11 ms·

All of these "this is how you hire" posts are utterly worthless without data afterwards to prove that their selection process results in high performance. Does

All of these "this is how you hire" posts are utterly worthless without data afterwards to prove that their selection process results in high performance. Does any of these posters actually correlate interview scores with performance reviews? No. It's just people very confidently announcing their own biases beliefs without any reason except their overconfidence. At least the reason why we have Leetcode questions is because Google did the research and came to the conclusion that those are were good at algorithms ended up being more successful at Google, and THAT'S why we are all suffering through LC. But now that LC has been gamed, I would love to see what the results are as to what makes a successful interview.

pjmlp 4y ago
Android code is such a good example of that hiring process works in practice, it is just brilliant piece of art. Where would we be without such hiring processes that managed to have such set of genius work on Android. /s
- TheBigSalad 4y ago
  It's a pretty successful software project.
cloogshicer 4y ago
This assumes that performance can be meaningfully measured. Which is incorrect, in my experience.
blitzar 4y ago
Also - does it really really matter? 101% worker vs 95% worker but one is an insufferable pr*k who makes everyone else 75% workers ... Everyones approach looks like it works because if everyone is between a 90-110% worker and the team gets along and works together you will get solid results.
TexanFeller 4y ago
> Does any of these posters actually correlate interview scores with performance reviews? Big assumption that performance can be reviewed and scored in some objective way, or if it is that this actually happens. I've seen lots of review processes that pretend to be objective, but absolutely none of them actually were.
datadeft 4y ago
> posts are utterly worthless without data afterwards Same goes to any subject where a multivariate analysis is almost impossible due to the lack of control over your experiments. I seriously doubt that anybody has any data that could prove anything. As an interviewer who did this for many companies for a decade, I hire for attitude. I can teach anybody hard skills (software engineering, sql, python, etc.) with enough time but I can't teach attitude. A person who I can trust because the persistent drive towards goals, can deliver a lot more than a naturally talented programmer with shitty attitude. This is based on my anecdotal data that I accumulated over the years. Funnily enough this is similar to what the Seal Team figured out about recruiting in a completely different field independently. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJdXjtSnZTI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJdXjtSnZTI
fatnoah 4y ago
> At least the reason why we have Leetcode questions is because Google did the research and came to the conclusion that those are were good at algorithms ended up being more successful at Google, That's just part of the process, though. They (and many others) have coding questions, system design questions, and behavioral questions. Taken together, they answer the questions of whether you can write code, design/build/contribute to a coherent larger system, and are someone who can be effective at working with others in a company. Over time, there's been a massive (IMHO) over-index on the coding portion, since it can usually result in an objectively correct or incorrect answer. With massive numbers of applicants, companies really don't lose out on being over-aggressive with cutting people based on these things. As they tighten their hiring belts, I think this will get worse.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Yeah. It's absolutely rational for companies/universities/etc. with a bigger pipeline than they know what to do with, to establish an objective (whether or not wholly relevant) and easy (for them) high bar even if it means passing over people who could have done a perfectly good job and even a few who could have been amazing--so long as most of the people they do let in are pretty good.
hgbjkk 4y ago
> At least the reason why we have Leetcode questions is because Google did the research and came to the conclusion that those are were good at algorithms ended up being more successful at Google [Citation needed] (Or you are doing what you say others are doing)
george574 4y ago
[dead]
mountainriver 4y ago
And is Google itself effective? We all copied Google but do we have their problems? Do we need the type of engineers they needed? Google is beginning to show its age, I’ve seen a number of past coworkers get hired there lately that weren’t effective at their job, but I’m sure they crushed some Leetcode.
- george574 4y ago
  HIRE THE BEST RELIABLE AND TRUSTED IOS AND IPHONE HACKER FOR HACKING SERVICE ALSO UPGRADING OF RESULTS AND HACKING OF NEARBY MOBILE PHONES, dont miss this opportunity !! CONTACT.: techspypro @gmail com
- swsieber 4y ago
  > Google is beginning to show its age,... Yup. Goodhart's law strikes again. I am curious as to what the next as-of-yet-ungamed effective hiring metric is.
  - idontwantthis 4y ago
    Maybe analytical hobbies. Hire anyone into lockpicking, rock climbing, or music theory.
    - ShredKazoo 4y ago
      I assume that's a joke? Sounds like going back to manhole covers.
      - idontwantthis 4y ago
        I honestly don’t know if I was joking or not but the breadth of replies is interesting.
        george574 4y ago
        [dead]
yodsanklai 4y ago
> Google did the research Google also operates with their own sets of constraints. What works for them isn't necessarily what works for different types of companies.
- eloisant 4y ago
  And because they pay a shitton of money, they have a constant flow of candidates and can afford to miss out on many great ones.
nitwit005 4y ago
> At least the reason why we have Leetcode questions is because Google did the research and came to the conclusion that those are were good at algorithms ended up being more successful at Google Isn't the story more complex than that? I certainly didn't just get leetcode questions when I interviewed there, and when I asked, the interviewer said the group hadn't been happy with hires that only knew algorithms.
- xyzzyz 4y ago
  When was that? In 2008, the candidates who were good at leet code kind of questions were generally unusually smart and skilled: nobody at the time was grinding these problems to prepare, so people who could offhandedly solve them without any special preparation were extraordinary. Now, 10-15 years later, everyone is grinding Leetcode, and as a result, being good at it is not indicative of all that much. When a measure becomes the goal, it often ceases to become a good measure.
