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Google basically admitted that GPA and where you went to school don't matter and do not correlate with job performance. And yet here we are still optimizing on

by sjg007 6y ago

Google basically admitted that GPA and where you went to school don't matter and do not correlate with job performance. And yet here we are still optimizing on the Ivy League. It'd be a safe wager that algorithm whiteboard interviews don't either except that they screen out folks who don't pass the interview. So because everyone has that baseline, that baseline is by definition meaningless. The other side of the coin is that performance management is also just as bad.

xornor 6y ago
Work results are only sensible measure for the work performance. Easy hire and fire is one solution. Also a short trial period at the start of the work agreement should show if results happen or not (fg. 4-6 months).
thu2111 6y ago
Yes, because those two things are related. I don't know if it was ever made public, I think I heard this story via backchannels. But Google did a research project at some point to discover why GPA/interview performance in general did not seem to correlate with post-hiring job performance. The project was never allowed to reach full completion because the direction their data and investigation was going looked like this: "Our hiring process does not correlate with post-hiring job performance because we have a large and measurable bias in interviews in favour of Ivy League candidates and women." In other words, GPA didn't correlate with job performance for Google because it was a confounding variable: they were selecting the sample for top tier universities (which select on GPA) at hiring time, but not when it came to promo reviews (which had a different process and anyway, less rhetorical ideology involved than hiring, at least at that time).
- sjg007 6y ago
  It’s worth reading the source here: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big-data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-...

by sjg007 6y ago

xornor 6y ago

Work results are only sensible measure for the work performance. Easy hire and fire is one solution. Also a short trial period at the start of the work agreement should show if results happen or not (fg. 4-6 months).

thu2111 6y ago

Yes, because those two things are related. I don't know if it was ever made public, I think I heard this story via backchannels. But Google did a research project at some point to discover why GPA/interview performance in general did not seem to correlate with post-hiring job performance. The project was never allowed to reach full completion because the direction their data and investigation was going looked like this: "Our hiring process does not correlate with post-hiring job performance because we have a large and measurable bias in interviews in favour of Ivy League candidates and women." In other words, GPA didn't correlate with job performance for Google because it was a confounding variable: they were selecting the sample for top tier universities (which select on GPA) at hiring time, but not when it came to promo reviews (which had a different process and anyway, less rhetorical ideology involved than hiring, at least at that time).

sjg007 6y ago
It’s worth reading the source here: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big-data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-...