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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

#221

Post by rhizome »

mseebach wrote: post #139
skrebbel wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspected so. Still, as a super-amazingly competent genius engineer with no self esteem, I hope not many companies follow their lead.

What's the point of hiring a super-amazingly competent genius engineer if he's going to sit in a corner and think he's wrong all the time? If you don't offer your genius to the team, you might as well not have it. And no, parceling out work for you to go and excel at on your own is likely not a good use of your skill.

What's the point of hiring a super-amazingly competent genius engineer if he's going to sit in a corner and think he's wrong all the time?

Think of it this way: someone who is concerned with not doing the wrong thing is going to be more sure that what they do come up with is the right thing, that they aren't reinventing the wheel badly.

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

#222

Post by nostrademons »

themstheones wrote: post #108
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…

There are approximately 7 people on earth with an IQ of 190 or higher, so I'm calling bullshit on that requirement.

I've seen this misconception twice on the thread now, so I'm calling it out: IQ is not normally distributed. It has fat tails: the extreme ends of the distribution are much more common than a normal distribution would suggest. Some quick Googling indicated that Terman's data on high-IQ people (1921) showed IQs at 4 SDs (160ish) are about 15x more common than a Gaussian would predict, while at 5+ SDs (175-200ish) they can be up to 1000x more common than a Gaussian.

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

#223

Post by tokenadult »

tokenadult wrote: post #102

From the original New York Times article that Quartz has linkspammed here: "On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart." Long before this was reported in the New York Times, this was the fi…

REPLY TO UPDATE SELF: Yes, the correct term was actually "blogspam," and I appreciate (and upvoted) the grandchild reply that pointed that out. I see that now the Hacker News curators have changed the link on the story submission from pointing to Quartz to pointing to the original New York Times article, which fits the Hacker News guidelines.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(I mention this because many comments in this thread will be very confusing to newcomers if it is not made clear that the thread used to point to Quartz but now points to the New York Times.)

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

#224

Post by reinhardt »

killermonkeys wrote: post #195
Retric wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes lack of dates has always been a big complaint at the Palo Alto MENSA meet ups.

Bazinga!

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

#225

Post by sliverstorm »

rhizome wrote: post #221
mseebach wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point of hiring a super-amazingly competent genius engineer if he's going to sit in a corner and think he's wrong all the time? If you don't offer your genius to the team, you might as well not have it. And no, parceling out work for you to go and excel at on your own is likely not a good use of your skill.

What's the point of hiring a super-amazingly competent genius engineer if he's going to sit in a corner and think he's wrong all the time? Think of it this way: someone who is concerned with not doing the wrong thing is going to be more sure that what they do come up with is the right thing, that they aren't reinventing the wheel badly.

Yes, but someone who is paralyzed by fear of doing the wrong thing is never going to invent the wheel, forget about whether or not it has actually been invented yet.

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

#226

Post by sliverstorm »

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 other nice part about being able to estimate- you can often determine feasibility with a reasonable degree of confidence, for a minimal investment in effort.

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

#227

Post by eieio »

donohoe wrote: post #122
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.

We built Quartz to be as distraction free as possible - mind telling me what the "cruft" is?

I can't stand the huge fixed header and I'm sad that I'm seeing more and more of them on websites. If I plan on spending any amount of time on a website that has one, I immediately edit the css to add display: none because otherwise it'll drive me crazy.

It's a waste of space and it makes it much much harder for me to read on my laptop. Vertical space is way too valuable to throw away like that.

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

#228

Post by iyulaev »

ryguytilidie wrote: post #217

This always seemed so overhyped to me. I did hundreds of interviews at Google and I never once asked anyone a question anything like the ones described. It was generally stuff like "oh hey, you're going to do deep work on our unix systems? What is the difference between kill and kill -15?" We also didn't care about GPA. This all seems like super old information if it was ever true at all.

What is the difference between kill and kill -15?

Well, for one, the second isn't syntactically correct.

I can't decide what's worse, brainteasers or brainless trivia questions.

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

#229

Post by dfriedmn »

freework wrote: post #208
dpritchett wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm seriously put off by any talk of topgrading and 'a/b/c player' ranking. Have you gathered much data on the success of this book's approach in your firm? I'd love to hear a positive take on it.

Agreed. I think anyone can be an "A" player under the right conditions. Under different conditions, the same person can be a "D" player. I know I've had jobs were I was the wonderboy who was regarded as an A player all around. I've had other jobs where I was the black sheep "F" player who gets fired after one week of employment.

First commenter's co-founder here: Sure, you definitely need to screen for culture fit. There are great people who would be bad fits here. That said, we want people who have succeed in most positions they've had in the past. If there are two people who have had 4 jobs in their career, you're way more likely to pick the better if you favor the one who outperformed in 3 of those 4 jobs rather than 1 of the 4. When you combine that with looking closely at their experience as it fits with the role, and their fit with the culture, then you have a complete screening process.

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

#230

Post by nostrademons »

raldi wrote: post #130

I've never seen any citation that Google ever used these kinds of question. Especially the idiotic one about pushing a car to a hotel. I think it was just an urban legend and a good piece of linkbait. There must be thousands of people on HN who interviewed at Google over the years. Did anyone ever get a question like this?

I think brainteasers were used in PM interviews fairly early on (I want to say 2004-2007, but I'm not sure on the exact dates). I've met people that were familiar with the brainteaser-type interview question, but such questions were banned before I started in 2009.
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