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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

#231

Post by drewvolpe »

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.

Definitely not. And it's a good example of how useful POD ("plain old data") can be. They ask 6 team members 18 questions about what they think of their boss and give those 108 datapoints to her and it's tremendously valuable.

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

#232

Post by Thrymr »

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.

> I hate it when terms start morphing into unrelated interpretations by means of public drift.

That's how language has always worked. There are people who are still uptight by the current "misuse" of words like "awesome" and "hopeful", but those of us who grew up with different meanings in common usage mostly just shrug.

For technical terms, usually I can live with words having domain-specific meaning that differs from common usage, but "theory" is one I still can't get over. It causes too much miscommunication.

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

#233

Post by astrobiased »

Retric wrote: post #165
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…

Looking for people with high IQ's with the right background is basically a waste of time. There are plenty of ways to define IQ's but 160 is around 1 in 30,000 and there are only something like ~200 graduating highschool each year. If 5 percent of them study programming you looking a say 10 new genius programmers every year. And plenty of them avoid SV for reasons as simple as the limited dating pool. The simple trut…

My dad was part of a company in Boston that only had employees with an IQ of 140 and up. I asked him how it went and he laughed and said it naturally fell into ruins. Key point: there's a lot more to employees than just quantifiable numbers like GPA, IQ and such.

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

#234

Post by HelloMcFly »

nostrademons wrote: post #220
Retric wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking for people with high IQ's with the right background is basically a waste of time. There are plenty of ways to define IQ's but 160 is around 1 in 30,000 and there are only something like ~200 graduating highschool each year. If 5 percent of them study programming you looking a say 10 new genius programmers every year. And plenty of them avoid SV for reasons as simple as the limited dating pool. The simple trut…

IQ has fat tails: the extreme ends of the distribution are much more common than a bell curve would predict.

Do you have evidence for that? I've worked on cognitive ability testing as it related to workplace performance, and have never seen anything that deviated dramatically from a normal distribution, especially at the high end.

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

#235

Post by fishtoaster »

Jabbles wrote: post #8

I don't understand people's problem with estimating. It's a useful skill. Perhaps it would be better if the questions actually related to technology, rather than golf balls - but the principle is the same. For instance - "how many hard drives does Gmail need?" requires a rough guess of how many users Gmail has (if you're interviewing at Google, you should know it's 1e8-1e9). How much space each one takes (probably no…

I used to think estimation questions were useful. I still think that estimation ability is something a programmer needs for exactly the reasons you state.

However, I used to ask one estimation question (How many hours have you spent coding over the course of your life) on all my interviews. Over time, I lost interest in it because almost everyone got it "right" (took an acceptable route and arrived at a reasonable estimate). The only people that got it wrong were ones I decided to reject for other reasons (this being a semi-technical but mostly ask-about-experience phone interview).

So, although I agree it's a useful skill, I don't think it's worth askin estimation questions from my personal experience.

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

#236

Post by spudlyo »

iyulaev wrote: post #228
ryguytilidie wrote: post #217

This always seemed so overhyped to me. I did hundreds of interviews at Google and I never once asked anyone a question anything like the ones described. It was generally stuff like "oh hey, you're going to do deep work on our unix systems? What is the difference between kill and kill -15?" We also didn't care about GPA. This all seems like super old information if it was ever true at all.

What is the difference between kill and kill -15? Well, for one, the second isn't syntactically correct. I can't decide what's worse, brainteasers or brainless trivia questions.

Pedantic nonsense. Most of the time when you're using kill you're going be using the bash shell built-in, where it is syntactically correct.

kill [-s sigspec | -n signum | -sigspec] [pid | jobspec] ...

Even so, with /bin/kill -sigspec is still valid and common usage, even if it is not documented in the manpage.

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

#237

Post by tbrownaw »

freework wrote: post #210

This topic/discussion reminds me of a movie I saw recently It was called "That guy...who was in that thing". It is a documentary about working actors. Not Big time superstars like Tom Cruise, but the small time 'character' actors. Anyways, there was one part in the movie where they start talking about auditions. All four or five of the actors they were interviewing for the movie unanimously spoke badly about the typi…

Making an engineer do puzzles like FizzBuzz is a lot like making an actor act out a 20 second scene without any time to prepare or a proper "scene partner" to act alongside of.

FizzBuzz is self-contained tho, so maybe a better comparison would be to asking for a dramatic poetry reading?

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

#238

Post by tjohns »

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?

Just to balance out the negative comments, I actually really like Quartz.

- Scrolling down into the next article and having the article list as a sidebar is a neat way to encourage exploration. It makes the site a bit more "sticky".

- I like that ads are unobtrusive and placed at the end of the articles. And unlike nytimes.com, there's no paywall.

- I find the site's overall design crisp and relatively uncluttered compared to most news sites.

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

#239

Post by fatjokes »

contingencies wrote: post #29

Google reputation in shreds; funds transparent PR stunt

Huh? Google's reputation in shreds? How so? If you're referring to NSA issue, that's the American government's reputation you're talking about. Google (and almost every other big tech company) was simply compelled to follow the law.

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

#240

Post by ant512 »

Plutor wrote: post #121
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 necessarily (and actually that would be a terrible answer. The highest rent in Monopoly with a hotel is $2000, and I would hardly call that a "fortune". The point of the question is to establish how well you gather additional information when the initial description is unsatisfactory. Anyone who's been an engineer knows you have to do this every single day. (Not that it's a good interview question.)

Monopoly was first published in 1935 and the prices haven't increased since. That makes the cost of a stay at the most expensive hotel $34,000 in today's money, which is far more than I'd ever pay to stay at a real hotel...

Ignoring inflation, you can compare the price of staying at that hotel with buying the land it's built on for a relative estimation of the cost.

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