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Candidates don't often appreciate the unequal disincentives for the interviewer in making the wrong call. For the company, hiring one poor programmer is usuall
by MarkMc 7y ago
Candidates don't often appreciate the unequal disincentives for the interviewer in making the wrong call. For the company, hiring one poor programmer is usually worse than rejecting 10 good programmers. So a coding test which reduces the rate of false positives is useful, even if it increases the rate of false negatives.
As an aside, this lopsided penalty reminds me of how Typhoon forecasters in different cities systematically bias the predicted stormtrack toward their own city:
https://twitter.com/m_clem/status/1081953447358984192?s=19 https://twitter.com/m_clem/status/1081953447358984192?s=19
- Apocryphon 7y agoThat's certainly a valid stat that I've heard before, but one wonders then if the situation shouldn't also be improving mechanisms when managing existing employees. California, where much of the tech industry is located, is an at-will state. If a bad programmer is really so bad, then shouldn't it be easier to terminate such an individual? Because the alternative, of rejecting 10 good programmers to get to a good one, seems just as much of a waste of programmer time and resources, as hiring a bad one. Perhaps there should be a probationary period with teeth, programmers should be hired as contractors for the first month.