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How similar are the Odds for a BS of CS graduate in 2017 in the United States to work in Silicon Valley versus the NCAA Division I Basketball Player to make it
by 6stringmerc 9y ago
How similar are the Odds for a BS of CS graduate in 2017 in the United States to work in Silicon Valley versus the NCAA Division I Basketball Player to make it in the NBA?
Point being, this is extremely helpful batch of advice for a surprisingly narrow field. Take out the SV / Top 1% Tech Culture nuances and there's really not a lot to work with other than "Put your best foot forward, be flexible to learn new things if asked, and and to keep trying.
But, something like this just stings to me:
>Either way, it’s very common for a candidate to get rejected and then get an offer a year or two later.
It's extremely uncommon for the common person to get anywhere near that kind of follow up. Well, maybe for half the expected salary, but no, this doesn't happen to anybody I know outside of SV or Top 1% C-Suite management. The advice within should be constrained to its applicable universe, with cautions that viewing the process in other fields through this lens could actually be detrimental.
- NTDF9 9y ago>> >Either way, it’s very common for a candidate to get rejected and then get an offer a year or two later. What OP implies is that the interview process is out of candidate's control and there are many variables in play. What the OP doesn't realize is that this is the definition of a shitty process. What would you call a piece of software that cannot reliably produce the same output most of the time? vs What would you call an interview process that cannot hire the same people most of the time?
- theoh 9y agoI don't know about SV interviews, but there are ways of quantifying this kind of unreliability: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-rater_reliability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-rater_reliability
- NTDF9 9y agoQuantifying assumes that the "raters" remain the same forever. That's not true though. Raters change. Counter intuitively, as the rater gets more and more familiar with the problem, the less tolerance they have for mistakes.
- theoh 9y agoI don't know where you got the idea that quantifying something fixes it for all time. Numbers can change. Measures of inter-rater reliability can be applied to multiple ratings over time by the same person (why not?)
- gaylemcd 9y agoOP here. I do absolutely realize that candidates getting rejected and then getting an offer later is... well, not quite the "definition", but it's a sign of a flaws in a process. However, you don't scrap the buggy program if there's not a better replacement; you fix the program. And you don't scrap this interview process if the alternatives are even worse.
- TulliusCicero 9y agoWhat an absurd chain of logic. Interviews are conducted by human beings, of course their reproducibility sucks. It's not like non-whiteboarding interviews are going to be great at that either. You could replace them by software, ala "here's a coding problem with a set of unit and integration tests to validate against, go nuts" but that would have its own set of issues.