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Defaulting to hire on credentials will put you out of business

carlosmiceli.com

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Re: Defaulting to hire on credentials will put you out of business

#41

Post by riggins »

randomdata wrote: post #22
riggins wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a similar vein. GED recipients have been less successful than originally anticipated. Social scientists were surprised because these are people who are intelligent enough to pass the curriculum but they weren't achieving greater success than other dropouts. In trying to understand the gap, what they focused in on is that life success isn't just intelligence, its soft skills like stick-to-it-iveness, willpower, con…

> In trying to understand the gap, what they focused in on is that life success isn't just intelligence, its soft skills like stick-to-it-iveness, willpower, concentration, etc. Do you have more information about these studies? I have always assumed that to be true. When you look at successful people, it is the indicator that stands out most often. I'd love to look at the formal research.

here are a couple papers.

http://ftp.iza.org/dp6580.pdf

http://www.economics.uci.edu/files/economics/docs/micro/f07/...

Re: Defaulting to hire on credentials will put you out of business

#42

Post by vorg »

bradleyland wrote: post #10
ChuckMcM wrote: post #5

The one piece of data that having a college degree communicates is that the person with it did something they didn't have to do, it took longer than a few months, and it involved a wide variety of tasks. As such its a useful way to prove you can do something that takes a long time to do. I agree however that there are people who haven't chosen to do that who have shown that ability in other ways. And there are people…

> The one piece of data that having a college degree communicates is that the person with it did something they didn't have to do, it took longer than a few months, and it involved a wide variety of tasks. As such its a useful way to prove you can do something that takes a long time to do. As long as we accept that it is one way of proving you can do something that takes a long time to do. I'm not sure that's what th…

Both Github profiles and college degrees can be gamed. Many people cheat in exams, copy assignments, and send doubles along to aptitude tests. They clone the base code for their Github projects from somewhere else, only dressing it up with infrastructural differences like they would a college programming assignment.

Those who didn't put in the time for either a degree or Github history will often lie on their CV about them. An interviewer will often not check up when employing someone so they'll have something against the new hire later on if they want to get rid of them quickly.

Developers who don't do college but genuinely can code projects don't apply for jobs anyway, they apply for funds then employ people.

Re: Defaulting to hire on credentials will put you out of business

#43

Post by bcoates »

auctiontheory wrote: post #17

Here's the thing: for the typical job listing, there are dozens, or hundreds, of applicants. Maybe more. You do not have the time to do a full-fledged investigation of every one of them, or bring them all in for a lengthy interview. You just don't. You need some filter to reduce the number to something more manageable, and degree/school is a straightforward way to do it. Also recognize that 99% of jobs, even technica…

> what's a better way, subject to real limitations of time and resources?

Selecting at random from the applicant pool.

Any reasonably selective filter function that becomes sufficiently part of HR conventional wisdom will render the fraction of applicants who both pass it, and are capable of getting and keeping a job, unavailable in the market. The residue is people who either fail the function or pass the function and are sub-par employees. Because the feedback loop on the effectiveness of hiring practices is sufficiently attenuated, the utility of the filter going negative will not be noticed.

Treat easy, popular ways of identifying top talent like stock tips: even if they were true in the past, by the time you hear about it, it's not a good idea anymore.

Re: Defaulting to hire on credentials will put you out of business

#44

Post by yyqux »

tkahn6 wrote: post #35
old-gregg wrote: post #12

Worked pretty well for Google, no? While reading "In the Plex", one fact stood out: nearly all of their early hires were well-respected CS figures from 1st grade universities. Not only you had to be smart, but you had to have good grades from a good school to get hired by Google early. The only exception I could find was Salar Kamangar. At least that was my impression from reading the book.

Also in "In the Plex" they talk about how Google kept a record of everyone's SAT scores and GPA and alma mater and found no correlation between those things and skill/quality/productivity/effectiveness.

If this is true, then it doesn't actually do anything to confirm the argument of the original article. The opposite actually. If you had selected a random sample of people and placed them in jobs in Google, then sure, that would provide a lot of evidence that academic performance doesn't matter. But that isn't what happened: this is a sample of people who already made it past the Google hiring filter, which allegedly is placing too much weight on credentials.