  - zeroonetwothree 4y ago
    I interviewed in 2007-2009 and there was a lot of preparation as well. It wasn't as widespread as later, but anyone that did 'programming contest' style problems had a huge advantage at interviews. I had something like an 80% offer rate because of this. Ironically I didn't actually get a Google offer though (not sure why, I did solve the problems).
  - greenwhite 4y ago
    Nobody was literally solving them offhand in the sense that they had no background in algorithmic problem solving. Those who didn't explicitly "prepare" were the people who liked competition programming and solving these problems for fun in their spare time. Though I'd agree those candidates were probably better quality on average than those who just grind problems solely for the interview
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  1. What types of questions did they ask instead? 2. Did you get an offer? Did you accept?
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> worthless without data afterwards to prove that their selection process results in high performance > Google did the research Did they? Where is the proof? Pot, Kettle, black
fatneckbeard 4y ago
almost all of Google loses money and makes products that get cancelled. so if you want to lose money and make products that nobody uses or gets cancelled, then i guess leetcode is a good idea.
- gautamdivgi 4y ago
  That’s not a development fail. They need better product people maybe? Also, google has money to spend so the bar for a launch may have been much lower in the past.
  - fatneckbeard 4y ago
    thats my point. what if leetcode tests filter out everyone who is good at making useful products or services, in favor of people who can memorize how to solve puzzles.
    - Jensson 4y ago
      The people who make those decisions aren't doing leetcode tests. Do you think that Thomas Kurian passed a leetcode test? Of course he didn't, the people who make business decisions are in another pipeline that is just a normal management interview.
      - fatneckbeard 4y ago
        so engineering is completely separated from management?
- rr808 4y ago
  Google is one of the greatest companies in history, measured both in technology and business performance. Sure, not everything is perfect.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    When did they start doing leetCode style interviews? LeetCode looks to have been founded in 2015; of course, though, that doesn’t mean Google couldn’t have had a similar in-house format that predates that founding… But it is hard to say how much leetCode style interviews helped. Post-2015 Google already had quite a bit of momentum.
angarg12 4y ago
I work for a big tech, and I have yet to see any evidence that leetcode-style interviews lead to better hires. If that data is being tracked anywhere, it's kept very secret. In fact the metric that recruitment uses for success is "inclined rate". It's easy to see how that is a lousy metric: I can just say yes to all candidates, but that doesn't mean they will do a good job.
- tzhenghao 4y ago
  I think it has to do with headcount requirements once you're Google scale too. Leetcode style interviews become yet another "process to avoid disaster at a big company". Disaster here means hiring a bad engineer and then having to fire them for performance reasons or whatever. Google's whole concept of hiring committees like it was graduate school also reinforces this. They probably do this to minimize nepotism at the hiring stage. All these processes become items on a hiring checklist, but to your point, it doesn't guarantee hiring a great engineer. Just one of those tragedies embedded alongside other big co bureaucracy processes.
- potamic 4y ago
  What is inclined rate?
  - Root_Denied 4y ago
    "Inclined To Hire", meaning someone who either interviewed the person directly or reviewed their hiring profile and all the interview feedback is saying yes, we should hire this person. Basically the equivalent of the Roman emperor thumbs up/thumbs down except it's a small group and you need a certain number of thumbs up to move forward. The number of people you need Inclined to Hire differs from org to org that use this method.
- Jensson 4y ago
  > I work for a big tech, and I have yet to see any evidence that leetcode-style interviews lead to better hires. I worked for Google and at least back then everyone working there could read the studies showing that the interviews worked. The effect was very clear, with there being no upper bar where the interview score stopped mattering. If you haven't seen any data then you just have a set of anecdotes, so your position is very weak. I have seen the data, but a person like you who is convinced it work wont believe me of course. But I'm not sure why Google would lie about that, or why they would keep the interview format for so long if it didn't work. The old article talking about Google interviews talked about what they did before they arrived at this format, what they do today is the best interview according to their data.
VLM 4y ago
Were the new hires more successful or were the hiring managers more successful? Note the hiring managers are the ones picking the criteria. My guess is a dev who passes leetcode but fails to produce is not seen as reflecting upon the hiring manager. It doesn't matter if leetcode correlates or even negatively correlates with the success of the new hire; what would matter is not being able to blame the hiring mgr.
lumb63 4y ago
I think part of it is, within software engineering, what is “high performance”? Is high performance making economically valuable contributions? If so, there is huge inherent inequality between the economic value of projects, so the metric is worthless for judging engineering talent. Is high performance getting good performance reviews? In my experience performance reviews are wrought with favoritism, ageism, and probably other subjectivities that create a very low signal to noise ratio, so that metric is worthless. Is high performance someone who is good at writing software? There are engineers I know who write very good software but lack the decision making or vision to do so in valuable areas. Thus, another metric is worthless. The reality is there is no general “high performance”. There are smarter and more motivated people, sure. I think testing for general intelligence, personality type, etc., are valuable. But I also think a lot of high performance is about finding someone who is a good fit for the organization in terms of the individual’s experience and skills and the organization’s needs.
