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> We know that cognitive ability has one of the strongest correlations with job performance There is a good argument that the technical interview success is mu

by e10a 7y ago

> We know that cognitive ability has one of the strongest correlations with job performance There is a good argument that the technical interview success is much more strongly correlated to the number of hours spent practicing Leetcode-type questions than to actual cognitive ability.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dvdbloc 7y ago
And shear luck that you have seen a problem or similar before
closeparen 7y ago
The process can definitely reject good candidates who are out of practice, but it’d be pretty hard to do the practice and give good performances without some underlying skill.
- xwolfi 7y ago
  But look at it that way: a candidate that didn't practice before the interview, is either not so interested, a bit dull about basic human interaction or cannot even understand what an interview is. It's honestly like coming to an interview without a suit and a tie. Sure if you're a pretentious startup it'll horrify you, but anywhere else it shows that the candidate just doesn't understand what's happening, that he could have just made the cheapest first impression effort and didn't even think about it, he came in sandals and tshirt instead. Do you want him talking to clients ? Can you afford him not talking to clients ?
typon 7y ago
I've noticed that exactly. IQ presumably is something inherent.. But personal experience shows that technical interviews have nothing to do with IQ. They can be easily solved by creating a dynamic programming problem pattern matcher in your brain, which is what I created after doing 300 leetcode problems. I did not become smarter in general or at coding at all, I just got good at mapping problems to binary trees or dynamic programming or string search.
- sockgrant 7y ago
  I think that the point is that being able to do what you did requires intelligence to accomplish.
  - cmonnow 7y ago
    it looks like a humblebrag.. "I'm not intelligent, I'm just able to see enough patterns in chess to defeat Carlsen" "I'm not smart, I'm just able to solve algorithmic problems based on my vast memory and ability to map new questions to old solutions"
    - Apocryphon 7y ago
      It depends- maybe if people devoted enough time to cramming algorithmic problems (more than they did in their CS classes, even) could they have memorized enough solutions and seen the patterns enough to be able to master this type of technical interview? One wonders, can that rote memorization + pattern machine process be trained into anyone- meaning that this is not a measure of intelligence but of brute force, like memorizing Rubik's Cube solutions? And then the practical concern arises- does that actually make anyone a better programmer, and benefit employers?
    - typon 7y ago
      It's really not. Knowing how to solve those leetcode questions has not improved my professional life one bit. I am not a better programmer.. In fact it probably made me worse. At my work I pretty much never deal with the kind of coding that leetcode requires. I'm more interested in writing larger scale software rather than throw away toy problems which completely ignore code quality or maintainability. In fact, I'm not even good at solving leetcode problems that well so I wasn't able to get a job at the big N companies...although it did help with passing the interview at one of the smaller companies.
- bydl0coder 7y ago
  I don't get how IQ could be considered inherent. It's a test, so results are defined by talent and training. A person who spent a month solving the types of problems present in an IQ test will certainly get a higher score. By, the way, you did become better at coding by solving Leetcode problems, cause now you can easily spot them in the wild and use a proper algorithm instead of some naive solution.
dahfizz 7y ago
The technical interview is not the only stage in the interview process. It might be better thought of as a way to filter out applicants who have poor innate ability and/or poor learning skills. I would argue that being able to study leetcode and then apply that new knowledge you've learned is an important skill in and of itself in this industry. Isn't that what all of highschool and most of college is? Signalling that you a quick learner and a hard worker is important.
- kortilla 7y ago
  >It might be better thought of as a way to filter out applicants who have poor innate ability and/or poor learning skills. It’s a way to filter out people who haven’t had time to study leetcode style quiz questions. It has no relationship to learning skills or innate ability. There is no way to distinguish between someone who hasn’t spent time grinding algorithms and someone who had with poor learning skills. >I would argue that being able to study leetcode and then apply that new knowledge you've learned is an important skill in and of itself in this industry. Isn't that what all of highschool and most of college is? Nope, it demonstrates that you had time to waste, nothing more. Candidates that built actual software to accomplish something are much more impressive because it shows they can write software attached to reality.