If the premise of the original article was correct though, you would expect that the uncredentialed people who made it past the hiring bar would be far stronger than the people who got an unjustified boost based on their credentials and the prejudices.

If it's true that easy-to-measure academic credentials are basically uncorrelated with job performance, then that's probably a good indication that their hiring process actually is well-calibrated: if people with poor credentials were doing better than people with good credentials, then their hiring process isn't giving sufficient weight to non-academic factors. If people with good credentials were doing better than people with poor credentials, that would indicate that they were putting too much weight on credentials and could improve hiring by weighing other factors.

Re: Defaulting to hire on credentials will put you out of business

#46

Post by CapitalistCartr »

randomdata wrote: post #19
jspiros wrote: post #2

I didn't go to college, though I grew up in a college town and eventually even worked for a while as the college's lead web developer. I've been developing software professionally for customers and clients since I was 14 (currently 25; so, for 11 years). Once, when I was applying for a job, I ran into someone with the same perspective as Bryan Caplan's from this article. I had made it through a few interviews and tes…

I received a similar lecture from a former employer, except it was by email, after I had handed in my resignation. He wanted to make it quite known that I wasn't qualified to work in the industry (even though I worked for him in the industry just fine for several years and I was the one leaving the job on my own accord?) and that I wouldn't be able to find another job without a degree. Even though I deep down knew ev…

Cap's breakup rule: you learn more about girlfriends and bosses when you leave than at any other time. This probably applies to boyfriends, too, but I don't have experience there.

Re: Defaulting to hire on credentials will put you out of business

#47

Post by dingfeng_quek »

There are many sources of competitive advantage, which includes but is not limited to good hiring practices and the development and retention of talent.

Companies which were not dependent on cheap/competitive talents were able to get away with many inefficient work practices. Companies which are not dependent can and will still do that. Introspection is stressful and costly, change even more so.

"This is why great designers, salesmen or computer programmers are still highly valued": A very narrow selection of professions where productivity is very sensitive to variations in ability.

Re: Defaulting to hire on credentials will put you out of business

#48

Post by dingfeng_quek »

yyqux wrote: post #44
tkahn6 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also in "In the Plex" they talk about how Google kept a record of everyone's SAT scores and GPA and alma mater and found no correlation between those things and skill/quality/productivity/effectiveness.

If this is true, then it doesn't actually do anything to confirm the argument of the original article. The opposite actually. If you had selected a random sample of people and placed them in jobs in Google, then sure, that would provide a lot of evidence that academic performance doesn't matter. But that isn't what happened: this is a sample of people who already made it past the Google hiring filter, which allegedly…

I wouldn't generalize this way. P( Y | X ) != P( Y ).

X: Hired by google, good grades, good school.

In fact, it doesn't test the difference between institutionalized tertiary education vs a lack of it, only differing academic performance among those who are already relatively successful in it.

Re: Defaulting to hire on credentials will put you out of business

#49

Post by dingfeng_quek »

pc86 wrote: post #13
old-gregg wrote: post #12

Worked pretty well for Google, no? While reading "In the Plex", one fact stood out: nearly all of their early hires were well-respected CS figures from 1st grade universities. Not only you had to be smart, but you had to have good grades from a good school to get hired by Google early. The only exception I could find was Salar Kamangar. At least that was my impression from reading the book.

Isn't the early Google work a good definition of a Hard Problem, though? [Startup X] does not need a CMU PhD to build the latest Node app. The domain is blocked at my office so I can't read the article, but I'd argue that spending the extra money on "10x" talent does nothing but shorten your runway.

On the other hand, the investment in [Startup X] is partly justified by the idea that spending money on "10x" talent is a chance for "100x" returns.

Re: Defaulting to hire on credentials will put you out of business

#50

Post by itcmcgrath »

sscalia wrote: post #39
itcmcgrath wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're not a large company at only 1100 people, but our HR department is excellent. Not only do they help filter for us (I received about 100 applications for a Product Manager position recently), but they also allow us to see all the applications if I want to go spelunking and ignore the system designated ranking. In short; not sure I agree with your generalized statement. I'm sure there are cases where it is true.

"System designated ranking" - you lost me there bud. I'm sure your HR department, and therefor - you - are ignoring some outstanding candidates. It's cool though, we'll hire them.

I think you somehow missed the 'ignore' part.
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