3 ms·

I can't speak to anything related to interviewing because I don't do interviews. Part of the reason I don't do interviews is because I have very low confidence

I can't speak to anything related to interviewing because I don't do interviews. Part of the reason I don't do interviews is because I have very low confidence in my ability to quickly tell who is good. Most of my colleagues that I respect the most (I work at Google) didn't make a strong impression on me when I first met them, or even within a few days. I feel like it takes days or weeks for me to get a sense of how much I like someone's work. So I definitely feel unsatisfied with the interviewing approach in general, but I don't have any practical ideas about how to improve it. "Work with someone for days or weeks first" isn't practical. I get your point that there still could be biases if you can recognize a musician's sound. I should have been more clear about what I meant by "perfect". What I meant is just that this intervention (adding screens to auditions) almost certainly didn't create any bias, it only removed it. It may not have removed 100% of it, but it didn't combat the bias by introducing a counter-bias. Can you recognize a coder's work by their style? Definitely to some extent. One aspect of working on a shared code-base with a whole bunch of engineers is that uniformity of style is a significant plus (makes code easier to read when it's consistent), so many of the differences that might show a "personal flare" are removed. But still, there is plenty that could belie a person's coding style. I think there are way too many programmers out there, however, for this to be an issue in interviews. Estimates say there are something like 2-4 million software engineers in the US. Compare this with orchestral musicians: it looks like about 60 orchestras in the US work 40+ weeks per year; if we estimate 100 players per orchestra this is 6,000 full-time orchestra spots in the USA (you might have better numbers on this). If you specialize this by instrument, it might be more like 240 full-time orchestral oboists in the whole country. It seems much more likely that you could recognize a specific person with those odds. (By the way, I'm a musician too. :) Though not in the orchestral world, and not full-time. I'm a singer (small ensembles mainly), though I did a lot of collaborations with orchestras as a boy growing up in Boychoir).

brooklyn_ashey 9y ago
Hey, thanks for responding with such interesting information! I had a friend audition for a swe job at Google. (very very small sample size, I know) They had a wonderful audition experience, even though they didn't get the job. I understood/agree with you about how you spoke about our audition removing bias without introducing a counter-bias. There is no way to be perfect here, but the orchestras who implement this screened protocol are some of the top 10 in the country, and are respected throughout classical music for making the best attempts to be fair. (most orchestras do a sloppier version of the screen, and small orchestras don't bother) After I got wise to it, I only took "top 10" auditions for this reason, because the process is an expensive burden on the player. You are right-ish about the numbers of players in circulation. This is an interesting point about why we or our colleagues know who is playing behind the screen: 1. we know who's at the audition. 2. At any given point, there are around 20-30 of us in the group of around 200-250 per instrument (who might all show up to a top 10-er) who are "in it to win it" at a top-ten audition. We all play gigs together often or went to school with one another. So the group we are selecting from is very small. Still, I believe we each could do it out of 100 players. It would be instructive to test this. I only mentioned it because it is interesting and most people don't realize this. (people are surprised when a musician can identify who is playing on a Mozart Concerto recording within a few bars at parties, but it isn't a trick-- your ear gets trained to recognize people in that way.) I only asked about recognizing someone by their code because there is a scene in Silicon Valley where Dinesh "falls in love" with the code of Guilfoyle, without knowing it's his. I thought that was hilarious, but unlikely, since the characters code together every day. Your comment taught me something about how teams work together on code. I'd say it is like the "house style" of a newspaper. I agree that it would be unlikely for anyone to recognize someone's code in a blind coding interview due to the numbers of engineers out there. Very interesting comment. Thank you! Cool that you are a singer and can keep it up.

brooklyn_ashey 9y ago

Hey, thanks for responding with such interesting information! I had a friend audition for a swe job at Google. (very very small sample size, I know) They had a wonderful audition experience, even though they didn't get the job. I understood/agree with you about how you spoke about our audition removing bias without introducing a counter-bias. There is no way to be perfect here, but the orchestras who implement this screened protocol are some of the top 10 in the country, and are respected throughout classical music for making the best attempts to be fair. (most orchestras do a sloppier version of the screen, and small orchestras don't bother) After I got wise to it, I only took "top 10" auditions for this reason, because the process is an expensive burden on the player. You are right-ish about the numbers of players in circulation. This is an interesting point about why we or our colleagues know who is playing behind the screen: 1. we know who's at the audition. 2. At any given point, there are around 20-30 of us in the group of around 200-250 per instrument (who might all show up to a top 10-er) who are "in it to win it" at a top-ten audition. We all play gigs together often or went to school with one another. So the group we are selecting from is very small. Still, I believe we each could do it out of 100 players. It would be instructive to test this. I only mentioned it because it is interesting and most people don't realize this. (people are surprised when a musician can identify who is playing on a Mozart Concerto recording within a few bars at parties, but it isn't a trick-- your ear gets trained to recognize people in that way.) I only asked about recognizing someone by their code because there is a scene in Silicon Valley where Dinesh "falls in love" with the code of Guilfoyle, without knowing it's his. I thought that was hilarious, but unlikely, since the characters code together every day. Your comment taught me something about how teams work together on code. I'd say it is like the "house style" of a newspaper. I agree that it would be unlikely for anyone to recognize someone's code in a blind coding interview due to the numbers of engineers out there. Very interesting comment. Thank you! Cool that you are a singer and can keep it up.