4 ms·

Testing for communication skills is awesome advice and probably rarely ever consciously focused on.

by nerdy 11y ago

adekok 11y ago
As a related note, the best predictor of university physics scores is high school English scores. Why? Because physics is about making a conceptual model. i.e. telling a story about a problem. And then solving it. For interviewing, communications skills are a must. People will be working in a team, and must be able to explain themselves. And get along with others. Another thing rarely checked for is the flip side... understanding explanations. If you have to explain something four times to a candidate, you'll probably have to explain things 1000 times on the job.
- espes 11y ago
  > As a related note, the best predictor of university physics scores is high school English scores. That's pretty counter-intuitive. Can you give a source?
  - adekok 11y ago
    It's been twenty years since I saw that... google doesn't offer anything useful.
    - dalke 11y ago
      I am also skeptical. Quoting from http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2006/02.23/05-ap.html http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2006/02.23/05-ap.html : > The study by researchers at Harvard University and the University of Virginia (UVA) found the best predictors of success in college science courses to be high school classes that foster mathematical fluency, value depth over breadth, and feature certain types of laboratory work. The study appears to be https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/smg/ficss/research/articles/Science_educator_advanced.pdf https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/smg/ficss/research/articles/Scie... . Table 4, model D, page 14 shows that science grades, followed closely by math grades, are much better than the English grade at predicting "College Science Grade". (It does not specifically pull out physics.)
  - tlarimer 11y ago
    Anecdote inbound. I recall our formal lab write-ups comprised a large part of our final grades. Poorly written, poorly formatted formal lab write-ups consistently got C's while well written and formatted write-ups got A's. In this case I can see a strong correlation between English scores and physics scores.
- RogerL 11y ago
  I don't think so. The best predictor of university physics scores is...wait for it.... university physics scores. Likewise, the best predictor of on job performance is on job performance. If this isn't a recent grad, interviewing on the resume will tell you more any proxy for on job performance. Sure, people may be seeking to step up from a drudgery type job, but I think that usually comes out (citation needed, I admit). "I wanted to replace the terrible X with the wonderful Y, but I was over ruled". "question about why this was rational". "rational explanation ensues" "want a job here?" I admit it ain't perfect, people lie on resumes and take credit for other people's work, but we all know the whiteboard tests and other things are just voodoo. Google's hiring data proves it out - only one person in their company was able to give better than chance ratings based on interviews. And, who really cares about resume inflation? I'm scrupulously honest in my resume, but if someone can describe all the trade offs, costs, and benefits of an architecture from a previous job, and answer speculative questions about it ("what would you change if you needed to scale X"), then heck, they can probably do the job. If I understand engineering and am an active contributor, what more do you want? No, "doesn't get nervous during a highly artificial situation of whiteboarding" is not a rational want, since it will not add 1 dollar to your bottom line.
  - vonmoltke 11y ago
    > I admit it ain't perfect, people lie on resumes and take credit for other people's work What frustrates me is that, as an interviewer, you can catch out all but the pathological liars if you know what you are doing. The problem is, very few interviewers in this industry know what they are doing. From the transcript intro: "We typically don’t get trained on interviewing". That is a glaring, fundamental problem. Worse are those who treat interviewing like a distraction from their "real" job. Those people do not belong anywhere near an interview table.
  - adekok 11y ago
    > The best predictor of university physics scores is...wait for it.... university physics scores. <sigh> And how do you predict university physics scores for people who've never been to university? It's pretty obvious that for someone already doing a job, that the best predictor of future performance is past performance. So your comment is unhelpful and condescending.
wpietri 11y ago
Yeah, it's one of the big reason I do pair programming interviews. [1] It lets me find out a) whether they can do the work, and b) whether they can communicate about the work they're doing. Her suggestion for "explain something to me" makes me a little nervous; I'd be worried that the interviewee would have a hard time coming up with a good topic on the spot. But last I interview, one person asked me to pull up one of my open source projects and explain the code to them. That struck me as a very fair test. [1] Described here: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-programming-interview-questions-youve-ever-asked-or-been-asked/answer/William-Pietri?share=1 https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-programming-intervie...
holman 11y ago
I wish you could see how a potential employee acted in a Slack room and in pull requests for a week or two before hiring them. (It's doable, but fairly rare in the industry right now.) As we move more and more towards working in a distributed fashion, using tools that don't require us to even meet someone in person for months at a time, it's a little strange that there's so much emphasis placed on in-person interviews (which is inherently a fairly stressful process). How someone communicates in person is fine, but that's sometimes only part of the picture. On top of that, some people are much more comfortable communicating over the internet, and weighing in-person interviews so heavily ends up discounting their real talents. Ideally you find people have skills with both asynchronous and synchronous communication... but you need to be keeping an eye out for both qualities for that.

