I think you'll find this response by @gayle to be spot on. SORRY, FOLKS: GOOGLE HASN’T CHANGED THEIR INTERVIEW QUESTIONS BY GAYLE MCDOWELL, EX-GOOGLE ENGINEER & HIRING COMMITTEE MEMBER http://blog.geekli.st/post/53477786490/sorry-folks-google-ha...
In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
271–280 of 285 posts
Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
#272"How many gas stations in Raleigh?" I had a couple questions like this at a couple of interviews more than a few years back now. In both cases, I sat for a minute, and asked a few questions back, like "do you mean the city limits of Raleigh, or the metro area?", "how do you define gas station - do we include public-only, or private fueling places?", etc. Part of this was buying some time, because the question caught…
> That interviewer told me I was the only person who asked clarifying questions before blurting out an answer or walk through.
I once got negative feedback from an interviewer: I'd asked too many questions about the questions.
Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
#273Earlier 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…
I have to agree with this at some level. I have seen startups trying to pull this type of crap. I haven't figured out why, it could be because they are trying to create "elite culture" that just doesn't fit or they are trying to seem more special so you will put up with BS and 60h+ weeks.
Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
#274The 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.
Its "deep learning" data hahaha.
Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
#275"How many gas stations in Raleigh?" I had a couple questions like this at a couple of interviews more than a few years back now. In both cases, I sat for a minute, and asked a few questions back, like "do you mean the city limits of Raleigh, or the metro area?", "how do you define gas station - do we include public-only, or private fueling places?", etc. Part of this was buying some time, because the question caught…
> That interviewer told me I was the only person who asked clarifying questions before blurting out an answer or walk through. I once got negative feedback from an interviewer: I'd asked too many questions about the questions.
That probably means you two should not work together.
Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
IQ by definition fits the bell curve. A given normalized IQ test is only good for a given rang and time period and when incorrectly interpreted outside of that range will produce excesive people with high IQ's. Also a test that's accurate +/- 10 IQ points is going to bump more people from 150 to 160 than drop people from 160 to 150 simply because there are more people at 150 than 160. Not to mention the tendency for…
Alex3917 brought up the same point in the other sub-thread where I raised this, and my response was basically "What's the point then?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5915459 Yes, you can define a concept as a normal distribution centered at 100 with a standard deviation of 15. But if you claim that this concept can be measured with IQ tests, and then the observed distribution of IQ scores doesn't match the pred…
Sit back and think about this for a second, if you define IQ in some other fashion you can't really have multiple IQ tests just the score on one specific test. As to having problems with a specific test, just because a specific laser rang finder has issues does not mean we need to redefine the inch.
PS: There is no way they had enough data to support an IQ rang up to 230. Do you bave any idea how many people you need to sample to have 50 people with an IQ between 205 and 220.
Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
#277The 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?
Hi,
I say cruft because I'm reading on mobile. I've got a Galaxy Note 2, and I'm using Chrome. It's hardly a slouch of a machine.
First, after clicking the link, I have to watch your spinner for a ~5 seconds. I'm on 65Mbps ADSL - just how much content are you sending me?
Second, the sheer weight of the JavaScript slows everything down. My browser is perfectly capable of scrolling through a page - yet because you've overloaded that, the scrolling is slow, jumpy, and the text renders poorly.
Thirdly, the Note has a huge screen, so I don't mind your static header. If I had a small screen it would piss me off.
Finally, when I switch from Portrait to Landscape, your page jumps all over the place.
Now, compare that to the Mobile NYT page. Yours looks more beautiful, but the NYT is quicker, easier to read, and doesn't get in my way.
You have great content - and an interesting product - but it needs to go on a diet and be user tested on a wider range of devices. I dread to think how it performs on low end phones.
T
Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, is Google admitting the questions are hopeless, or are they saying that their interviewer's reactions to the answers to those questions are hopeless? Because fixing interviews is harder than just working out hwat questions to ask.
I dunno about google, but my experience was more copy cat behavior by someone that didn't get the purpose of it I think... maybe I was to blame as well as I pushed back expecting to be challenged more.. not just told I was wrong. It ended up worse then useless for both of us involved.
Dodged a bullet, anyone can see your answers were at least a good as the phone book one. Nothing worse than a managers who relies on authority to backup their flawed decisions just to spare their own ego. Sounds like a toxic org culture
Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
#279Insofar as this interview speaks to the relevance of brainteasers to actual software development / engineering, it fails to provide a meaningful topic of conversation. It surprises me that nobody's pointed out that at best the conclusions are relevant to engineering "leadership" performance, rather than -- as I expected for "Google" and "head-hunting" -- coding performance. Sure, people skills and team skill are important, but if you're going to get good at selecting for leadership and ignore selecting for productivity, to the extent they're not related you're not going to be very good at creating and maintaining software. Although software isn't 100% of Google's success and coding productivity isn't 100% of software success, it's pretty important.
Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
#280Earlier 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.
Simple, the point is to boost the interviewers ego, nothing more. This example is the kind of mean-spirited bullshit that leads me to loathe brain-teasers.