131–140 of 330 posts
I am perplexed why anyone would think that interview performances has any interesting statistical relevance. Much more interesting would be how successful the candidate was after receiving a job at the company.
Until recently I worked at a startup as Machine Learning Engineer/Data Scientist. There I got some experience interviewing people and looking at their resumes. In my experience, which is very limited compared to this post, people who put an MOOC on their resume are usually less qualified compared to people who don't. There is nothing wrong with MOOCs, but they are almost always beginner-level. If you put them on your…
I think the point here are folks taking MOOCs for enrichment, not as a gateway to get a job. So for instance someone taking the ML course just for knowledge, not to try to get in the door as a data scientist
I am perplexed why anyone would think that interview performances has any interesting statistical relevance. Much more interesting would be how successful the candidate was after receiving a job at the company.
I'm perplexed as to how people don't think it has any relevance at all.
The entirety of every industry is based on 'interview performance' as being one fairly important factor of future success.
Interviews are obviously not perfect predictors, but they are pretty strongly correlated with outcomes.
Someone who does very well in a technical interview is more likely to be a 'good engineer' than someone who fails miserably - though I totally accept that is not always the case.
There's no doubt we could use a little more science to our approach, however.
"I’m excited to see that what mattered way more than pedigree was the actions people took to better themselves." so a degree from a top school is not earned (nor are admissions i guess), but rather conferred at birth? i beg to differ. the commentary on the "disutility" masters degrees is even worse.
I don't think it's entirely that black and white. If an undergraduate degree from a tier 1 school didn't cost approx. a quarter of a million dollars, along with the fact that your "peers" with rich parents will have attended a private school + tutoring + usually had a decent home-life; these things stack up, you can't claim it's a level playing field. Of course you need to be smart to get there in the first place (in…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sure this happens, yes. But, that's not what's going on here, IMHO. Asking a person to traverse and modify a linked-list (a very common problem) or to implement a B-tree are not 'tech outside their job' Most of these interviews are more like math problems than anything a practical developer would encounter. Shit, if these interviews were "What do you think of node?" or "What is Go's concurrency model?" I think ex…
Asking a person to traverse and modify a linked-list (a very common problem) or to implement a B-tree are not 'tech outside their job' Yes, it is. More to the point, it's built-in bias toward recent college graduates. Once someone's actually been out in the real world programming for several years, any space in their brain's metaphorical working set that was ever dedicated to remembering how to do this stuff has long…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Asking a person to traverse and modify a linked-list (a very common problem) or to implement a B-tree are not 'tech outside their job' Yes, it is. More to the point, it's built-in bias toward recent college graduates. Once someone's actually been out in the real world programming for several years, any space in their brain's metaphorical working set that was ever dedicated to remembering how to do this stuff has long…
I'll be honest, traversing a linked-list and implemented a B-tree (assuming someone reminds you what a B-tree is) are not particularly difficult problems. If you have trouble with those, I'm going to really wonder if your programming skills are really very good to begin with.
Also these days the trendy interview problem is longest common subsequence, which ends up testing "how recently did you review dynamic-programming techniques", not "can you code".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the interviews are "structured", the correlation between interview performance and job performance is probably around .3 based on meta-analyses of research findings. If the interviews are "unstructured", the correlation will be within sampling error of zero.
Do you have a source for this? I totally believe you, but I've been trying to find good empirical studies and authors to read on interviewing.
Until recently I worked at a startup as Machine Learning Engineer/Data Scientist. There I got some experience interviewing people and looking at their resumes. In my experience, which is very limited compared to this post, people who put an MOOC on their resume are usually less qualified compared to people who don't. There is nothing wrong with MOOCs, but they are almost always beginner-level. If you put them on your…
I think the point here are folks taking MOOCs for enrichment, not as a gateway to get a job. So for instance someone taking the ML course just for knowledge, not to try to get in the door as a data scientist
I am perplexed why anyone would think that interview performances has any interesting statistical relevance. Much more interesting would be how successful the candidate was after receiving a job at the company.
The conclusion is a bit obvious: if you ask people algorithms questions, the people who do the best will be people who spent a lot of time rote learning algorithms material. This means schools which place a lot of emphasis on the theoretical core or people who've taken online algorithms courses. I'd be much more interested to see performance on other questions e.g. Google's typical curveball for new grads is an archi…