Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews
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Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews
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Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews
#2Interesting and surprising, especially the experience thing. I think I am a significantly better engineer than earlier in my career, so I assumed experience would count for a fair bit. Then again I have inherited projects from experienced guys who make crap high level architecture decisions and the code is way more difficult to work with than it ought to be.
But then this article seems to be measuring interview performance, not actual ability on the job. So is any of it actually relevant at all?
Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews
#3It's rather shocking how much effect Udacity/Coursera had on interview performance - more than graduating from a top school or being employed at a top company:
"...only 3 attributes emerged as statistically significant: top school, top company, and classes on Udacity/Coursera."
Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews
#4I am perplexed why anyone would think that interview performances has any interesting statistical relevance. Much more interesting would be how successful the candidate was after receiving a job at the company.
Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews
#5Very unsurprising for me. You are measuring your ability to solve algorithm puzzles. Most engineers don't actually do many algorithm puzzles in day-to-day work, especially the types of algorithms that interviews tend to focus on like sorting and dynamic programming. So "years of experience" is not measuring experience in what you're actually being tested on. On the other hand, you do exactly those types of things in many CS classes, and in Coursera classes, algorithms are exactly what you practice. So it makes sense it correlates.
Top company is a predictor for the obvious reason - it's selection bias for people who already passed those interviews at the company. You're not good at the interview because you worked at the company, you work for the company because you're good at the interview.
Master's degrees seem like largely for international students needing visas, career switchers, etc so not surprised they are not a strong predictor. And if anything the course material moves past the intro data structures stuff the whiteboard interviews tend to test.
The only huge surprise for me here is that Coursera is a stronger predictor than top company and top school. I would have predicted top company > top school > Coursera.
The post that I would be much more interested in is correlating performance reviews to interview performance. That gets suggested as a possible future post.
Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews
#6It's rather shocking how much effect Udacity/Coursera had on interview performance - more than graduating from a top school or being employed at a top company: "...only 3 attributes emerged as statistically significant: top school, top company, and classes on Udacity/Coursera."
Interviewing is a specific skill in itself that most people have to develop independently, so studying other things independently should be a strong correlation.
Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews
#7It's rather shocking how much effect Udacity/Coursera had on interview performance - more than graduating from a top school or being employed at a top company: "...only 3 attributes emerged as statistically significant: top school, top company, and classes on Udacity/Coursera."
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Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews
#8Interesting and surprising, especially the experience thing. I think I am a significantly better engineer than earlier in my career, so I assumed experience would count for a fair bit. Then again I have inherited projects from experienced guys who make crap high level architecture decisions and the code is way more difficult to work with than it ought to be. But then this article seems to be measuring interview perfo…
Hey, author here. You're absolutely right. We hope that with time and data, the interview process can get better at predicting on-the-job performance -- one of the things we're really interested in is seeing how predictive different interview questions can be. To do that, we're also working on collecting data around what happens after interviewing.io users find jobs.
Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews
#9Very unsurprising for me. You are measuring your ability to solve algorithm puzzles. Most engineers don't actually do many algorithm puzzles in day-to-day work, especially the types of algorithms that interviews tend to focus on like sorting and dynamic programming. So "years of experience" is not measuring experience in what you're actually being tested on. On the other hand, you do exactly those types of things in…
Yup! We'd love to close that loop and are working to collect as much on-the-job performance data as we can. Please stay tuned.
Re: Lessons from 3,000 technical interviews
#10Very unsurprising for me. You are measuring your ability to solve algorithm puzzles. Most engineers don't actually do many algorithm puzzles in day-to-day work, especially the types of algorithms that interviews tend to focus on like sorting and dynamic programming. So "years of experience" is not measuring experience in what you're actually being tested on. On the other hand, you do exactly those types of things in…
Coursera might top them because it's a good indicator that they're actively trying to round out what they know, which means they likely studied up on algorithms right before the interview.