- 908B64B197 4y ago
  > The reality is there is no general “high performance”. I've heard that claim times and times again. Often it's from companies believing in "Best Cost IT talent" or whatever the current buzzword is on LinkedIn. Chances are, they never even worked with an SV caliber dev. We've all seen engineers that are simply running around in circles around others. Just think of John Carmack. If any of these organizations managed to luck out by hiring someone from, let's say Apple or Google, it would most likely change their beliefs that there's no "high performance".
- twelve40 4y ago
  if performance reviews are worthless why do people have them at all? if they are regularly practiced at a company, this means the company puts enough faith in them to overall promote those who deserve it and to decide peoples' and company's fate based on that. Which then makes it quite a decent interview outcome metric. If on the other hand performance reviews are as bad and worthless as you claim, they should be stopped completely, and everyone running them should be instantly fired as a bunch of ageist favoritist pigs who are scamming the company.
- 4y ago
VoodooJuJu 4y ago
>Google did the research and came to the conclusion that those are were good at algorithms ended up being more successful at Google They could have been fooled by randomness, like many "intellectual" types often are.
dilyevsky 4y ago
Actually I remember Norvig saying that they found no such thing - scoring higher in interview panels did not correlate with performance on a job. The only positive correlation they found was gpa
- jfrbfbreudh 4y ago
  +1 If I remember correctly, it was actually slightly negativity correlated with work quality because extremely talented competitive programmers would smash the interviews but write competitive programming style code (aka not enterprise quality).[1] 1) https://catonmat.net/programming-competitions-work-performance https://catonmat.net/programming-competitions-work-performan...
  - froh 4y ago
    no wait. this is about live competitions, not about job interviews. the interview is about the interaction on a CS topic. how do you express yourself, verbally and in code? that's not: can you crank your the highest performance solution in the shortest amount of time.
KerryJones 4y ago
I really wish I had the reference, but I did the "paid trial" for a week for out interviewing process (startup, 40m evaluation) based on an article that said that standard tech interviews gave you an 18% predictability and that paid trials gave you about 72% (it was only one study). I can tell you that at our company we definitely dodged candidates here and I was very happy with everyone we hired (but you could call that bias, as I was the hiring manager -- but I also worked withe veryone I hired)
- richthegeek 4y ago
  I can imagine that works fine for fresh-out-of-university candidates but I can't imagine a time in my career where I could (and would want to) take 5 days PTO for a job interview. FAANG-like hiring has the question "What info do you get from the 5th interview that you didn't already have after the 2nd?" - for the paid trial, what info do you get by Friday that you didn't have by the end of Monday?
  - KerryJones 4y ago
    I agree it's much harder with someone further in their career (and we worked with candidates to figure out what made sense, either shortening the trial, allowing other time to be included, etc.) To answer your last question. On Monday, it was had to fully tell how someone interacted with the team (there was a particular incident where a candidate ended pushing some extremely strong politics on the rest of the team on Wednesday). I was okay with it (I think people should be okay to express opinions), but the rest of the team was not -- and I value the rest of my team (ended up making the decision not to go forward as they weren't comfortable with the hire). Similarly, when they gave an estimate on Monday for the work they could accomplish on Friday (but failed to do it), depending on their reasoning (did they just grossly miss-estimate, or were there legitimate reasons, are they learning from errors). They had time to keep us updated throughout the week, to readjust, etc. All things that you typically learn with time.
weatherlite 4y ago
> But now that LC has been gamed, How was it gamed? I wasn't aware of anything. Is this about LLMs being able to solve some of the questions?
- resonious 4y ago
  I think it's only gamed in the Goodhart's Law sense. The original intention of hard CS brain teaser questions was to filter for people who can reason through the questions on the spot. Now because everyone knows the questions and answers, the filter is probably more likely to net you people who put in the memorization hours than high IQ folks.
- californical 4y ago
  It’s that it doesn’t really test your depth of knowledge of CS topics, it more just tests that you’re able to memorize categories of problems and how to solve them. Sure you need to understand some basic CS to pass a LC question, but it’s more about recognizing a pattern and having memorized the proper algo for that pattern. If you were taking an algorithms interview 20 years ago, you’d have to truly know a huge breadth of CS knowledge. But now you can just memorize problems for a few months and never learn the true meaning of “why” a tree is the best data structure in x situation. It was “gamed” when people learned that you could pass the interviews without truly understanding the material, if you just memorize the rules of the game and can recite them when asked.
  - roncesvalles 4y ago
    That doesn't mean it's not testing for the right things. Pattern matching, memory, and understanding are all attributes that help be an effective software engineer. It's also not as easy as you describe - just memorizing patterns. Maybe for the easy-medium questions that ChatGPT can solve, but Google stopped asking such questions a decade ago. The algorithm questions that all the tech companies ask today require real problem-solving.
raverbashing 4y ago
> why we have Leetcode questions is because Google did the research and came to the conclusion that those are were good at algorithms ended up being more successful at Google Did they? I remember hearing about a research they did and it wasn't so clear cut to its advantages as a "job success predictor"
- froh 4y ago
  coding competitions are no predictor. oral exam style algorithmic interviews are.

