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The cited data is from a paper The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232564809_The_Valid... in 1998 as a meta-analysis of other findings, but they are not specific to software development (one account is sourced from 32000 employees in 515 diverse civilian jobs in the 1980s). Maybe software is like any other job (sales, clerical, accounting) but…
The best interview process is not going to account for bad corporate policy, terrible bosses, or other confounding factors.
I don't think you can. Job performance is something that gets figured out on the fly. Unless you're working in a crazy standardized operation thats a moving target. e.g. We've got a ton of manager & they all sorta do their own thing...they gravitate towards their strong suit essentially. You can't really test for that in advance. Some people excel at leading 30 man teams on stable jobs. Others excel at being parachut…
If you know what kind of company/situation you're in, you can certainly select for candidates that are more likely to thrive in that environment. As you mentioned, people gravitate toward their strong suits. So by asking behavioral questions, you can learn how they approached situations in the past and whether their strengths/weaknesses are the right mix for your needs.
That's my point. You don't unless you're in a very simplistic business.
I really don't think you can define/bottle this easily - even with high quality interviewing.
Nor do I think you should. To use a very cliched phrase the hottest hires are the ones that think outside the box AND are killing it. Without some flexibility in terms of filtering and criteria you might miss out on that
I think the important thing is to realize that you need to rely on realistic factors and many different signals to get useful data. I've been to plenty of interviews for "senior software engineers," where they used the standard gauntlet of algorithms/problem solving/data structures questions in rapid succession for eight hours. I tend to deliver most of my projects on time and of a high quality. I value things such a…
I think the important thing is to realize that you need to rely on realistic factors and many different signals to get useful data. I've been to plenty of interviews for "senior software engineers," where they used the standard gauntlet of algorithms/problem solving/data structures questions in rapid succession for eight hours. I tend to deliver most of my projects on time and of a high quality. I value things such a…
What does your interview process look like?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Job performance is a satisficing measure: you only need to get someone who's good enough to perform the duties you need of them. (Yes, even in software engineering.) Is that really the case for software? I mean, I'm very skeptical of the "only the best and brightest" nonsense, as I think it selects for the wrong people. But I'm also skeptical of the "eh, good enough" heuristic. Right now I'm helping a friend deal w…
> Now that I can see the code, I understand why the dev shop needed so many people working on it, and why all features were hard to do. It's because when you use a lot of mediocre programmers, they all create work for themselves and one another. Not intentionally, but just because they aren't able to see how the differing approaches and sloppy work slowly diminish productivity. To me, that sounds like a leadership pr…
Personally, I'd rather start with the amazing senior people, hire bright juniors, and mentor them into being amazing developers as well. As well as investing in tooling for non-developers. If a chunk of work is boring enough that a mediocre programmer can do it without risk (e.g., creating reports), it's perhaps boring enough that you can just enable the users (with, e.g., report builders).
“In economic terms, the gains from increasing the validity of hiring methods can amount over time to literally millions of dollars,” writes Schmidt regarding the importance of valid assessment methods. “However, this can be viewed from the opposite point of view: By using selection methods with low validity, an organization can lose millions of dollars in reduced production. In a competitive world, these organization…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That opens you up to liability for race-based discrimination. The accepted wisdom is that IQ tests are inherently racist and favor white evaluees over black and brown ones.
That's formulated the wrong way. An IQ test per se cannot be racist because it is not a human being with intentional behaviour. This means blame must fall on the test designer or test conductor to introduce a racist biasing. In places where accurate results matter, the best available methods of psychometrics are used: http://enwp.org/Progressive_Matrices These are free of bias: culture, language, reading/writing abil…
How the individual fits within the team is vital. You might have one of the smartest people on the planet but if they can't effectively communicate or understand and work within the cultural norms of the team you're going to have a problem.
These norms and practices vary and shift between teams, countries, and even within the same team over time.
For example hiring a Linus Torvalds for an intermediate, client facing, political position, is probably going to have poor results.
These are difficult things to test for and are as much a decider of job performance as raw knowledge and technical experience.
In the end, it's a crap shoot... Even their highest marker of validity is only about 50%. In the end, if you make it too hard in an employee market, you will have good to great candidates drop off... if you make it too easy, you will wind up at the bottom of the barrel. Market pay will also vary wildly and dramatically, and perception is equally varied. Where I work now, we have a small pre-interview code challenge..…
> In the end, if you make it too hard in an employee market, you will have good to great candidates drop off... if you make it too easy, you will wind up at the bottom of the barrel. Market pay will also vary wildly and dramatically, and perception is equally varied. I mean, you're talking about a different thing than "job performance" here. Job performance is a satisficing measure: you only need to get someone who's…