Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Lesson to Unlearn

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 588 posts

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#381

Post by rglullis »

mwfunk wrote: post #355
knzhou wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have to try, because the alternative to standardized testing isn't some egalitarian utopia, it's nepotism.

Yeah. I love HN and many of the thoughts expressed on it, but if there's one thing that always jumps out at me as being an incredibly widely held cognitive bias in the tech community, it's a tendency to view certain things in a very black and white, binary fashion, and to treat certain very complicated, messy problems with lots of social nuances as if they were simple problems, if only everyone could be rational abou…

Sorry, it seems that you are jumping into conclusions that were never warranted. Chesterton's fence is a principle that I learned a while ago and I am not defending that we need to throw everything away.

What I am saying is that what you regard as a "90% solution at best" is actually not a solution at all. Standardized tests are terrible predictors of performance on actual jobs. If standardized tests (or IQ tests or anything that is supposed to be a proxy for measuring performance) shows time and again that it only manages to measure people that are good to "study for the test", then why do we keep trying to use them to measure performance? Is it because it "the only thing we have"? This seems like saying "I am lost in Rome but all I have is a map of Paris, let me use that anyway."

And no, I am not proposing some other solution to replace it.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#383

Post by retsibsi »

kick wrote: post #297
coffeemug wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you cannot. IQ is highly correlated with wealth and is also highly heritable. So in all likelihood what you've observed is that smart kids win academic competitions, and also happen to be from rich families. If you take a bunch of kids with an IQ of 100 (or 115, or even 130) and put them into private schools they'll do a little better but they won't be winning any academic competitions.

The available data disagrees with you on this: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1238041

> The available data disagrees with you on this:

> https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1238041

That article doesn't seem relevant. 'Poverty impedes cognitive function' is entirely compatible with 'IQ is highly correlated with wealth and is also highly heritable', and with the claim that private school can't make a genius out of a kid who lacks an extremely high IQ.

edit: maybe I misunderstood, and you only were only pointing out that some potential-genius kids have that potential stifled by poverty. But that doesn't seem to be the original point of disagreement.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#384

Post by johnm »

OnlineGladiator wrote: post #274
burlesona wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a hiring manager at a big company, I can tell you this is just as frustrating for me as it is for candidates. I hate “leet code” and frankly find algorithmic interviews to be very low signal compared to more practical, open-ended, domain-specific problems. I will say though, the problem is one of “standardization” across an organization where it’s too big for everyone to fit in a room. Suppose you give each tea…

> But as you grow, that ten percent of underperforming people becomes large in absolute numbers, and is very painful to deal with. I think you could reduce the 10% to 1% simply by actively firing bad employees, and the easiest way to do that is with a probationary hiring period (let's say 6 months, maybe a year). I am fully aware of how systemic rot can be, and how hard it can be to remove. The real problem is when y…

On the manager side, I can't upvote that enough.

Toxic systems are always the responsibility of the managers and that's from the top down. The systemically perverse issues created by people "managing up" is one of the most critical problems that people higher up the food chain need to correct for.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#385

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

xvector wrote: post #360
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a hiring manager at a big company for years. We never did coding tests, and I like to think that I made good choices every time. I kept a high-functioning team together, under fairly humble pay, and stressful, sometimes demoralizing, conditions, for decades. I'm mediocre, at best, at these tests. I don't come from a traditional CS background (started as an EE). I tend to take unusual, hybrid approaches to solvi…

Unfortunately portfolios would make finding jobs very difficult for myself and my colleagues. We aren’t really allowed to talk about what we work on outside of what could easily fit in a vague, 1-sentence summary on LinkedIn. This is actually frustrating me quite a bit because as I look for new jobs people like to ask, in detail, what I worked on, and I can’t really tell them.

I completely understand.

That was a big reason that I learned to draw people out when they interviewed. I asked them to "tell me stories" about projects they worked on, without getting detailed about specifics. In my experience, they were always able to demonstrate plenty of enthusiasm and creativity without revealing the family jewels. A half-hour whiteboard test would have been completely useless. I was usually able to establish a fairly comfortable level of tech knowledge fairly quickly, and the bulk of the interview was really about how well I thought they'd fit the team (NOTE TO SELF: Don't go for homogeneity).

However, this isn't a problem that's unique to our industry. My father was in the CIA, and I never found out until just a few years before his death. Lawyers have legal cases they can't discuss, doctors have medical cases they can't discuss in detail, without violation of HIPAA, etc.

Somehow or another, these folks are able to interview for jobs that often have a far greater risk than a line programmer on a major initiative.

True, some are screw-ups, and that doesn't become apparent until after they are hired, but the same goes for an engineer that can ace every problem on HackerRank, but goes all to pieces, when presented with 100 KLoC of spaghetti code, and told to fix a problem (exactly what happened to me, on one of my first programming jobs. 100 KLoC of 1970s-vintage FORTRAN -I fixed the bug, but had to hold my nose, while doing it. I later learned that this was what everyone did).

What bothers me most, is that a chief reason that I'm given for these tests, is that companies want to find people that can come up with innovative and unique solutions, yet they seem to actually have the opposite effect; filtering for people that only come up with standard solutions.

