181–185 of 185 posts
If you want a really big competitive advantage, figure out how to hire great people who don't interview well.
It's simpler. Hire people who don't suck and train them. And, amazingly enough, you find those people generally become quite good.
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> Because jobs are just as social as intimate relationships, if not more so. For very small or family companies, maybe. In small communities, maybe, but small communities could also include people from any horizon. But in other cases, I disagree. Work and production is the blood of human civilization. Generally, the free market ideology says that if you're competent, it's the only relevant parameter. Social filters a…
If you don't exclude socially toxic people from your company, talented people who don't want to work with that type of person will leave. I know multiple people who have left or transferred because of difficult coworkers, and more who have left because of difficult managers. If one toxic person can't outperform all the talented people who will leave, it is in the company's best interests not to hire that person. Yes,…
I see your point, and yes, there's a difference. I still believe those people can be worked with, in some way or another. Being too selective at the workplace isn't a healthy way to run society.
It's true that there's a difference between discriminating them and avoiding them, but the result and the intention are the same, in my view. Avoiding them is just politically correct and acceptable, but the truth is, it's the same process.
The nazis lost the war, but they won the battle of social darwinism.
> If you are an irritating person that no one wants to be around, you will be socially excluded.
What's not really what I'm talking about. And that's a nature fallacy. The role of civilization has always been to fix the problems of nature. There are many ways to interpret some socials signs as being "irritating". They're often normative or arbitrary.
> I don't know of any movement that is going to champion your cause.
Socialism, would it be democratic, or any form of progressivism, attempts to aim at that cause. Europe is more progressive about this.
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Some technical questions are really sink or swim. [0] I've seen interviews get totally derailed by a simple FizzBuzz question. [1] I wonder if the GRE situation doesn't have more to do with selection bias, ie applications with a score lower than a certain threshold aren't considered at all or that folks that aren't convinced of their ability in math & science simply won't apply to graduate school. [0] https://blog.co…
I’d completely agree that asking some technical questions is pretty important, and my experience is that they don’t have to be particularly difficult at all, you can filter a lot of people with very basic questions. I have several first hand stories that match the one you heard about the FizzBuzz question. People who refuse to answer easy technical questions and/or get angry about being asked them are a HUGE red flag…
Or most likely can't.
> I think it’s plausible since success in grad school and primary output in grad school is papers & writing & a thesis
That's true. What's missing from the picture is that a great communicator who isn't a chemist will never apply to a PhD program in chemistry.
> The same is true for working at a company, the majority of very successful people aren’t the coders
That's not really going to help fill technical positions.
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I’d completely agree that asking some technical questions is pretty important, and my experience is that they don’t have to be particularly difficult at all, you can filter a lot of people with very basic questions. I have several first hand stories that match the one you heard about the FizzBuzz question. People who refuse to answer easy technical questions and/or get angry about being asked them are a HUGE red flag…
> It’s a sign the person doesn’t enjoy coding or work. Or most likely can't. > I think it’s plausible since success in grad school and primary output in grad school is papers & writing & a thesis That's true. What's missing from the picture is that a great communicator who isn't a chemist will never apply to a PhD program in chemistry. > The same is true for working at a company, the majority of very successful peopl…
I wouldn't jump to that conclusion. It might be true sometimes, but there are people who can code but get offended by such tests. I'm saying it doesn't matter if they can code or not, because getting angry about easy questions is a good reason to reject the candidate, aside from their technical skills. It's demonstrating a lack of willingness. They might be an amazing coder, but not a team player. They might be unfriendly. They might be defensive about their skills, or assuming a golden resume should exempt them from coding tests. They might not be able to code. No matter what the cause is, I have a reason to avoid hiring that person.
> What's missing from the picture is that a great communicator who isn't a chemist will never apply to a PhD program in chemistry.
While true, I'm not sure why that matters? PhD applicants do have a wide range of scores on their GREs, and you can still control for those scores and adjust, as well as being able to look at all science fields and not just chemsitry. If the correlation between outcomes and writing scores is higher than the correlation between outcomes and math/science scores, it doesn't really matter that you haven't measured people who weren't interested, does it?
BTW, googling around currently gets me a metric ton of results and studies concluding that GREs don't predict graduate school success beyond the first year. I'm not finding much on the subject tests vs math vs language, but it looks like the current consensus is that GREs are bad predictors and cause some gender/race/class bias problems.
> That's not really going to help fill technical positions.
I'm saying the successful coders are the ones who are better at communication, among the coders -- counting only coders who already have the job. And the successful grad students are the ones who are better writers, counting only grad students who are already enrolled in a science PhD. That's what I meant about controlling for the bias. Being able to communicate and write well is a major skill needed in technical positions, and the technical people who excel are the ones who are better at explaining, communicating, writing, publishing, etc.
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I'll give my limited perspective. Software engineering is a field that is both requires breadth and depth at a very high bar for acceptance. From the interviewing side and the many interviews I've been through, it often feels impossible to overcome. The breadth that the field requires leaves gaps in knowledge, where anecdotally I've been asked what's a language I'm an expert in, or to detail the deep particulars of r…
Seems totally reasonable, thanks for sharing your perspective. I’d agree that a lot of interviews can range from hard to insane. I’m really curious what that means in terms of measurable outcomes... like how many fresh CS graduates are completely failing to land a job? How many companies are failing to find candidates? Stuff like that... FWIW, I warn people I’m going to ask questions they don’t know, and I ramp the q…
I think it's great to challenge people, and honestly a candidates reaction to a hard question is probably one of the best indicators.