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Very 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,
by ditonal 10y ago
Very 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.
- leeny 10y agoYup! 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.
- semicolon_storm 10y agoCoursera 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.
- marcosdumay 10y agoThose riddles are second semester problems on CS, thus anybody that isn't an student spent at least the last 4 years not working on them. The same probably applies to top companies, people probably interviewed there more than 2 years ago. But Coursera stuff that gets into a CV is almost certainly recent.
- glippiglop 10y agoTotally agree with this. I'm reminded of when I interviewed with Amazon a few years back and it was clear that the questions were best suited to filtering down to the best graduates. In my mid 30's I was too rusty to satisfy the interviewer and my real world experience counted for nothing as the entire process was structured like a series of exam questions. I think there's a point - I would guess at about 8+ years of experience - where a technical interview will stop being a reliable indicator of an engineer's ability. It then becomes more important to evaluate what the candidate has been doing in their career and how that experience can be taken advantage of within the team that they'd be joining. Technical ability can still be judged by asking to see some existing code if it's that essential.
- hcatlin 10y agoYes! Yes! Yes! Except, remember, top company also means experience. If you are at a top company, your second-year CS stuff might be a little rusty.