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Tut most engineering orgs are terrified of letting a bad hire through so they blindly do whatever the “top” companies do. Yup, that seems to be it. As if ther

Tut most engineering orgs are terrified of letting a bad hire through so they blindly do whatever the “top” companies do. Yup, that seems to be it. As if there's some "secret sauce" to interviewing that all the other shops know except their own.

taurath 9y ago
The truth is you just don’t know, and you have to go off of hunches - the google panel rejects on hunches all the time, regardless of the systems they put in place to minimize it.
- kafkaesq 9y ago
  Yup - the hunch factor isn't a "bug"; it's absolutely intrinsic to the process. Not only is fundamentally irreducible - you wouldn't want to completely remove it from the process, even if you could. So I guess the problem with objective-seeming (and often just simply gratuitously hard) "filter" questions like those suggested here is that their real purpose seems to be give the process an appearance of objectivity - "We had a guy in here, his code samples looked great, and he talked a great game and all -- but would ya believe, he totally froze on that Lego robot puzzle question! What a poser!" -- when of course it's never going to be anything of the sort.
bogomipz 9y ago
Yes and this logic is essentially "if it works for a publicly traded company that has 25,000 full time engineers then surely it's the right approach for our start up of 25 people total."
- kafkaesq 9y ago
  Whether it actually works for those companies (beyond a placebo-like effect) is open to question. But the bigger point is that - even assuming for the sake of argument that these questions actually do "work", on some leel - they've become such a huge fad that people are just adopting them solely on the basis of authority, without intrinsically understanding why these questions work, or more importantly, how to interpret candidates' responses to them In other words, they're just following a script. I wouldn't say quite it's on "blind faith", per se (because the companies do have some reputation). But it's not much better than blind faith. Such that this precious quote of yours, from just a few days ago, seems quite apt here: This practice of blindly adopting ideas just because they work for Google needs to stop.

taurath 9y ago

The truth is you just don’t know, and you have to go off of hunches - the google panel rejects on hunches all the time, regardless of the systems they put in place to minimize it.

kafkaesq 9y ago
Yup - the hunch factor isn't a "bug"; it's absolutely intrinsic to the process. Not only is fundamentally irreducible - you wouldn't want to completely remove it from the process, even if you could. So I guess the problem with objective-seeming (and often just simply gratuitously hard) "filter" questions like those suggested here is that their real purpose seems to be give the process an appearance of objectivity - "We had a guy in here, his code samples looked great, and he talked a great game and all -- but would ya believe, he totally froze on that Lego robot puzzle question! What a poser!" -- when of course it's never going to be anything of the sort.

bogomipz 9y ago

Yes and this logic is essentially "if it works for a publicly traded company that has 25,000 full time engineers then surely it's the right approach for our start up of 25 people total."

kafkaesq 9y ago
Whether it actually works for those companies (beyond a placebo-like effect) is open to question. But the bigger point is that - even assuming for the sake of argument that these questions actually do "work", on some leel - they've become such a huge fad that people are just adopting them solely on the basis of authority, without intrinsically understanding why these questions work, or more importantly, how to interpret candidates' responses to them In other words, they're just following a script. I wouldn't say quite it's on "blind faith", per se (because the companies do have some reputation). But it's not much better than blind faith. Such that this precious quote of yours, from just a few days ago, seems quite apt here: This practice of blindly adopting ideas just because they work for Google needs to stop.