I remember once doing a "take home" test that asked me to apply a third-party library. I did what I always do with dependencies; I encapsulated it, and that seemed to totally freak out the interviewer. To this day, I have no idea why they lost their bottle so badly over it. My solution worked extremely well, and it also gave the problem tremendous "future-proofing." That's why I encapsulate dependencies.

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#386

Post by OnlineGladiator »

johnm wrote: post #379
OnlineGladiator wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But as you grow, that ten percent of underperforming people becomes large in absolute numbers, and is very painful to deal with. I think you could reduce the 10% to 1% simply by actively firing bad employees, and the easiest way to do that is with a probationary hiring period (let's say 6 months, maybe a year). I am fully aware of how systemic rot can be, and how hard it can be to remove. The real problem is when y…

Alas, for all of the focus on the interview processes to "prevent" false positive hires, those same companies suck as actually getting rid of the bad hires. Some is rational risk aversion to lawsuits and the like but that clearly bs when you see just how fast people that aren't liked by someone high enough up the food chain are shown the door. The effect on morale and real productivity of getting rid of the toxic and…

The first job I had there was a probationary period - it was good and bad. It was good because you knew everybody there was extremely talented and you could rely on your coworkers. There was a bit of an understanding about the cut throat nature of the place though, and obviously that's not for everyone. But at the end of the day, when it came time to just get shit done, there was never any problem.

I can't name that place without doxing myself, but it sounds like Netflix has a similar culture. Some people love it. Some people hate it. But I don't think many people would say they have an issue with employing less-than-stellar employees.

Of course this is only "solving" (it's certainly not perfect) the problem of hiring for engineers, which most of us are on HN (at least I assume, but certainly more engineers than engineering managers). It does nothing to address the issue of hiring bad managers. I have no solution for that, other than to make sure the first manager is excellent. A players hire A players because they want to do the best work they can, and will go out of their way to hire people better than themselves. B players hire C players because they just want to make themselves look good. Once you have a bad manager, the assumption is everyone beneath him will be as bad or worse (obviously there are exceptions).

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#387

Post by throwawaymath »

rglullis wrote: post #381
mwfunk wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I love HN and many of the thoughts expressed on it, but if there's one thing that always jumps out at me as being an incredibly widely held cognitive bias in the tech community, it's a tendency to view certain things in a very black and white, binary fashion, and to treat certain very complicated, messy problems with lots of social nuances as if they were simple problems, if only everyone could be rational abou…

Sorry, it seems that you are jumping into conclusions that were never warranted. Chesterton's fence is a principle that I learned a while ago and I am not defending that we need to throw everything away. What I am saying is that what you regard as a "90% solution at best" is actually not a solution at all. Standardized tests are terrible predictors of performance on actual jobs. If standardized tests (or IQ tests or…

What about that comment made you believe it was referring to something you said specifically?

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#388

Post by halflings »

AlwaysBCoding wrote: post #374
halflings wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheating? Even with phone screens, some candidates still cheat at these interviews (have some engineer with them answering questions, or looking up similar questions online). I agree a full blown project over 24 hours would be better, but it's more costly to create questions and score them (if you want to do it in a way where cheating is hard/impossible). I've seen startups do this, and it works well for them, but mi…

what even is cheating on an algorithm problem? looking up an answer online? asking someone in your social network to help you work through the problem? because that's what you actually do in the real world. as long as you can explain / defend your solution what does cheating even mean.

That's an idealistic way of looking at things.

People would look-up solutions to that exact problem; it's very hard to come up with a unique problem that was never asked before, and questions leak pretty quickly. (especially at larger companies)

The goal of a test is to evaluate whether you'd be a good employee; I agree algorithmic questions are not representative of day-to-day work, but evaluating your friend's ability to help you is out of scope. Companies want to hire someone that has decent programming skills; you can't rely on other people to solve all your problems, you need to have a minimum level of skill.

[again, playing devil's advocate here; we all agree the process is suboptimal, but let's not ignore the negatives of some of the alternatives suggested here]

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#389

Post by yosefzeev »

I actually did what this article suggests in college. It didn't go well grade wise. However, I had money and time to study and learn about things I wanted to learn. I found that my path often was interwoven with the path of the class, but that the perspective was different and sometimes professors are only grading on perspective--specifically their own. The biggest dividing line is, I suspect, that college does not, at this point teach one how to think. How to think and good grades are not necessarily the same thing at all. I was busy learning how to think, and deciding what could be relegated to "It's in a book, I can find it if I need it" vs "I should memorize this because it will be useful in life for me later".

Re: The Lesson to Unlearn

#390

Post by halflings »

alien_ wrote: post #329
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My solution is smaller companies - that way the underperforming ones can be eliminated more easily.

At Amazon, perhaps one of the largest and most successful employers, the solution to this is that when interviewing, everyone's main goal is to hire people better than the current average of the team. To ensure this, someone experienced with interviewing from outside the team/organization, so called bar raiser, is always added to the interviewing team. This person is there to ensure high quality hires and has hiring…

FWIW this wasn't my experience when interviewing with Amazon; I felt the bar was much lower than other companies I interviewed with, even when I wasn't that good at algorithmic problems.

That's just one data point, and maybe what you're describing is for more senior hires?

Post reply on HN