The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
nytimes.com
The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
1–10 of 410 posts
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#2It's interesting, because I'd argue that the best companies in tech have have interviews that are very structured and predictable.
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#3It should probably have been titled "The Utter Uslessness of Unstructured Job Interviews", because that's the kind of interview the author criticizes.
In my personal experience, structured interviews can be very helpful in determining a candidates abilities.
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#4It's interesting, because I'd argue that the best companies in tech have have interviews that are very structured and predictable.
Is that true? Isn't the generic accusation against AmaGooFaceSoft that your interview performance largely depends on whether you happened to study some interviewer's pet topic (e.g. parallelism, dynamic programming, networking, etc.)?
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#5It's interesting, because I'd argue that the best companies in tech have have interviews that are very structured and predictable.
Is that true? Isn't the generic accusation against AmaGooFaceSoft that your interview performance largely depends on whether you happened to study some interviewer's pet topic (e.g. parallelism, dynamic programming, networking, etc.)?
Having done interviews at a few of time, I'd say that's mostly false, at least for the last 2-3 years.
As far as I can tell, there's always a pre-defined pool of questions. Some of them are pretty 'open ended', but still targeted towards getting a good impression of a certain area of knowledge.
That being said, I had an interview with Google at some point in the past where one of the interviewers almost seemed appalled that I didn't know the exact list of items that can be found in a filesystem superblock. But at all other companies it seemed a bit more sane. I guess it's partially a function of the type of personalities a company is willing to hire :)
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#6It's interesting, because I'd argue that the best companies in tech have have interviews that are very structured and predictable.
Is that true? Isn't the generic accusation against AmaGooFaceSoft that your interview performance largely depends on whether you happened to study some interviewer's pet topic (e.g. parallelism, dynamic programming, networking, etc.)?
This accusation is almost always from people who haven't studied that particular pet topic. In my experience, the pet topics you list - parallelism, dynamic programming, networking, etc. - are needed quite frequently for those jobs at AmaGooFaceSoft. In other words, those candidates would be poor fits for those jobs, which is exactly what an interview is trying to test.
I think the Google hiring process is fucked up in a lot of ways, but I don't think reliance on whiteboarding or the selection of interview questions are two of them.
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#7Articles like this - and the comments that follow - always overlook the primary value of job interviews, which to me is answering the question: "Do I want to work for this company?"
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#8It should probably have been titled "The Utter Uslessness of Unstructured Job Interviews", because that's the kind of interview the author criticizes. In my personal experience, structured interviews can be very helpful in determining a candidates abilities.
From the hiring side, I agree. There's no other way to smoke out those whose creative writing skills extend to their resumes, and you get a pretty good idea of personality differences between candidates if you use the same pool of questions for a given position.
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#9But surely structured interviews just test a candidate's ability to improvise plausible stories? Whether they are truthful or not is a different matter..
Re: The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews
#10Articles like this - and the comments that follow - always overlook the primary value of job interviews, which to me is answering the question: "Do I want to work for this company?"
And articles like this are almost universally written from the perspective of someone being interviewed, rather than the one interviewing.