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To expand on this: * Prior to officially selecting candidates based on performance in problems derived from programming competitions, candidates who excelled a
by nilkn 9y ago
To expand on this:
* Prior to officially selecting candidates based on performance in problems derived from programming competitions, candidates who excelled at programming competitions were likely to do well on the job.
* That correlation was observed on a wide scale by employers, so many companies -- Google chief among them -- started incorporating such questions into the official interviews.
* Candidates now observed the change in employer interviewing methods on a wide scale and adapted their preparation methods. This fundamentally changed the pool of people good at programming competition problems in such a way as to reduce the correlation between the original signal (good at algorithmic problems) and the goal (good at the job).
* Overall, widespread acknowledgment -- and all consequent changes in behavior -- of the original correlation between the signal and the goal significantly reduced the quality of the correlation.
- warkdarrior 9y agoIn other words, what gets measured gets managed. So if you measure hiring candidates by their performance in programming competitions, everyone will manage their own skills towards doing better in competitions.
- notduncansmith 9y agoYes but not just that. I think the bigger trend is that training oneself to excel at those types of problems meant (in addition to other things) one thing about you back then (that you were really into programming). Now that same behavior likely means that you want to get a nice job at one of the big tech companies, as a result of them publically selecting for that. These are fuzzy indicators to begin with, but they're definitely different fuzz.
- saghm 9y ago> I think the bigger trend is that training oneself to excel at those types of problems meant (in addition to other things) one thing about you back then (that you were really into programming). Now that same behavior likely means that you want to get a nice job at one of the big tech companies, as a result of them publically selecting for that. Thanks for the explanation! The idea being discussed didn't quite click for me until I read this
- robrenaud 9y agoI think it's simpler than this. I don't think there is much outright gaming of the signal. Programming interviews and programming competitions are very similar, much more similar than programming interviews and real world software engineering. When you are selecting top programming competition competitors, you are implicitly selecting people who will absolutely smash your (non-design) programming interview questions. This has little to do with their effectiveness as software engineers.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]