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    And just like the standardized test rigamarole, technical interviews can be gamed by investing in prep courses and materials for those who are willing to dump the money and time on them.
    - cmonnow 7y ago
      It's like saying "This guy spent 4 years in college trying to get a 4.0 GPA. Clearly, he only did it to game the system and get a good job/career. So I won't hire him" A person willing to spend time and money preparing to succeed in a scenario that exists in real life (pass interviews), is one of the types of persons I want to hire.
spunker540 7y ago
Is there anything wrong with preferring people who have spent a lot of time practicing leetcode? Most jobs prefer people with certain kinds of experience vs raw cognitive ability. Raw cognitive ability doesn’t mean much outside of entry level jobs. I don’t believe the interview process would be any more efficient or effective for software engineering roles if they started preferring pure “cognitive ability” to leetcode effort.
- cmonnow 7y ago
  This thread, and a similar thread recently - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20162777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20162777, just solidifies my desire to ask for algorithmic whiteboard type questions. Assuming all other things are equal, obviously anyone will choose the candidate who can do these questions vs one who cannot. The problem, obviously, is that all other things are seldom equal IRL. So, the issue now becomes : Would you rather hire someone who has a solid github profile but can't whiteboard algos, or someone who doesn't have any past portfolio but can ace whiteboard algos. If you give me 20 years, I could probably get a PhD. Given ENOUGH time, anyone could theoretically achieve anything. But the differentiator between candidates happens when the clock is ticking. I, and most other employers, are not looking for perfect answers. We want to know how you approach a problem under these constraints : short time, high pressure, unseen problem. We want to know whether you are the type who chokes. It tells us that your desire to look good in front of someone (or conversely, your fear of looking bad in front of someone) fills up your mind more than your desire to solve a problem. Would you choke if you mom asked you the same question - No, because you don't fear being judged, right ? We want a similar trait in our developers. We want you to GIVE VERY LITTLE SHIT about what we think of you, at least for the next 30 minutes. We want you to have enough control of your mind to TEMPORARILY ignore our existence and focus on the problem at hand. Granted, such scenarios occur rarely IRL, but it tells us a lot about how much control the person has over their psyche, how honest they are about their limits, what they do when they reach their limit etc. It's as much a behavioral test as an IQ one. Having said all that, not all companies need non-choking geniuses. Choking geniuses work fine for many.
  - invalidOrTaken 7y ago
lmm 7y ago
> There is a good argument that the technical interview success is much more strongly correlated to the number of hours spent practicing Leetcode-type questions than to actual cognitive ability. Where is that "good argument" substantiated? People say exactly the same thing about IQ tests, probably because it's something they'd like to be true. But it's not backed up by the evidence.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  Incorrect. See e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2383929/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2383929/
  - telotortium 7y ago
    https://www.gwern.net/DNB-FAQ https://www.gwern.net/DNB-FAQ contains a rather extensive review of this study and its follow-ups, critiques, etc, and comes to the conclusion that Dual n-Back training probably doesn't work to improve fluid intelligence.
    - e10a 7y ago
      Gwern is a person unhealthily obsessed with proving that IQ tests work and cannot be considered a reliable source.
      - gwern 7y ago
        That's quite a leap there. There is no contradiction between thinking IQ tests work and thinking that DNB increases IQ; I thought it did, and it was a bitter experience learning first-hand how exactly the Replication Crisis works. If you think I am an unreliable source, why don't you look at the other meta-analyses like Melby-Lervåg, or Sala? Or look at the criticisms made by researchers like Redick whose experiments turned out to be nulls? (Redick's most recent comment on DNB is titled "The Hype Cycle of Working Memory Training" https://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/U8YNVXKM5SKF6ZY9TQBR/full https://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/U8YNVXKM5SKF6ZY9TQBR/ful... , so you can probably guess what he thinks of DNB now.) Or look at what the field thinks in recent studies - assuming you can find any recent DNB/IQ studies, as everyone has realized that it doesn't do anything.
bubblewrap 7y ago
That would be a spectacular finding, implying everybody could become a good coder with a little bit of practice. I'm not saying it isn't so, but I think the word is still out in that. In any case, the solution seems simple: just practice some leetcode before the interview.

