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Harder programming questions do a worse job of predicting outcomes

triplebyte.com

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Re: Harder programming questions do a worse job of predicting outcomes

#471

Post by HillaryBriss »

joker3 wrote: post #101

There's a problem here. The only thing that Triplebyte can claim based on their data is that easier programming questions are more predictive of performance among candidates who received an offer . Since candidates who get offers are (in theory) different from candidates who don't get offers, we can't necessarily generalize from one population to the other. There's also a question about how to mix question difficulty…

i wonder about the definition of "easy" vs. "hard" questions. it seems to me that this is problematic. i mean, is there a well accepted mapping of all computer science related questions to a numerical difficulty rank?

i mean what if we did that for math? some people would be good at geometry questions, others at algebra, others at topology, real analysis, etc.

what if some great geometer interviews with a fanatical algebraist and then fails to make the cut? this candidate is a great geometer! were the questions "too hard"?

Re: Harder programming questions do a worse job of predicting outcomes

#472

Post by walamaking »

mikekchar wrote: post #459
chrisbennet wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe google employees aren’t incentivized to fix things as much as they are for making new things?

I'm probably responding more to this thread than I should, but I'm an a chatty mood today :-) I think there are a lot of factors and this is almost certainly one of them. Having worked in a couple big, wealthy and famous companies before, one of the biggest problems is that they are always making acquisitions. One day you're building X and then upper management thinks, "Woah... X + Y would be awesome. But we don't wa…

Your experiences closely reflect mine for GCP. Some of the tools, although amazing in and of itself, often have some minor flaw that makes the user experience extremely inconvenient when you encounter it many times. The simplicity of the inconvenience only exaggerates the frustration.

Re: Harder programming questions do a worse job of predicting outcomes

#474

Post by acroback »

pmiller2 wrote: post #195
acroback wrote: post #172

What is important to employers? 1. A candidate who can solve puzzles but is not willing to do the dirty work with team, solving production issues, doing debugging, bug fixing with usual stuff. 2. Another Candidate, who is willing to learn, is ready to work with team and do the dirty work. I am on a hiring committee as a Tech Lead, and I always try to weed out 1. Works great, we hire as interns and then assess them. S…

I didn’t interview with Facebook or Google either, both because I didn’t want to grind leetcode, and because those companies are pure evil.

For me evil is not what I consider. Its pure business, if other party don't need for my skillset, I aint gonna put my time to change my skillset to suit theirs.

Re: Harder programming questions do a worse job of predicting outcomes

#475

Post by scarface74 »

sfw1k wrote: post #452
warp_factor wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't be a good fit for Google. With their algorithmic interviews that require college-grad level of studying, they filter for people that are ready to follow orders without complaining. That's who they want to hire at the end of the day: some coders that don't get too critical about their job and do what they are asked to do, even if it is repetitive, stupid and doesn't really make sense (such as re-studying…

some coders that don't get too critical about their job Couldn't be farther from the truth. As someone who works there I've noticed this general trend of animosity towards Google, it seems to be fueled by the fact that people feel a sort of inferiority complex when they don't clear an interview or they feel they wouldn't be able to crack it if they ever gave it a shot, this leads to an overcompensation of attitude in…

I have no idea whether I could study hard enough to work at Google. What I do know is that I don’t like large companies and I have no desire to move to the west coast.

Re: Harder programming questions do a worse job of predicting outcomes

#476

Post by Izkata »

bradleyjg wrote: post #438
fucking_tragedy wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is illegal to do, hence proxy IQ tests.

It is not illegal. Here’s Griggs v. Duke Power Co., 401 U.S. 424 (1971) https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/401/424/#tab-opi... . Go read it and see for yourself what it says.

Right at the top of that link:

> Testing or measuring procedures cannot be determinative in employment decisions unless they have some connection to the job.

IQ tests are not directly related to the job, and so are illegal according to that ruling. Coding tests are directly related, which is why they get a pass.

Re: Harder programming questions do a worse job of predicting outcomes

#477

Post by apostacy »

meko wrote: post #385
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We convinced our parents to buy a computer because it would help our education when all we really wanted one for was playing computer games. Joke was on us though, because playing computer games at the time usually involved a lot of putzing around and figuring out how stuff worked, ultimately teaching us marketable skills.

I'm envious because my parents heavily restricted my computer use thinking it'd rot my brain or I'd get r*ped. They wanted me reading books, to become a lawyer or a doctor. I always had an affinity for technology. My folks meant well but I think not watering that seed has me in the middle of this lost life.

I spent so many years yearning. It was so unfair that all of the other kids had Pentium computers at home, and all I had was an old 386. My parent's refused to get me a game console, or cable tv. I was SO BORED, in my desperation, I tried making games in QuickBASIC.

I still think my parent's should not have gone so Amish, but I also don't think I would have developed as a programmer without that.

Re: Harder programming questions do a worse job of predicting outcomes

#478

Post by zimpenfish »

thewarrior wrote: post #390
mikekchar wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I find weird is why does anybody want to work at Google? I use their tools all the time at work. If you go to console.cloud.google.com... I mean... Wow. Just yesterday I was trying to find the logging for our cloud endpoints on Stackdriver. They should use that as their interview question ;-) And this is the big thing I've noticed about many Google apps (especially dev tools): they are all incredibly (for want o…

Simple answer: Money + Prestige + Job security + Resume

Kinda the BBC of Silicon Valley then.

Re: Harder programming questions do a worse job of predicting outcomes

#479

Post by andmed3 »

riskneutral wrote: post #353
tombert wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I go back and forth about how I feel about doing heavy algorithm/data-structure stuff in interviews. On the one hand, I have never once written any kind of sort algorithm or LRU cache by hand for a production system, because why would I? Pretty much every language's standard library has a fairly-optimized sort and caching thing built in, and if they don't then there's still probably a million outside libraries to do…

> On the other hand, I genuinely do feel theory is really important. While not knowing the minutia of a tim-sort doesn't indicate that you'll be a bad engineer, not knowing the runtime efficiency of a sort can lead to some really awful code. OK but why don’t these interviewers ever ask “internals” questions? How does a CPU works, or what the different levels of memory hierarchy are, what an interrupt request is, what…

Where are those companies who ask such questions, and not for a embedded software engineer role but for someone higher up stack. I wish I knew

Re: Harder programming questions do a worse job of predicting outcomes

#480

Post by [deleted] »

sfw1k wrote: post #452
warp_factor wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You wouldn't be a good fit for Google. With their algorithmic interviews that require college-grad level of studying, they filter for people that are ready to follow orders without complaining. That's who they want to hire at the end of the day: some coders that don't get too critical about their job and do what they are asked to do, even if it is repetitive, stupid and doesn't really make sense (such as re-studying…

some coders that don't get too critical about their job Couldn't be farther from the truth. As someone who works there I've noticed this general trend of animosity towards Google, it seems to be fueled by the fact that people feel a sort of inferiority complex when they don't clear an interview or they feel they wouldn't be able to crack it if they ever gave it a shot, this leads to an overcompensation of attitude in…

[deleted]
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