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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

#151

Post by donohoe »

engtech wrote: post #133
donohoe wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

1. when I go to this link: http://qz.com/96206/google-admits-those-infamous-brainteaser... It shows several stories at once, not just the google brainteasers stories. 2. In general, people would rather read the real article instead of a summary of the article. When someone submits a summary of an article to a site like HN or reddit, it is usually flagged as blog-spam because we'd rather read/support the original cont…

  1. ... It shows several stories at once, not just the google brainteasers stories.
It shows one article initially. It will load the next one as you scroll down and approach the end. This is not counted as a Page View unless you actually continue down into it - you'll notice the URL change at that point)

  2. In general, people would rather read the real article
  instead of a summary of the article.
I would argue that this is a "real article". The NYT piece were 8 questions and answers. This article is based on just one of those questions - and expands on it. I'm not an editor/write so I'll avoid going deeper but thats my take-away.

  3. For long form articles, nothing beats reading the print-preview page...
Tru dat.

  Even aside from that, the New York Times has some of the best 
  information architecture in the business. These are the guys 
  who did NYTProf. Their web team is awesome.
I used to work there :)

  4. Some visual issues I had with quartz:
  4.1: No left/right whitespace around images.
The Featured Image (between Headlines and Text) is meant to be full-width to a max. Inline images should have left/right whitespace

  4.2: I see a vertical scroll bar in the middle of my screen on Firefox.
Can you email me a screenshot (email in profile)? There are a few Firefox specific bugs we're working on this week. This may be one of them.

  4.3 The black header bar which is fixed and stays on the screen 
  all the time even though it conveys no useful information to me.
True. Intentional. It can be expanded which reveals the large site map. There are big pros and cons to hiding it. Its an on-going conversation.

However we used to have it disappear altogether and people complained about that too....

  4.4: A bunch of text blurbs on the left side of the screen 
  that convey no useful information to me.
Its a list of Headlines - thats all that is meant to be conveyed.

  You say you're trying to be as distraction free as possible, 
  but that's not actually true because it isn't possible to 
  have your business model and be as distraction free as possible.
  The print preview page is as distraction free as possible.
I'm confused. That doesn't make much sense to me. Yes, I am saying that we intend to be "distraction free as possible" - I'm not sure that I have to add a big asterisk * that covers "within the confines of an ad based business model" any more than I should also add "within the confines of a browser running a web site thats not a book" - I'm not trying to be snarky, just hard know what to make of what you said exactly..

Also - take a look at the ads... do we have them all over the place? Nope - we have them at the end of an Article - not in-between, not embedded, not inline. Thats important.

We are not perfect, but we aspire to continuously improve. Focus is on the user and the reading experience but with recognition that we have to pay the bills for 20 or so editors and journalists across five (maybe more?) countries. (I'm not counting devs, sales, hr etc in that)

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

#152

Post by jedc »

raverbashing wrote: post #113
ownagefool wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's not talking about 30k rows, he's talking about 30k people. It could easily be big data if you monitor & document their every working moment, but they probably aren't doing that so you're probably right.

Yes, 30k people, so it's what? Some interview reports, some performance reviews, HR report/history of the employee? It really doesn't look like something big.

1 million applications received. Say 10% of those go into some sort of evaluation process = 100k assessments/year. Say 10% of those go through an interview panel of (on average 3 interviews) = 30k assessments/year For 30k employees with (say on average) 2 assessments per year = 60k assessments/year.

So 1 million CVs per year on which to do some sort of evaluations, and 200k individual assessments per year. Over the past five years that roughly 6 million data points.

Since there's no hard-and-fast rule on this, that's why I called it small Big Data.

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

#153

Post by Ma8ee »

caf wrote: post #137
donohoe wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't know about cruft, but Quartz just doesn't work at all for me. The spinner just spins on, forever.

I don't know about cruft, but I just don't like it.

I'm going to try to be a little bit more helpful. At first I didn't really know why I felt a bit uncomfortable on the page, but I think it comes from a feeling a bit lost. My attempts to try to understand why:

1. The pictures don't have any borders, so at first I think a part of the picture is hidden outside the window. I widen the window to see the whole picture, but instead of revealing any missing part the picture just gets bigger.

2. If I continue increase the size of the window until the picture stops scaling, I eventually see the grey area to the right, which give me the feeling of locking behind the coulisses at a theater. I shouldn't be there and see that. Contributing to that might be the lack of shadow on the right side, which makes that border flat compared to the left side.

3. I scroll down to gauge the length of the article before I start reading, and it just continue to scroll and I realize after a while that I'm in some other article and I have scrolled through a whole bunch of them. The boundaries between the articles are very weak compared with the pictures and in particular the thick black fields with the captions.

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

#154

Post by ctdonath »

fduran wrote: post #106
Udo wrote: post #100

There are questions that are actually fun and I can sort of see them starting a conversation with the right kind of interviewer that tells both parties a lot about who they're dealing with. From the article: > How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle? Basic economics estimating - probably not that useful and a bit dull, but hey why not. At least the problem has several angles to it that might be…

> A man pushed his car to a hotel and lost his fortune. What happened? horrible question, it took me a few seconds to figure out they are talking about the game Monopoly.

A horrible question for many reasons. It requires not just knowledge of Monopoly, but instant recollection thereof. It says more about the questioner's limited world view (presumes everyone knows about X, where X is irrelevant to the job) than the interviewer's intelligence. It is a learnable answer: skim How Would You Move Mt. Fuji? and similar "clever question" books and you can recall the answer rather than deducing it (the latter being far more important to the job). The worst part, I think, is the automatic dismissal of any creative & applicable "wrong" answer; before seeing the "Monopoly" reference, I was imagining some despairing ex-executive cashing out his life savings, putting it in the car with a can of gasoline, pushing it down a hill into the offending hotel and watching it all go up in smoke ... but because I didn't say "Monopoly", no credit for creativity etc.

On that last point, I recall interviewing at Microsoft: Asked questions about automatic control of venetian blinds, for one question I knew I was missing some obvious simple checkbox-type answer. I told her "I know I'm missing the obvious here, so I'm just gonna pick some alternative solution and talk thru it so you can see how I think" and proceeded to elaborate on a complex yet viable & marketing-impressive implementation. Wasn't gonna let some "correct" answer stand in my way...

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

#155

Post by [deleted] »

mik3y wrote: post #134
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 conducted hundreds of interviews at Google and never once asked (or saw someone else on my slate ask) a brainteaser such as these. Urban legend.

[deleted]

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

#156

Post by eliben »

ap22213 wrote: post #88
eliben wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the use of the term "Big Data" there bullshit. Even for the largest company like Walmart with 2 million employees - having some data about every one is hardly "big". Collect a whole deluge of data about each and you hardly fill a USB drive. I realize that reporters like to throw buzzwords into anything to cater to the "simpler" readers. But come one, this is outright silly.

I don't know, I'm starting to change my opinion of this. I used to think 'big data' meant anything that didn't fit easily into a RDBMS. At least petabytes. But, more recently, in conversations with non-programmers, I see that 'big data' to them, means 'broad data' - it means trying to track everything possible and make sense of it. The average business user is really excited to be able to cross-relate disparate types…

If you're right then it's a sad situation. I hate it when terms start morphing into unrelated interpretations by means of public drift.

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

#157

Post by genwin »

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 like Quartz in general but usually get tripped up by the scroll bar within a frame. My mouse is normally near the right edge of the monitor, outside the frame.

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

#158

Post by skwirl »

kybernetyk wrote: post #42
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…

> "That's a challenge. I'm going to go interview there just to prove to these suckers that I'm better." Well that, or: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect

It would also unfortunately filter out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome

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

#159

Post by ChuckMcM »

rdouble wrote: post #25
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.

Is Google's HR data set really "Big Data" or just "data?" Seems like it would fit into a normal database. Or maybe even an unwieldy Excel spreadsheet.

Probably not, but the year that I joined they had processed a million resumes. So they probably have some level of data (ranging from phone screen only to on-site interview) on anywhere from 8 to 12 million engineering candidates. For the folks who have come on site there might be a 5 - 8k words of text in their file for phone screens probably less than 1K depending on if they include a code sample or not. Most of the folks they processed at the time didn't get to on-site interviews so it probably skews to the lower end.

Its "not" big data in the sense that it needs a cluster to process but it is a pretty large sample set of the current population of engineers who might want to work there.

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

#160

Post by drgath »

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?

From the article

> "On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time"

That implies Google has some data to back it up, whether they themselves previously asked those types of questions, or they derived it from some other means. Either way, they aren't doing themselves any favors to dispel that urban legend. Most reading that will just assume they used to ask brainteasers, but no longer.

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