4 ms·

This sentiment gets shared a lot, but what's a better alternative? Without ignoring the reality that you only have 15-20 minutes with each candidate, some of th

by pc86 4y ago

This sentiment gets shared a lot, but what's a better alternative? Without ignoring the reality that you only have 15-20 minutes with each candidate, some of them will be brilliant, and at least a third or more won't be able to code their way out of a paper bag. Oh, and keep in mind false negatives have almost no downside but false positives hurt the recruiter financially, and hiring bad people is expensive.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago
>Oh, and keep in mind false negatives have almost no downside but false positives hurt the recruiter financially, and hiring bad people is expensive. This gets repeated over and over, makes sense rationally on a superficial level, but falls apart once you think deeper into it without substantiating it with evidence. We don't work on a binary false positive / true positive scale. We don't know the efficiency of each variable going into the equation with which we filter false positives. Layering proxy on proxy doesn't guarantee an increase in the ratio of true positives to false positives. All these variables are costly and subject to diminishing returns. At the end, the workplace is still arguably a far bigger deciding factor in the outcome than who you hire. If you're a big corp like MS getting at least a few dozen candidates after initial automated filters, that's one thing. If you're a relative no-name with a handful of candidates and a fat management layer pulling these shenanigans, it's about time we get real and call them out.
- 542458 4y ago
  > At the end, the workplace is still arguably a far bigger deciding factor in the outcome than who you hire. I really don’t think this is true. Are there any successful programming companies who just hire whoever for development work? All the top-tier ones have settled on being extremely selective. Of course, that could be coincidence or bias… but this practice is fairly expensive, so there would be nontrivial pressure against it. Furthermore, I think a lot of people can attest to working with both very good and bad developers on the same team - so even inside a workplace you see a range of individual productivity.
  - cobalt 4y ago
    top tier companies are also at the top. What they do doesn't necessarily make sense for everyone else
542458 4y ago
Yeah, I think this is the crux of it. Hiring sucks for everybody involved. I hate it because the process is ugly and the cost of failure is enormous (emotionally to me, financially to my budget, and personally to my reputation).
lapcat 4y ago
> keep in mind false negatives have almost no downside Can it be said that refusing to hire women, for example, has almost no downside? In my opinion, this is a kind of ethical issue, because the "false negatives" are not just random. Audition-style coding quiz interviews tend to systematically discriminate against people who don't interview often, who haven't recently studied CS in college, who don't have time to "train" for interviews, or who tend to have situational anxiety in job interviews (which is fairly common, and not an indicator of on-the-job anxiety). A study sponsored by Microsoft itself showed that these interviews test for anxiety rather than skill. https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/07/tech-job-interviews-anxiety/ https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/07/tech-job-interviews-anxiety/ Remember that the author said, "A few weeks later I’m about to go in for my interview and I’m so nervous I can barely think straight." These screening tests were all-or-nothing, so if he flubbed the question, he was eliminated. You might respond, "Well, he made it through the onsite interviews." Yes, that's precisely why using coding tests as screening is so pernicious, because a short screening test is not a good indicator of what someone can do given more time and under better working conditions.
jasonlotito 4y ago
> but what's a better alternative? "Write a function that, when given an array of length n + 1 containing integers 1 through n, find the duplicate integer in an array. You can use this equation: sum(1 to n) = n(n + 1) / 2" Basically, if your solution is made trivial by someone knowing a generic formula or equation, just give it to them. Not giving them the formula doesn't give you any additional information.
- pc86 4y ago
  Of course it does. Have they seen the question before? Are they really good with math? Are they really bad with math? Do they even know how to approach a mathematical problem like this if they've never seen the formula before? Do they even consider that there might be a mathematical formula to determine this, or do they immediately just try to brute force it? We can debate whether or not any of the above is useful information (I think it is), but not giving them the formula definitely gives you more information than just giving it to them.

by pc86 4y ago

BlargMcLarg 4y ago

>Oh, and keep in mind false negatives have almost no downside but false positives hurt the recruiter financially, and hiring bad people is expensive. This gets repeated over and over, makes sense rationally on a superficial level, but falls apart once you think deeper into it without substantiating it with evidence. We don't work on a binary false positive / true positive scale. We don't know the efficiency of each variable going into the equation with which we filter false positives. Layering proxy on proxy doesn't guarantee an increase in the ratio of true positives to false positives. All these variables are costly and subject to diminishing returns. At the end, the workplace is still arguably a far bigger deciding factor in the outcome than who you hire. If you're a big corp like MS getting at least a few dozen candidates after initial automated filters, that's one thing. If you're a relative no-name with a handful of candidates and a fat management layer pulling these shenanigans, it's about time we get real and call them out.

542458 4y ago
> At the end, the workplace is still arguably a far bigger deciding factor in the outcome than who you hire. I really don’t think this is true. Are there any successful programming companies who just hire whoever for development work? All the top-tier ones have settled on being extremely selective. Of course, that could be coincidence or bias… but this practice is fairly expensive, so there would be nontrivial pressure against it. Furthermore, I think a lot of people can attest to working with both very good and bad developers on the same team - so even inside a workplace you see a range of individual productivity.
- cobalt 4y ago
  top tier companies are also at the top. What they do doesn't necessarily make sense for everyone else

542458 4y ago

Yeah, I think this is the crux of it. Hiring sucks for everybody involved. I hate it because the process is ugly and the cost of failure is enormous (emotionally to me, financially to my budget, and personally to my reputation).

lapcat 4y ago

> keep in mind false negatives have almost no downside Can it be said that refusing to hire women, for example, has almost no downside? In my opinion, this is a kind of ethical issue, because the "false negatives" are not just random. Audition-style coding quiz interviews tend to systematically discriminate against people who don't interview often, who haven't recently studied CS in college, who don't have time to "train" for interviews, or who tend to have situational anxiety in job interviews (which is fairly common, and not an indicator of on-the-job anxiety). A study sponsored by Microsoft itself showed that these interviews test for anxiety rather than skill. https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/07/tech-job-interviews-anxiety/ https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/07/tech-job-interviews-anxiety/ Remember that the author said, "A few weeks later I’m about to go in for my interview and I’m so nervous I can barely think straight." These screening tests were all-or-nothing, so if he flubbed the question, he was eliminated. You might respond, "Well, he made it through the onsite interviews." Yes, that's precisely why using coding tests as screening is so pernicious, because a short screening test is not a good indicator of what someone can do given more time and under better working conditions.

jasonlotito 4y ago

> but what's a better alternative? "Write a function that, when given an array of length n + 1 containing integers 1 through n, find the duplicate integer in an array. You can use this equation: sum(1 to n) = n(n + 1) / 2" Basically, if your solution is made trivial by someone knowing a generic formula or equation, just give it to them. Not giving them the formula doesn't give you any additional information.

pc86 4y ago
Of course it does. Have they seen the question before? Are they really good with math? Are they really bad with math? Do they even know how to approach a mathematical problem like this if they've never seen the formula before? Do they even consider that there might be a mathematical formula to determine this, or do they immediately just try to brute force it? We can debate whether or not any of the above is useful information (I think it is), but not giving them the formula definitely gives you more information than just giving it to them.