Misidentifying talent
danluu.com
Misidentifying talent
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Re: Misidentifying talent
#2Every time this comes up, I can only think about how Irken society in Invader Zim was supposed to be absurd, but human nature looked at absurdity and decided to make it a parody.
Re: Misidentifying talent
#3The sad point is that in the current state, you get two leetcode style questions for round interview, and that's it. Good luck with that;
There is 0 interest in companies to improve the quality of the interview process. 0. They'd rather increase the funnel, instead improving the rate of good talent detection.
There is enough new fodder to go through every year, that improving quality of detecting good engineers, is not that important.
Re: Misidentifying talent
#4It’s striking that so many stories about the triumph of metrics over intuition involve games. I’m convinced that you should put statisticians in charge if your goal is to win a game. I’m not convinced that related behaviors, like constructing a game adjacent to the problem you’re actually trying to solve and treating game performance as a proxy (like LeetCode interviews! Or KPIs!) are helpful.
It’s also interesting that he brings up the blind audition here in the appendix. Blinding can of course remove biases about the person from the process, but it is still subjective. To make the “can’t manage what you don’t measure” point we would need to show that orchestra performance got better after we developed an algorithmic way of deciding how good an audition performance is. After all millions of dollars are on the line, are you really going to listen to some credentialed old man about which one he liked better? So backwards!
Re: Misidentifying talent
#5Funniest thing is that the companies with the most extreme leetcode interviews, Facebook, roblox, etc also fell the hardest in the most recent sell off. There’s even a quote by kieth rabois, one one the top VCs, that FB hired and built their culture around optimization, which has failed. They can’t innovate because innovative type people weren’t let into the company.
Re: Misidentifying talent
#6Funniest thing is that the companies with the most extreme leetcode interviews, Facebook, roblox, etc also fell the hardest in the most recent sell off. There’s even a quote by kieth rabois, one one the top VCs, that FB hired and built their culture around optimization, which has failed. They can’t innovate because innovative type people weren’t let into the company.
It makes sense.
How many creative and truly innovative thinking people do you know that will spend hours studying for and partaking in such a ridiculous interview process? It’s easily one of the top turn offs for me when it comes to FAANG companies. Not because it’s difficult, but because it’s utterly boring, and useless.
It seems these companies are far more interested in hiring very intelligent and analytical type people, but those who have no sense of outside the box thinking. Which in theory makes sense at scale, but in tech your head start will eventually fade, and those same people you’ve hired likely can’t bring you back.
Re: Misidentifying talent
#7Funniest thing is that the companies with the most extreme leetcode interviews, Facebook, roblox, etc also fell the hardest in the most recent sell off. There’s even a quote by kieth rabois, one one the top VCs, that FB hired and built their culture around optimization, which has failed. They can’t innovate because innovative type people weren’t let into the company.
It makes sense. How many creative and truly innovative thinking people do you know that will spend hours studying for and partaking in such a ridiculous interview process? It’s easily one of the top turn offs for me when it comes to FAANG companies. Not because it’s difficult, but because it’s utterly boring, and useless. It seems these companies are far more interested in hiring very intelligent and analytical type…
Here’s what’s funny, amazon and Microsoft are less about leetcode. Google has very hard questions but they are somewhat novel. Facebook has very tough questions but they are basically straight from the book, people getting hired there just need to memorize.
Smaller growth stock companies like coinbase or DoorDash tend towards the Facebook style of interviews.
If you look at stock prices, there’s a near direct correlation between difficulty of leetcode and stock price.
But that maybe because smaller growth oriented companies just need fast memorized results on the job, or it’s just discriminatory
Re: Misidentifying talent
#8Funniest thing is that the companies with the most extreme leetcode interviews, Facebook, roblox, etc also fell the hardest in the most recent sell off. There’s even a quote by kieth rabois, one one the top VCs, that FB hired and built their culture around optimization, which has failed. They can’t innovate because innovative type people weren’t let into the company.
It makes sense. How many creative and truly innovative thinking people do you know that will spend hours studying for and partaking in such a ridiculous interview process? It’s easily one of the top turn offs for me when it comes to FAANG companies. Not because it’s difficult, but because it’s utterly boring, and useless. It seems these companies are far more interested in hiring very intelligent and analytical type…
Intelligence is likely when you're knowledgeable but it is not a given.
Re: Misidentifying talent
#9I'm on a pretty small team, we don't have enough people or time to do a robust interview process, but we started contracting devs for a week before hiring them, and it has been a much better experience than any interview I could have done in 1-2 hours. Plus, they get paid and we get a little bit of work done even if things don't work out.
Re: Misidentifying talent
#10Funniest thing is that the companies with the most extreme leetcode interviews, Facebook, roblox, etc also fell the hardest in the most recent sell off. There’s even a quote by kieth rabois, one one the top VCs, that FB hired and built their culture around optimization, which has failed. They can’t innovate because innovative type people weren’t let into the company.
Talents, like perfect spouses, are incredibly hard to find but they are there in plain sight.
The founder has to be dogged - in fact - dedicate his life and time to finding these individuals. But what would drive a founder like that if it is not in his nature?