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In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
41–50 of 285 posts
Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
#42The 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.
>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…
> "That's a challenge. I'm going to go interview there just to prove to these suckers that I'm better."
Well that, or: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect
Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
#43"Design an evacuation plan for San Francisco"
Why not Mountain View? At least, it would be useful for Google... if the big one comes
Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
#44Earlier 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…
That does filter out the genius engineers who aren't also arrogant, doesn't it? (which might not be a problem)
earlier in the interview he talks about preferring avoiding false positives over missing out on false negatives, so this practice does fit into their philosophy.
Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
#45The 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.
I quote my friend who works in "Big Data":
"sometimes I think Big Data is just Excel on 128GB of RAM"
Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually they say they're giving less weight to them (historically Google has weighted them very heavily) which is significantly different from "test scores are worthless".
You've skipped over the original NYT article, which the qz.com article being linked to here quotes from. He does say they're worthless. Here's the complete quote: One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation This chimes with m…
Makes sense, most companies only care about university grades for first jobs (because there's very little else to distinguish candidates at the stage).
Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
#47This is great news both for Google and the candidates. Of course as long as the behavioral indicators for the competencies will be defined right - according to actual goals and tasks on the job.
Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean by "read mathematics at Edinburgh"?
It's standard (or slightly pretentious) British English; I guess the US equivalent would be "majored in math at Edinburgh" (which would be equally incomprehensible to a Brit)
It's not really pretentious – it kinda depends on what university you went to. I typically say 'studied', but my friends who went to other unis say 'read'. I would take 'read' as a pretentious term.
Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
#49I 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…
The problem is, the interviewers often judge how accurate your estimation is, and not the fact that you know (the highly flawed) Drake Equation. These estimates are completely useless in real life, because in real life nobody guesses how many drives you need for GMail, or how many gas stations there are in LA.
> These estimates are completely useless in real life, because in real life nobody guesses how many drives you need for GMail, or how many gas stations there are in LA.
Do you never do sanity checks? If you want to compute the number of drives you need for GMail, you estimate, do the computation, make sure they agree, and then have someone check your work.
Re: In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal
#50I 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…
The problem is, the interviewers often judge how accurate your estimation is, and not the fact that you know (the highly flawed) Drake Equation. These estimates are completely useless in real life, because in real life nobody guesses how many drives you need for GMail, or how many gas stations there are in LA.
> These estimates are completely useless in real life, because in real life nobody guesses how many drives you need for GMail, or how many gas stations there are in LA.
Do you never do sanity checks? If you want to compute the number of drives you need for GMail, you estimate, do the computation, make sure they agree, and then have someone check your work.