311–320 of 324 posts
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First one depends on the bowling ball. Most alleys have balls ranging from 7lb to 16lb, all the same volume, and the crossover point where they’d sink is 11.6lb. If it was a floating bowling ball, the lake water level would stay the same when you toss it from a boat. If it were a sinking one, it would decrease.
That's why the problem statement specifies that the bowling ball sinks.
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This can't have been recent. Or perhaps it was and they violated the law. A standard IQ test is probably quite good at assessing if you'll be good at a programming job but it is also quite illegal unless it has passed through a battery of compliance paperwork - which it actually cannot pass because it would require the output of IQ tests to be race-equal and they cannot be both an IQ test and race-equal. This is lite…
I'm a broken record about this, but no, it's not illegal to administer IQ tests in white-collar employment, and it doesn't take a battery of compliance paperwork to do so. This is an Internet myth.
Not even brain teasers or IQ. Just: can applicant FizzBuzz? Verboten!
This is how, in a mass job application world, enterprises end up with >80% of coders, all making 6 figures, that can't FizzBuzz.
A hack to get the enterprise to assess is find the third party SWE test providers to big brand logos the board recognize, brands under the same risk governance / regulatory regimes, and ask "what do we know they don't?" First, the board know and respect those brands. Second, the question makes the board consider what they think about those in charge of the failing capabilities internally. This is something now both easy for the board to discuss, and obviously done by good references. Ok, let's try empirical evals.
Countless such broken record warranting beliefs clanging around 100k employee enterprises. McKinsey, BCG, PWC, KPMG -- all they need to do to justify 8 figure bill for the year is undo any one of them.
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Its funny how some people react to these? I suspect you see them as time wasters which is why you end the interview. I see them as ice-breakers and rather enjoy them because they are fun to talk through.
I am on my 50's now, if I have to prove that I am worthwhile being an employee with such teasers instead of what I have done thus far, I rather spend my time elsewhere, unless I am desperate for getting the position.
HR is modern priesthood, and their function is to prevent the "unwashed" from ascending up the higher ranks. Now there I've made it much worse (or better!) than the actual reality, which is that there's just not enough quality engineering jobs no matter which way you cut it and all of this theatrics result from scarcity.
We have a perfectly good mechanism for dealing with scarcity, it's called scarcity. It's more plausible that the issue is this being a lemon market
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Several (not many relative to the total industry, but several) large household-name companies publicly do general cognitive testing for white collar roles, and the companies that administer these tests have logo crawls just like any SAAS company of their clients. These companies have enormously deep pockets and would be juicy targets for employment law practices. But nothing happens, because this is mostly not a real…
It seems to be quite accurate that many of these tests are publicly referenced. e.g. (PDF warning) https://www.pwc.com/m1/en/careers/documents/assessment-proce... and the provider is https://www.shl.com/ I took the practice test to completion that PWC recommends and just to give people an idea of these cognitive tests. It was a series of questions that went: > Which statement describes you best? > 1. I usually make d…
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I'm a broken record about this, but no, it's not illegal to administer IQ tests in white-collar employment, and it doesn't take a battery of compliance paperwork to do so. This is an Internet myth.
Not only Internet. It's held view among risk-management-heavy enterprises, some of which might even insist, beyond the claim in this thread, that " any anbility assessment is illegal". To be fair, maybe someone in HR read it on Facebook or LinkedIn, showed risk management a (doesn't have to be real) legal risk they could head off. So they ban people evals, even for skilled trades. Not even brain teasers or IQ. Just:…
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I have kind of the same personal experience - a couple of days answering questions about the scalability and resilience of a fictional web app and enterprise integrations. I’m very much a generalist and kept to standards and terms not specific to AWS infra. They ”passed” me but wanted a follow-up after going through some training packages to make sure I could translate everything to AWS. At the time I was leaving a b…
> I don’t want to sell stuff, I just want to build things. While this resonates with me and probably the majority of the HN readership, I also want to be paid (handsomely) to build things. But in every case where someone pays me to build things, they want to sell it to someone (if they haven’t already sold it before I built it). I think the important difference is whether you believe the thing you’re building is good…
Certainly not every enterprise setting is like this, but they do exist, or the setting can even be created if just enough people of the right stuff end up together.
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Things that open-ended are ripe for abuse, which is to say when you have a team of white techbros, guess which candidates get high marks on these ad-hoc questions?
From the comment I was replying to: > Unless it is for a position I really, really want, or are unemployed and every opportunity counts, that is usually where the interview ends for me This person is close minded and is filtering themselves out of the process. This is ideal. Are you saying you’re against all open-ended questions in the interview process?
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It seems to be quite accurate that many of these tests are publicly referenced. e.g. (PDF warning) https://www.pwc.com/m1/en/careers/documents/assessment-proce... and the provider is https://www.shl.com/ I took the practice test to completion that PWC recommends and just to give people an idea of these cognitive tests. It was a series of questions that went: > Which statement describes you best? > 1. I usually make d…
I am positive that I have answered exactly this set of questions as part of a screening test to be allowed to take a Management Certificate course about 15 years ago.