by e10a 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

dvdbloc 7y ago

And shear luck that you have seen a problem or similar before

closeparen 7y ago

The process can definitely reject good candidates who are out of practice, but it’d be pretty hard to do the practice and give good performances without some underlying skill.

xwolfi 7y ago
But look at it that way: a candidate that didn't practice before the interview, is either not so interested, a bit dull about basic human interaction or cannot even understand what an interview is. It's honestly like coming to an interview without a suit and a tie. Sure if you're a pretentious startup it'll horrify you, but anywhere else it shows that the candidate just doesn't understand what's happening, that he could have just made the cheapest first impression effort and didn't even think about it, he came in sandals and tshirt instead. Do you want him talking to clients ? Can you afford him not talking to clients ?

typon 7y ago

I've noticed that exactly. IQ presumably is something inherent.. But personal experience shows that technical interviews have nothing to do with IQ. They can be easily solved by creating a dynamic programming problem pattern matcher in your brain, which is what I created after doing 300 leetcode problems. I did not become smarter in general or at coding at all, I just got good at mapping problems to binary trees or dynamic programming or string search.

sockgrant 7y ago
I think that the point is that being able to do what you did requires intelligence to accomplish.
- cmonnow 7y ago
  it looks like a humblebrag.. "I'm not intelligent, I'm just able to see enough patterns in chess to defeat Carlsen" "I'm not smart, I'm just able to solve algorithmic problems based on my vast memory and ability to map new questions to old solutions"
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    It depends- maybe if people devoted enough time to cramming algorithmic problems (more than they did in their CS classes, even) could they have memorized enough solutions and seen the patterns enough to be able to master this type of technical interview? One wonders, can that rote memorization + pattern machine process be trained into anyone- meaning that this is not a measure of intelligence but of brute force, like memorizing Rubik's Cube solutions? And then the practical concern arises- does that actually make anyone a better programmer, and benefit employers?
  - typon 7y ago
    It's really not. Knowing how to solve those leetcode questions has not improved my professional life one bit. I am not a better programmer.. In fact it probably made me worse. At my work I pretty much never deal with the kind of coding that leetcode requires. I'm more interested in writing larger scale software rather than throw away toy problems which completely ignore code quality or maintainability. In fact, I'm not even good at solving leetcode problems that well so I wasn't able to get a job at the big N companies...although it did help with passing the interview at one of the smaller companies.
bydl0coder 7y ago
I don't get how IQ could be considered inherent. It's a test, so results are defined by talent and training. A person who spent a month solving the types of problems present in an IQ test will certainly get a higher score. By, the way, you did become better at coding by solving Leetcode problems, cause now you can easily spot them in the wild and use a proper algorithm instead of some naive solution.

dahfizz 7y ago

The technical interview is not the only stage in the interview process. It might be better thought of as a way to filter out applicants who have poor innate ability and/or poor learning skills. I would argue that being able to study leetcode and then apply that new knowledge you've learned is an important skill in and of itself in this industry. Isn't that what all of highschool and most of college is? Signalling that you a quick learner and a hard worker is important.

kortilla 7y ago
>It might be better thought of as a way to filter out applicants who have poor innate ability and/or poor learning skills. It’s a way to filter out people who haven’t had time to study leetcode style quiz questions. It has no relationship to learning skills or innate ability. There is no way to distinguish between someone who hasn’t spent time grinding algorithms and someone who had with poor learning skills. >I would argue that being able to study leetcode and then apply that new knowledge you've learned is an important skill in and of itself in this industry. Isn't that what all of highschool and most of college is? Nope, it demonstrates that you had time to waste, nothing more. Candidates that built actual software to accomplish something are much more impressive because it shows they can write software attached to reality.
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  And just like the standardized test rigamarole, technical interviews can be gamed by investing in prep courses and materials for those who are willing to dump the money and time on them.
  - cmonnow 7y ago
    It's like saying "This guy spent 4 years in college trying to get a 4.0 GPA. Clearly, he only did it to game the system and get a good job/career. So I won't hire him" A person willing to spend time and money preparing to succeed in a scenario that exists in real life (pass interviews), is one of the types of persons I want to hire.

