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The Last Technical Interview
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Re: The Last Technical Interview
#72Man do those slop images look ugly. I’d take child scribbles over the garbage picture in the article.
Re: The Last Technical Interview
#73The "provisional employment" idea sounds good at first, until you think about how it would actually work in practice. You have 100 applicants for 1 position. Which one do you provisionally hire? Ah of course, we have to do a traditional interview loop to evaluate 10 candidates before we can pick one. So you do the traditional interview loop, and then you have 6 months of provisional employment. You haven't replaced a…
It's an obstacle when hiring people who are currently enjoying stable employment. Probably fine for juniors, but not for experienced people with families and whatnot.
That is directly addressed in the article.
Re: The Last Technical Interview
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I gave the feedback at one Google interview that they should send Google employees through to see how many get hired. Good to see they basically tried that. They did, but not with the intention of doing anything about the problem. This is a question of reliability , the conceptual 'correlation' of a measurement instrument with itself when measuring the same thing. Reliability is one of two major concepts in psychom…
Serious question, tell me what you think of using IQ tests to hire SWEs? Should we just do that instead?
The tests that carry the particular branding "IQ" (Wechsler / Raven's / etc.) suffer from some problems in this regard - not very many questions exist and there are very large coaching effects. (Also, psychologists will tell you that getting an accurate result means you need the test to be administered by a trained psychologist. This is mostly nonsense, but to the extent you believe them, it's cost-prohibitive.)
Hiring from a test that measures IQ is a very good idea (and there is a test that's commonly used for hiring purposes, the Wonderlic†); hiring from "an IQ test" is a bit less good. Anyone who wants to subvert the Raven's test will be able to do that. High-stakes tests need more security.
The concept of "IQ" can be toxic in contemporary American politics, so there are many more tests that "happen" to test IQ than there are tests that advertise themselves as testing IQ.
† https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1982-00123-001 : "correlations between Wonderlic IQs and WAIS Full Scale IQs were [0.93] for the main group and [0.91] for the cross-validation group". Note that this test involves only basic math and takes 12 minutes of the candidate's time.
Re: The Last Technical Interview
#75Signals I've got from this post:
- Steve's company got acquihired by Amazon, granting him a free ticket in without all the torment of the multi-stage interview pipeline.
- It's a well known fact that it's easier to jump from one FAANG to another, so while interviewing at Google he had significant advantage, plus the blog gaining popularity.
- All of this has caused a deep down imposter syndrome, which resulted in an attempt to "improve" an interview process from the inside - but the wings were clipped pretty quickly by the corporate politics. It turns out that lawyers are not planning to reinvent anything there and hence are somewhat more important than engineers.
- The post itself is an self-applause over essentially a failed effort. "I've tried"
Re: The Last Technical Interview
#76This reads as if he's really struggling not to say "Now that the applicants are desperate we can begin to interview them properly mwahahahaaaa!"
I came to conclusion that a lot of these interviews just nerds revenge lol (20+ yoe in faangs).
Re: The Last Technical Interview
#77I couldn't find the text of this joke, attributed to Dirac. I'll paraphrase. A man walks into a pet store. There's a parrot for $100, it says this parrot speaks perfect English . The one next to it is $1,000, and says, This parrot speaks 12 languages fluently. Then there's a bedraggled looking, droopy, parrot, and its label simply says One Million Dollars. Does it sing opera and has successfully run for President? th…
Our hiring dis-function is because there a lot of people that dislike conflict and firing someone.
ie - people that are incompetent at their role of people managers.
Why is incompetence so discussed for ICs but rarely for management?
Maybe if more managers were competent and less conflict-averse they would do their jobs better and cycle out incompetence and bad intentions faster.
Ah wait, but middle managers specifically choose conflict-averse, easy to control, domesticated people. That's why you find this particular type of personality in management so often.
So the issue is incentives as well and bigger than initially thought.
Re: The Last Technical Interview
#78Signals I've got from this post: - Steve's company got acquihired by Amazon, granting him a free ticket in without all the torment of the multi-stage interview pipeline. - It's a well known fact that it's easier to jump from one FAANG to another, so while interviewing at Google he had significant advantage, plus the blog gaining popularity. - All of this has caused a deep down imposter syndrome, which resulted in an…
Steve Yegge writing a self-applause post? Well, I never! =)
Re: The Last Technical Interview
#79The "provisional employment" idea sounds good at first, until you think about how it would actually work in practice. You have 100 applicants for 1 position. Which one do you provisionally hire? Ah of course, we have to do a traditional interview loop to evaluate 10 candidates before we can pick one. So you do the traditional interview loop, and then you have 6 months of provisional employment. You haven't replaced a…
You could be less selective with a high-turnover pool of temporary workers, something like an internship program. But that doesn’t mean anyone gets to be an intern.
Re: The Last Technical Interview
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an obstacle when hiring people who are currently enjoying stable employment. Probably fine for juniors, but not for experienced people with families and whatnot.
That is directly addressed in the article.
Not exactly, if I am thinking of leaving my job and I have responsibilities, I will not even entertain taking a leap of faith, resigning from my current position and grinding for 3 month in a super-competitive environment for 1/10 of a chance of getting a better job.
I'll talk to recruiters and interview at other companies on my spare time, as before.