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Why do you think you can assess whether they've "got the chops" in an interview better than a university can assess competency in four years?

kodablah 10y ago
Because having chops in one area doesn't necessarily correlate to having them in another (i.e. student vs employee). Couple that with individual valuation and personality evaluation, and it seems foolish to accept the university's assessment. Maybe if you were hiring in groups and needed impersonal metrics it would be different.
- superuser2 10y ago
  Why do you believe whiteboarding skills are more highly correlated with success as an employee than academic performance? Or are you referring to something other than the standard coding interview?
bumbledraven 10y ago
Incentives.
lizardking 10y ago
Because the university and myself are assessing different sets of competencies. They are measuring academic performance, usually in mathematics or computer science, and I am looking for people who can help my company build better software. Those two competencies aren't always strongly correlated. Thus I must assess "chops" as well as I can. Additionally, the farther out from a candidate's graduation the interview takes place, the less their GPA matters compared the work they have done since they left. If you have a great resume and come highly recommended I'm not very concerned with how well you did in your calc 2 or operating systems courses.
kabdib 10y ago
Candidate A stuck it out for four years. They took all the right classes. But they didn't do much of anything else. Candidate B dropped out after three years. But they've done some quite interesting side projects, they know a bunch of languages, and stuff outside the coursework, and the courses they took were the harder ones. Generally, and for openers, 'A' is gonna struggle explaining what the heck an XOR is, while 'B' is going to toss off the answer in a couple of seconds. And their skills just keep diverging from there. I'll have confidence that 'B' will keep growing and learning, and they're going to be a handful, while 'A' is going to need to be told what to do, and that will be tiresome. This ^^^ is kind of a parody, but you can tell what I'm looking for, early on. (People with more experience, I look for significant contributions to hard problems, and I'm really interested in how people decide what to work on).

kodablah 10y ago

Because having chops in one area doesn't necessarily correlate to having them in another (i.e. student vs employee). Couple that with individual valuation and personality evaluation, and it seems foolish to accept the university's assessment. Maybe if you were hiring in groups and needed impersonal metrics it would be different.

superuser2 10y ago
Why do you believe whiteboarding skills are more highly correlated with success as an employee than academic performance? Or are you referring to something other than the standard coding interview?

bumbledraven 10y ago

Incentives.

lizardking 10y ago

Because the university and myself are assessing different sets of competencies. They are measuring academic performance, usually in mathematics or computer science, and I am looking for people who can help my company build better software. Those two competencies aren't always strongly correlated. Thus I must assess "chops" as well as I can. Additionally, the farther out from a candidate's graduation the interview takes place, the less their GPA matters compared the work they have done since they left. If you have a great resume and come highly recommended I'm not very concerned with how well you did in your calc 2 or operating systems courses.

kabdib 10y ago

Candidate A stuck it out for four years. They took all the right classes. But they didn't do much of anything else. Candidate B dropped out after three years. But they've done some quite interesting side projects, they know a bunch of languages, and stuff outside the coursework, and the courses they took were the harder ones. Generally, and for openers, 'A' is gonna struggle explaining what the heck an XOR is, while 'B' is going to toss off the answer in a couple of seconds. And their skills just keep diverging from there. I'll have confidence that 'B' will keep growing and learning, and they're going to be a handful, while 'A' is going to need to be told what to do, and that will be tiresome. This ^^^ is kind of a parody, but you can tell what I'm looking for, early on. (People with more experience, I look for significant contributions to hard problems, and I'm really interested in how people decide what to work on).