Testing for communication skills is awesome advice and probably rarely ever consciously focused on.

by nerdy 11y ago

Testing for communication skills is awesome advice and probably rarely ever consciously focused on.

As a related note, the best predictor of university physics scores is high school English scores. Why? Because physics is about making a conceptual model. i.e. telling a story about a problem. And then solving it. For interviewing, communications skills are a must. People will be working in a team, and must be able to explain themselves. And get along with others. Another thing rarely checked for is the flip side... understanding explanations. If you have to explain something four times to a candidate, you'll probably have to explain things 1000 times on the job.

espes 11y ago
> As a related note, the best predictor of university physics scores is high school English scores. That's pretty counter-intuitive. Can you give a source?
- adekok 11y ago
  It's been twenty years since I saw that... google doesn't offer anything useful.
  - dalke 11y ago
    I am also skeptical. Quoting from http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2006/02.23/05-ap.html http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2006/02.23/05-ap.html : > The study by researchers at Harvard University and the University of Virginia (UVA) found the best predictors of success in college science courses to be high school classes that foster mathematical fluency, value depth over breadth, and feature certain types of laboratory work. The study appears to be https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/smg/ficss/research/articles/Science_educator_advanced.pdf https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/smg/ficss/research/articles/Scie... . Table 4, model D, page 14 shows that science grades, followed closely by math grades, are much better than the English grade at predicting "College Science Grade". (It does not specifically pull out physics.)
- tlarimer 11y ago
  Anecdote inbound. I recall our formal lab write-ups comprised a large part of our final grades. Poorly written, poorly formatted formal lab write-ups consistently got C's while well written and formatted write-ups got A's. In this case I can see a strong correlation between English scores and physics scores.
RogerL 11y ago
I don't think so. The best predictor of university physics scores is...wait for it.... university physics scores. Likewise, the best predictor of on job performance is on job performance. If this isn't a recent grad, interviewing on the resume will tell you more any proxy for on job performance. Sure, people may be seeking to step up from a drudgery type job, but I think that usually comes out (citation needed, I admit). "I wanted to replace the terrible X with the wonderful Y, but I was over ruled". "question about why this was rational". "rational explanation ensues" "want a job here?" I admit it ain't perfect, people lie on resumes and take credit for other people's work, but we all know the whiteboard tests and other things are just voodoo. Google's hiring data proves it out - only one person in their company was able to give better than chance ratings based on interviews. And, who really cares about resume inflation? I'm scrupulously honest in my resume, but if someone can describe all the trade offs, costs, and benefits of an architecture from a previous job, and answer speculative questions about it ("what would you change if you needed to scale X"), then heck, they can probably do the job. If I understand engineering and am an active contributor, what more do you want? No, "doesn't get nervous during a highly artificial situation of whiteboarding" is not a rational want, since it will not add 1 dollar to your bottom line.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  > I admit it ain't perfect, people lie on resumes and take credit for other people's work What frustrates me is that, as an interviewer, you can catch out all but the pathological liars if you know what you are doing. The problem is, very few interviewers in this industry know what they are doing. From the transcript intro: "We typically don’t get trained on interviewing". That is a glaring, fundamental problem. Worse are those who treat interviewing like a distraction from their "real" job. Those people do not belong anywhere near an interview table.
- adekok 11y ago
  > The best predictor of university physics scores is...wait for it.... university physics scores. <sigh> And how do you predict university physics scores for people who've never been to university? It's pretty obvious that for someone already doing a job, that the best predictor of future performance is past performance. So your comment is unhelpful and condescending.

wpietri 11y ago

Yeah, it's one of the big reason I do pair programming interviews. [1] It lets me find out a) whether they can do the work, and b) whether they can communicate about the work they're doing. Her suggestion for "explain something to me" makes me a little nervous; I'd be worried that the interviewee would have a hard time coming up with a good topic on the spot. But last I interview, one person asked me to pull up one of my open source projects and explain the code to them. That struck me as a very fair test. [1] Described here: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-programming-interview-questions-youve-ever-asked-or-been-asked/answer/William-Pietri?share=1 https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-programming-intervie...

holman 11y ago

I wish you could see how a potential employee acted in a Slack room and in pull requests for a week or two before hiring them. (It's doable, but fairly rare in the industry right now.) As we move more and more towards working in a distributed fashion, using tools that don't require us to even meet someone in person for months at a time, it's a little strange that there's so much emphasis placed on in-person interviews (which is inherently a fairly stressful process). How someone communicates in person is fine, but that's sometimes only part of the picture. On top of that, some people are much more comfortable communicating over the internet, and weighing in-person interviews so heavily ends up discounting their real talents. Ideally you find people have skills with both asynchronous and synchronous communication... but you need to be keeping an eye out for both qualities for that.