101–110 of 354 posts
After reading this I have a dumb question: The person behind the post is a CS major but only played a little bit with the C programming language in college — is this pretty common these days?
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Actually the primary correlate of SAT scores is not intelligence but wealth.
I suspect the actual correlation is not with wealth (i.e. giving money so somebody with low SAT scores would not actually improve their scores - unless he would have enough money to bribe whoever is overseeing the test of course ;) but with some things that correlate with wealth.
I actually like asking math questions on interviews. It shows how people approach a problem. Asking code questions in an arbitrary interview setting shows just about nothing - no access to a reference doc, somebody peering over your shoulder. Heck, I couldn't code my way out of a wet paperback in that setting. Certainly, asking only math questions is stupid as well, people should know at least a little about the stuf…
I think you don't get the point. Learning a new language after you programmed for 5 years in a variety of paradigms like assembler, object-oriented, purely functional, will take you between a couple of hours and a week. But if you have NOT had those 5 years of varied programming experience, then the new language is not your problem. Learning the concepts is, and that will take time.
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What if all your most relevant work is owned by previous employers? Restricting hires to people with decent personal projects and/ or extensive open source contributions isn't ideal either.
I'm fine with only hiring people who have done some work outside their workplace. If they're really great at programming, they have the drive to try new things outside work. Indeed, a couple good personal projects is probably the best predictor of skill you could find. (Skill and interest tend to be highly correlated.)
The problem is that IP agreements in the state of California say that the employer is not entitled to work done "on the employee's own time, without using the resources of their employer, and unrelated to the lines of business of their employer". Google claims to be in basically every tech-related business there is. Do something as simple as a mobile app or casual game and you can potentially get in trouble for it because it may compete with a division you've never heard of.
There's a procedure to get around this, but it's fairly slow and bureaucratic, and so many Googlers find it more efficient to do their "for fun" coding as 20% projects. Facebook has a similar system with their hackathons. Apple just works its devs so hard they don't have time for independent coding products.
I think that GitHub profiles are a good way to identify good devs who don't work for the leading tech companies, but once you're in one of them you a.) don't have time for personal programming projects anymore and b.) find that the stuff that your coworkers are doing is more interesting than pretty much anything you could work on as a solo dev.
This may be another reason people are eager to start their own company in lieu of working for someone else. If the questions are rubbish and completely unrelated to the actual job, then there's a huge disconnect between the interviewer (or HR company, as a lot of places outsource that) and where the actual work is to take place. I blame both. The irony is that, in an effort to hire the "smartest" people, they leave o…
This may be another reason people are eager to start their own company in lieu of working for someone else. If it is so, then it is a good thing. Right?
Here is an interesting idea that I had reading this. As a startup, what if you were to create a simple computer language that looked different from most other computer languages, at least somewhat different. Alternatively, just use one of the many really obscure programming languages out there, just make sure the applicant does not know it ahead of time. Give the applicant a 10-20 page reference manual for the langua…
It takes me a month or two to be comfortable with a new language. How long do you expect your interview to last?
> Breadth-first search from both ends. I believe this is deeply valuable. For some roles, I would much prefer to hire someone who can quickly see the value of breadth-first search from both ends. If he/she doesn't happen to know the syntax of Ruby, or Java, etc. it's less important to me.
If the person wrote the code in such a way that no one else could understand that it was a breath-first search, is that valuable? If they didn't even leave comments when they write code? If they didn't realise that you're using some slightly arcane feature of your language to keep a library of useful tree operations, and was expected to use the pre-existing function through macros/generics? Or was expected never to use such a technique because half the team wouldn't understand the code?
Hey, I know the theory on how to bake a large amount of cakes, breads, cookies, etc. I learned it by watching it on TV, and from cookery books. But actually it turns out that I'm a pretty crap baker, because I lack experience to know when I'm over-working/under-working dough, how to adjust cooking time with an unknown oven, etc. And I make a huge mess when I'm doing this, and take a lot longer than anyone with basically any experience of doing it at all.
The position I was filling is a part-time position for a CS major, sort of like an internship. I devote time to develop his/her skills, s/he would get real-world experience, and a little money to help with cost of living. If everything works out, a position could open up for full employment.
I had a pretty good idea what I was looking for. Someone that had good grasp on theory but had no experience coding. Preferably enrolled in Uni. I had 5 applicants but the only candidate I interviewed is enrolled in Math-CS.
I basically tried to gauge if he had deep interests and asked him to code a bit, solve a simple control (find me the article with the highest hitcount from the day a week ago, gave him 10 minutes).
He failed the coding test but I made the hire regardless. Reason why was 2 things out of the 4 hours we spent together: When I asked him who he considered the father of CS he rattled off von Neuman, Djikstra and Knuth. Yeah, you can make that argument I suppose, but he knew who the influential people were. The other thing was: even if he failed the coding test he failed it by not reading the code examples quite right, he was using my code to try to help himself solve the problem. I'm sure he'll work out.
We as a field should employ internships a lot more than we do, get the college kids and undergrads working on real-world problems a lot more than we do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect the actual correlation is not with wealth (i.e. giving money so somebody with low SAT scores would not actually improve their scores - unless he would have enough money to bribe whoever is overseeing the test of course ;) but with some things that correlate with wealth.
Money buys access to tutors and training materials. It buys access to free time for practicing for your SAT. It also buys opportunity to repeatedly retake the SAT until you get a grade you like.
"Does test preparation help improve student performance on the SAT and ACT? For students that have taken the test before and would like to boost their scores, coaching seems to help, but by a rather small amount. After controlling for group differences, the average coaching boost on the math section of the SAT is 14 to 15 points. The boost is smaller on the verbal section of the test, just 6 to 8 points. The combined effect of coaching on the SAT for the NELS sample is about 20 points."
http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionst...