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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

#171

Post by pekk »

mseebach wrote: post #139
skrebbel wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspected so. Still, as a super-amazingly competent genius engineer with no self esteem, I hope not many companies follow their lead.

What's the point of hiring a super-amazingly competent genius engineer if he's going to sit in a corner and think he's wrong all the time? If you don't offer your genius to the team, you might as well not have it. And no, parceling out work for you to go and excel at on your own is likely not a good use of your skill.

What a pile of bullying bullshit. If someone is skilled, they are skilled completely apart from whether they are constantly advertising themselves and putting other people down as worse than them.

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

#172

Post by lmm »

richbradshaw wrote: post #48
lmm wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's standard (or slightly pretentious) British English; I guess the US equivalent would be "majored in math at Edinburgh" (which would be equally incomprehensible to a Brit)

It's not really pretentious – it kinda depends on what university you went to. I typically say 'studied', but my friends who went to other unis say 'read'. I would take 'read' as a pretentious term.

As a brit my experience is that "read" is used exclusively by oxbridgers and contestants on university challenge.

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

#173

Post by pathy »

jmillikin wrote: post #132

How to drive clicks in four steps: 1. Invent a bunch of silly riddles that a non-technical reader might accept as tech interview questions. 2. Pull a major tech company out of a hat (today it's Google), and claim with no evidence that their interviews are based around silly riddles. The article will be cited for years as proof that people working at $COMPANY are weird and obtuse. 3. Wait a couple years. Ignore all ev…

I see you didn't read the article. The basis for the article is a NYT interview with a SVP at Google, claiming that the brainteasers are not useful (among other things). Surely that is good source? I haven't got a clue if Google actually used these kinds of questions but the interview sure seem to suggest it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...

That said, the riddles listed are of course a bit clickbaity but they did not conjure the story out of thin air.

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

#174

Post by chinpokomon »

dasil003 wrote: post #65
hkmurakami wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quote my friend who works in "Big Data": "sometimes I think Big Data is just Excel on 128GB of RAM"

Not to go all senselessly pedantic, but doesn't Excel have a limit of like 55,000 rows?

Not when you use it with Power Pivot.

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

#175

Post by theboss »

I'm still a student and like to interview at a lot of places, shop around, and keep practicing my interviewing skills.

I STILL go to interviews where I am ONLY asked these kinds of questions...It's embarrassing. If you ask me these questions for a 2 hour long interview then I'm not going to work for you...it's that simple

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

#176

Post by chinpokomon »

dagw wrote: post #77
dasil003 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to go all senselessly pedantic, but doesn't Excel have a limit of like 55,000 rows?

Current limit is 1,000,000 pr worksheet. However there is a tool called PowerPivot which lets you get around that limit and do analysis on larger data sets.

I didn't see this response when I replied to the parent. Power Pivot is pretty great when you can use it.

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

#177

Post by jimmaswell »

yen223 wrote: post #131
fduran wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not sure what the point of this question is. It seems all it does is to test whether the candidate has heard of Monopoly.

I'm familiar with Monopoly and I didn't think of Monopoly when I read the question.

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

#178

Post by chris_mahan »

rjd wrote: post #54
mossplix wrote: post #15

So how useless exactly were they? As long as you are looking for a "right" answer not a correct one, they are a very good metric for testing problem solving skills.

I got off to a real bad footing in a job interview using a questions like that once. With a guy looking for a 'right' answer, and it didn't go down well when I challenged his assumption. He asked how many plumbers worked in the city, to which I replied you could check the industry registry for qualified plumbers, you can probably filter them out by city. There was silence then I had the question clarified to how many…

You must not question the data. The phone book is data, and is therefore perfect. Imagine if people started questioning data...

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

#179

Post by plorkyeran »

eliben wrote: post #156
ap22213 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In this case at least the meaning it's drifting towards still actually means something rather than just a meaningless buzzword.

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

#180

Post by nkorth »

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.

Thanks, Quartz is literally unusable on my phone.
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