spunker540 7y ago

Is there anything wrong with preferring people who have spent a lot of time practicing leetcode? Most jobs prefer people with certain kinds of experience vs raw cognitive ability. Raw cognitive ability doesn’t mean much outside of entry level jobs. I don’t believe the interview process would be any more efficient or effective for software engineering roles if they started preferring pure “cognitive ability” to leetcode effort.

cmonnow 7y ago
This thread, and a similar thread recently - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20162777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20162777, just solidifies my desire to ask for algorithmic whiteboard type questions. Assuming all other things are equal, obviously anyone will choose the candidate who can do these questions vs one who cannot. The problem, obviously, is that all other things are seldom equal IRL. So, the issue now becomes : Would you rather hire someone who has a solid github profile but can't whiteboard algos, or someone who doesn't have any past portfolio but can ace whiteboard algos. If you give me 20 years, I could probably get a PhD. Given ENOUGH time, anyone could theoretically achieve anything. But the differentiator between candidates happens when the clock is ticking. I, and most other employers, are not looking for perfect answers. We want to know how you approach a problem under these constraints : short time, high pressure, unseen problem. We want to know whether you are the type who chokes. It tells us that your desire to look good in front of someone (or conversely, your fear of looking bad in front of someone) fills up your mind more than your desire to solve a problem. Would you choke if you mom asked you the same question - No, because you don't fear being judged, right ? We want a similar trait in our developers. We want you to GIVE VERY LITTLE SHIT about what we think of you, at least for the next 30 minutes. We want you to have enough control of your mind to TEMPORARILY ignore our existence and focus on the problem at hand. Granted, such scenarios occur rarely IRL, but it tells us a lot about how much control the person has over their psyche, how honest they are about their limits, what they do when they reach their limit etc. It's as much a behavioral test as an IQ one. Having said all that, not all companies need non-choking geniuses. Choking geniuses work fine for many.
- invalidOrTaken 7y ago

lmm 7y ago

> There is a good argument that the technical interview success is much more strongly correlated to the number of hours spent practicing Leetcode-type questions than to actual cognitive ability. Where is that "good argument" substantiated? People say exactly the same thing about IQ tests, probably because it's something they'd like to be true. But it's not backed up by the evidence.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
Incorrect. See e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2383929/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2383929/
- telotortium 7y ago
  https://www.gwern.net/DNB-FAQ https://www.gwern.net/DNB-FAQ contains a rather extensive review of this study and its follow-ups, critiques, etc, and comes to the conclusion that Dual n-Back training probably doesn't work to improve fluid intelligence.
  - e10a 7y ago
    Gwern is a person unhealthily obsessed with proving that IQ tests work and cannot be considered a reliable source.
    - gwern 7y ago
      That's quite a leap there. There is no contradiction between thinking IQ tests work and thinking that DNB increases IQ; I thought it did, and it was a bitter experience learning first-hand how exactly the Replication Crisis works. If you think I am an unreliable source, why don't you look at the other meta-analyses like Melby-Lervåg, or Sala? Or look at the criticisms made by researchers like Redick whose experiments turned out to be nulls? (Redick's most recent comment on DNB is titled "The Hype Cycle of Working Memory Training" https://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/U8YNVXKM5SKF6ZY9TQBR/full https://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/U8YNVXKM5SKF6ZY9TQBR/ful... , so you can probably guess what he thinks of DNB now.) Or look at what the field thinks in recent studies - assuming you can find any recent DNB/IQ studies, as everyone has realized that it doesn't do anything.

bubblewrap 7y ago

That would be a spectacular finding, implying everybody could become a good coder with a little bit of practice. I'm not saying it isn't so, but I think the word is still out in that. In any case, the solution seems simple: just practice some leetcode before the interview.