111–120 of 748 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the assessment has no relationship to the job requirements then the test assessment cannot be justified either
As much as I hate the current interview process, this isn't true. The justification foe the assessment is that the assessment is the defined set of hoops that the company who you are trying to get paid by has assigned.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In that case, the market should take them out, right?
Only if the other companies perform better, but since they also might have a corrupted culture that may not be the case. Also, relying on "the market" to fix things can take decades so it is not really a useful strategy for individuals.
If a company lasts decades, that’s a pretty good success. Not every company can be IBM, and the world is probably better off without too many IBMs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't there an alternative interpretation, that the internal evaluation process is just as broken as the hiring process?
Correct. You have unethical people now, you are probably “cheating” at work by taking credit for ideas not theirs.
Yes, it's fundamentally unfair to those interviewees who don't cheat. And the process is broken. However, the conclusion this person reaches - we must conduct these broken interviews in person so the cheaters can't cheat - is the wrong one. Look at it from the point of view of the hiring company now, not the interviewer. They got a person who was good enough (based on the merits of their actual work, not interview pe…
Correct! Making a harder-to-cheat "closed-book-test" isn't the answer.
A better answer would be to make it "open-book" — allow and expect interviewees to have their full libraries and reference sites open and ready to go. This is actually how they will be doing their work (we hope!). Then judge on efficient lookups AND insightful comments on how to build upon the found knowledge.
Or, based on the above sample recognize that the process is really totally broken, that almost anyone coming in will work out well (the cheaters clearly lacked the skill or confidence of OP, yet did fine in the actual job), and either fix the criteria (obviously difficult based on the last decade of HN discussions on the hiring sh^tshows), or just cut wasting resources on extensive interviews and take the first N applicants and be done with it.
I think that's more or less how I would summarize the sympathetic comments in here, but if I missed something or if I'm being unfair then let me know.
I for one think this kind of stuff is pretty shameful, and I don't see how the world can function if everyone were to think and act like that. The scariest thing for me is how all that's really changed since university, which was full of cheaters, is how much easier it's become, and I don't just mean in engineering. I mean in every facet of life we're basically awash in never before seen capacity to benefit from dishonesty.
I guess the silver lining is there will probably be incredible opportunity down the road to combat this, but nonetheless it's a little sad that it isn't inherent to the discipline of technology itself anymore. Like, there was a time where this kind of personality type would just go get an MBA, but Computer Science and Engineering were considered too hard to really be worth the effort. Obviously I don't mean to say that there were zero grifters, but on the whole the only people who pursued these disciplines were true, dyed in the wool nerds who simply thought making stuff was cool.
As a passing thought I've noticed that there's also sort of like a fierce loyalty to defending LLM's in the forums, often by people who display a certain amount of ignorance as to how they work. I wonder if there's a similar dynamic there as to the people who are justifying the cheaters in the comments?
I've done a lot of screening interviews and cheating does happen. Some of my favorites: * developer attempts to pass something off as video lag, as he attempts to lip sync someone else's answer. * developer had printed all the 'common' answers on the wall behind his computer, and would look up to them for reference as we were talking. Then the tape came off and covered him in a a paper stack overflow. * the glorious…
I grew up staunchly against cheating. Becoming an adult was hard. My whole university class cheated on a tough assignment - someone found the solution online and shared it around. I didn't look at it, took the challenge and gave it a lot of effort. I got a pretty bad mark and the rest of the class got top marks. I also see the same mindset in work. People don't prepare for presentations and then spitball when present…
You can’t really cheat your way to a better presentation. If the “spitballed” version is good enough for the situation, why expend a lot of effort on preparation? Maybe the problem is that people have low expectations when everyone delivers bad presentations. This kind of cultural thing is often easier to fix by changing the format rather than pushing for everyone to do more — in other words, ask “do we need all thes…
"Any questions?"
"How are we going to scale the data storage?"
"Oh, we're confident that the data will all fit in a single SQLite instance."
"Great."
It's only six months later, when it turns out it won't, and there's a lot of stress and panicked re-working, that the lack of preparation will be obvious. And by then, everyone will have forgotten the presentation.
I've done a lot of screening interviews and cheating does happen. Some of my favorites: * developer attempts to pass something off as video lag, as he attempts to lip sync someone else's answer. * developer had printed all the 'common' answers on the wall behind his computer, and would look up to them for reference as we were talking. Then the tape came off and covered him in a a paper stack overflow. * the glorious…
Tangentially related… Life insurance companies (in the USA 20 years ago when I sold it) would require a medical exam for every life insurance application. If the applicant commits fraud by having someone else take the examination (usually a blood draw, height and weight measurement, and maybe a heart EKG for bigger policies), the policy is considered valid after two years. Even if the insurance company finds out frau…
Taken back to the fraud in interviews, you could make the same argument that after some time working on the job and not gettimg fired, the risk of getting someone not actually qualified did not come to pass, so its more useful to look at the employees current performance than their original fraudulent interview.
Anecdotally, I have seen this with my friends and co-worker from school. The one who were good at marketing themselves often went further faster in hierarchy than the skillful ones who had trouble marketing themselves.