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I'm saying it produces false positives. False negatives are ok for a conservative hiring process, because you're paying for a super low false positive rate with
by p4wnc6 11y ago
I'm saying it produces false positives. False negatives are ok for a conservative hiring process, because you're paying for a super low false positive rate with a higher budget for false negatives.
But the whiteboard hazing produces too high a rate of false positives -- candidates who can recite CS trivia, study in a way tailored and overfitted to the interviews, and then pass them and be hired even if they don't actually have the broader skills that the interview was designed to conservatively filter for.
I speculate that new hires at Google aren't much better at anything than new hires anywhere else. They might become better later due to a compounding returns effect of already being at Google, but the hiring process didn't select them because they already were better. Instead, the hiring process is a status show, selectivity theater, to enhance the promotional reputation of a business-conquering nerds stereotype and to enhance Google's bargaining power by convincing people that they are only worthwhile to the extent they jump through interview hoops.
- rhizome 11y agoIt's not a false positive if they aren't testing for the thing that turns out to be positive. That people express creativity or whatever, despite making it through an employment filter based almost solely on technical concepts. It's just luck.
- p4wnc6 11y agoIf they are testing for quality X and the test says "yes" even though the person doesn't have quality X, then it's a false positive. I'm saying that they view the riddles, data structure hazing, etc., as tests for quality X (where X == careful engineer who won't inject N^2 complexity into something and make it take centuries). But really, the puzzles and so forth do not select for that X. You get people who are good at the trivia, but who still otherwise would inject poor complexity. Meanwhile, you reject people who might be careful and pragmatic, but are not talented at the trivia. From their perspective (since they believe it does test for X) it produces false positives.