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"but when you go to collage for an STEM major there is a huge amount of critical thinking and problem solving involved" I went to college for Computer Science

"but when you go to collage for an STEM major there is a huge amount of critical thinking and problem solving involved" I went to college for Computer Science and while there was definitely a larger emphasis on critical thinking and problem solving than in high school and grade school, testing (which is the closest to a school equivalent of a job interview) still ultimately boiled down to you either knew the material or you didn't. Testing was virtually never a conversational process during which I could ask the test-giver questions to get at a deeper problem, so ultimately very different than these problems where the "tester" (interviewer) doesn't actually expect you to solve them during the "test" (interview). My comment has nothing to do with the experience of LEARNING in USA schools, but rather TESTING in USA schools (including the vast majority of colleges). FWIW, as an older experienced software developer, I now excel at the sorts of interviews you are describing, but when I was younger and just out of school I was terrible at them. Not because I was a bad developer/engineer then, but because of anxiety brought about by being asked about things outside of my element, because I just wasn't used to that having never been exposed to it. Based on lots of conversations with other developers, I don't believe I am alone in having this difficult adjustment period with software interviews when first starting out as a professional. It is entirely possible your process works fine for you because it is one of those ones that is unlikely to produce false positives, which is what you really want to avoid, but I'm sure there are also some great developers just out of school that totally bomb your interviews while they would do great at the actual job. If you can hire enough developers to allow those false negatives to exist, then that's no skin off your back but your anecdote about having to lower standards suggests that maybe passing on some of those false negatives was detrimental at least in the short term.

myrandomcomment 9y ago
So the I had a conversation once with the VP of Engineering about this. He an amazing brilliant and kind man. I basically asked if we could maybe hire top 2% vs the goal of top 1%. His answer was pretty interesting (and I am paraphrasing). "I can ID the top 1%, I do not know how to tell the deference between the reset (i.e. is this person top 2% or top 10%)." We did have this issue of hiring quickly and as I said at one point we lowered the standards. No one from that group made it. We did try. The cost of those hiring mistakes on productivity and just time spent was not worth it even if it meant we passed over someone that was a good candidate. To be fair it was not all cut and dry. Personal recommendation for someone you worked with in the past could override any interview issues. There was atleast one time where a candidate was rejected by some of the interviews but got hired anyway because of this and it worked out. When I started the team was around 30 and made of veterans of various other companies. We all hand family and the goal was to get it done right and go home. Age ranges were around 30-40 for the core team at this point. We recruited heavily from collages at BS/MS level and within a year the the number of people in their 20s was more then the older folks, so we must have been able to do something right for the new kids in their interviews. The one thing I have learned is hiring is so much an art as well as a scince. Google has published tons of data on their hiring practices and success rates. Most of it is pretty interesting as the things you think matter turn out not to be the key to those that were successful.

myrandomcomment 9y ago

So the I had a conversation once with the VP of Engineering about this. He an amazing brilliant and kind man. I basically asked if we could maybe hire top 2% vs the goal of top 1%. His answer was pretty interesting (and I am paraphrasing). "I can ID the top 1%, I do not know how to tell the deference between the reset (i.e. is this person top 2% or top 10%)." We did have this issue of hiring quickly and as I said at one point we lowered the standards. No one from that group made it. We did try. The cost of those hiring mistakes on productivity and just time spent was not worth it even if it meant we passed over someone that was a good candidate. To be fair it was not all cut and dry. Personal recommendation for someone you worked with in the past could override any interview issues. There was atleast one time where a candidate was rejected by some of the interviews but got hired anyway because of this and it worked out. When I started the team was around 30 and made of veterans of various other companies. We all hand family and the goal was to get it done right and go home. Age ranges were around 30-40 for the core team at this point. We recruited heavily from collages at BS/MS level and within a year the the number of people in their 20s was more then the older folks, so we must have been able to do something right for the new kids in their interviews. The one thing I have learned is hiring is so much an art as well as a scince. Google has published tons of data on their hiring practices and success rates. Most of it is pretty interesting as the things you think matter turn out not to be the key to those that were successful.