trick Max Levchin used to hire the best engineers at PayPal" Levchin realized the best engineers wanted to be challenged both in their jobs and in the interview process. “We cultivated a very public culture of being incredibly hard to get in. Even though it was actually very hard to get good people to even interview, we made a point of broadc…

Looking for people with high IQ's with the right background is basically a waste of time. There are plenty of ways to define IQ's but 160 is around 1 in 30,000 and there are only something like ~200 graduating highschool each year. If 5 percent of them study programming you looking a say 10 new genius programmers every year. And plenty of them avoid SV for reasons as simple as the limited dating pool.

The simple truth is large companies end up with a few geniuses randomly but there rare enough to not be worth optimizing for. What companies really want are people willing to work ridiculously hard for little reason and that's what 'hard' interviews are optimized for. O your willing to put up with hours of BS on the off chance we will higher you, great let's just see how you like 60h+ weeks.

Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

#166

Post by ctdonath »

rorrr2 wrote: post #12
Jabbles wrote: post #8

I don't understand people's problem with estimating. It's a useful skill. Perhaps it would be better if the questions actually related to technology, rather than golf balls - but the principle is the same. For instance - "how many hard drives does Gmail need?" requires a rough guess of how many users Gmail has (if you're interviewing at Google, you should know it's 1e8-1e9). How much space each one takes (probably no…

The problem is, the interviewers often judge how accurate your estimation is, and not the fact that you know (the highly flawed) Drake Equation. These estimates are completely useless in real life, because in real life nobody guesses how many drives you need for GMail, or how many gas stations there are in LA.

These estimates are completely useless in real life

Oh yes they are, for getting a grasp on what real life entails and what's possible.

With all the NSA scandal/hysteria going around, lots of people are approaching the issue with the presumption "gee, they can't possibly record everyone's phone calls". With a quick estimate I figured recording everyone, all the time, in CD quality, would take just 5% of the federal budget - making it doable instead of improbable or impossible, and making subsets of the scenario (i.e.: just recording phone calls) likely. For those of us who remember 10MB hard drives and 5.25" floppies, such a data scale is staggering - but it's a current reality, and a little estimating provides a reality check.

Likewise grasping the concept of, or even implementing, high-res "eye in the sky" drones. Gigapixel cameras seem like a novel futuristic impractical concept ... but then a little estimating involving HD-quality cell phone cameras, you can realize that a 24/7 flying 30fps gigapixel camera drone is in fact quite possible for a relatively modest sum (speaking in jurisdictional law enforcement budget terms). (Takes less than 200 cell phone cameras and a suitable multiplexer & high-bandwidth downlink BTW.)

I had an epiphany about accounting (!) when touring a billion-dollar timeshare (hotel/condo) project. Wanna make a billion dollars? Pick some large expensive project, then estimate your way down to a plan for pulling a few dollars out of a LOT of wallets by dividing, dividing, dividing away into manageable chunks people are willing to shell out a few bucks for.

Such estimates are exercises in how to mentally manage very large scale money, personnel, opportunities, and processes. Wanna make a billion dollars? Charge a buck profit per window to wash a thousand windows for each of a thousand businesses every week for 20 years. Don't laugh, there's some really rich people who made a lot of money charging a buck at a time - because they estimated their way into a profitable vision.

Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

#167

Post by lelandbatey »

Retric wrote: post #165
hkmurakami wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I suspect the "tough" interview plays well into a company's PR. from: "The trick Max Levchin used to hire the best engineers at PayPal" Levchin realized the best engineers wanted to be challenged both in their jobs and in the interview process. “We cultivated a very public culture of being incredibly hard to get in. Even though it was actually very hard to get good people to even interview, we made a point of broadc…

Looking for people with high IQ's with the right background is basically a waste of time. There are plenty of ways to define IQ's but 160 is around 1 in 30,000 and there are only something like ~200 graduating highschool each year. If 5 percent of them study programming you looking a say 10 new genius programmers every year. And plenty of them avoid SV for reasons as simple as the limited dating pool. The simple trut…

I'm pretty sure that was mostly hyperbole, with the intention being "we hire smart, clever people" however you choose to qualify that.

Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

#168

Post by inopinatus »

dasil003 wrote: post #86
shawabawa3 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not really pretentious > I would take 'read' as a pretentious term. I'm confused...

I think he meant "wouldn't". It's not pretentious per se, it just would be interpreted that way to an American because we wouldn't use that phrasing, therefore we can only imagine it being spoken in an upper-class English accent, pinky fully extended.

Quite so. Having been raised by the BBC World Service I actually do have a somewhat received pronunciation, albeit gently deflected by many years abroad.

The disposition of my pinky, however, shall remain a mystery.

Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

#169

Post by shawabawa3 »

chris_mahan wrote: post #162
jedc wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 million applications received. Say 10% of those go into some sort of evaluation process = 100k assessments/year. Say 10% of those go through an interview panel of (on average 3 interviews) = 30k assessments/year For 30k employees with (say on average) 2 assessments per year = 60k assessments/year. So 1 million CVs per year on which to do some sort of evaluations, and 200k individual assessments per year. Over the p…

Even if it's 100 million rows. That's something a single beefy server with SQL Server 2012 can handle. That's not big data. Big data is a million times 100 million rows.

> Big data is a million times 100 million rows.

[citation needed]

This whole thread is pointless. There is no definition of Big data.

Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal

#170

Post by drgath »

objclxt wrote: post #32
lobotryas wrote: post #4

Sounds great, although like with any retraction I doubt this will be enough to stop the spread of interview puzzles. Even I'm guilty of asking my share before I realized that the only thing that matters about the candidate is whether they can sit down and start writing code (and the quality of said code).

Google still ask puzzles: they just don't ask brainteasers . For example, write a program to find every possible word in a given Boggle board is a puzzle, but one you're going to solve by coding...rather than "how many piano tuners are there in New York", which is a rather different matter. I've interviewed on-site with Google several times, and always found the CS puzzles to be challenging but fair.

> Google still ask puzzles: they just don't ask brainteasers.

Isn't the only difference between "brainteasers", "puzzles", and real engineering challenges, just the usefulness of the result?

I get what you are saying though. Asking someone challenges rooted in technology seems so much more useful and natural than something involving ping pong balls and Lake Michigan.

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