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Doing well on whiteboard interviews can be a sign of high intelligence (a true positive result). But what signal does doing poorly on them give? Did you measure
by uh_uh 6y ago
Doing well on whiteboard interviews can be a sign of high intelligence (a true positive result). But what signal does doing poorly on them give? Did you measure the candidate's intelligence (true negative), or preparedness maybe anxiety levels (false negative)? I guess the answer is that it does not matter as long as you have a large enough true positive candidate pool. And FAANG has this.
- RogerL 6y agoSure it matters. Who doesn't do well due to stress? I think you'll find women, minorities and basically a lot of people outside of the cultural norm/majority do poorly. That's not an argument that you can eliminate test anxiety, but certainly if we can reduce it without destructively eliminating the high value candidate pool we should do so.
- uh_uh 6y agoWhat you are saying is an ethical/moral consideration and it is a valid one. When I said it doesn't matter, I meant that FAANG is commercially not incentivised to account for the anxiety factor. Even if they miss out on good candidates due to their anxiety, they can still choose from plenty of good candidates who don't suffer from anxiety. Given how many people are aspiring to join FAANG, I'd assume it's a buyer's market for these companies.
- biotinker 6y agoI'm not sure that's true. What you describe is the case for any individual candidate, but doesn't account for how those candidates interact with one another. Specifically, it has repeatedly been shown that more diverse teams will consistently outperform more homogeneous ones. If your company only hires above the 95th percentile but their method for finding that quality cutoff is heavily skewed towards a certain demographic, in the long run that company may well perform worse than a company that hires at the 80th percentile but without the demographic skew.
- thedevilslawyer 6y ago> Specifically, it has repeatedly been shown that more diverse teams will consistently outperform more homogeneous ones. From the data I've seen made public, FAANG are usually more diverse than other companies.
- thedevilslawyer 6y agoI think you'll find men, people in majorities and lots of people on average will do poorly, also.
- marcosdumay 6y agoThe ratio that's important for those huge companies is the "true positive"/"false positive" one. I guess if you make the test hard enough, always change it, and add some unhealthy dose of suspicion over the candidate's behavior, you can maximize that ratio. But I'm not confident FAANG even looks at it. It's much more likely that they just postulate that a hired employee is a competent one and go on with their day. From the candidate point of view, of course, things are very different, and the negative results are much more important.
- cercatrova 6y agoCompanies don't care about false negatives, they don't want false positives because that is concretely lost revenue, rather than not hiring someone.