pjmlp 4y ago

Android code is such a good example of that hiring process works in practice, it is just brilliant piece of art. Where would we be without such hiring processes that managed to have such set of genius work on Android. /s

TheBigSalad 4y ago
It's a pretty successful software project.

cloogshicer 4y ago

This assumes that performance can be meaningfully measured. Which is incorrect, in my experience.

blitzar 4y ago

Also - does it really really matter? 101% worker vs 95% worker but one is an insufferable pr*k who makes everyone else 75% workers ... Everyones approach looks like it works because if everyone is between a 90-110% worker and the team gets along and works together you will get solid results.

TexanFeller 4y ago

> Does any of these posters actually correlate interview scores with performance reviews? Big assumption that performance can be reviewed and scored in some objective way, or if it is that this actually happens. I've seen lots of review processes that pretend to be objective, but absolutely none of them actually were.

datadeft 4y ago

> posts are utterly worthless without data afterwards Same goes to any subject where a multivariate analysis is almost impossible due to the lack of control over your experiments. I seriously doubt that anybody has any data that could prove anything. As an interviewer who did this for many companies for a decade, I hire for attitude. I can teach anybody hard skills (software engineering, sql, python, etc.) with enough time but I can't teach attitude. A person who I can trust because the persistent drive towards goals, can deliver a lot more than a naturally talented programmer with shitty attitude. This is based on my anecdotal data that I accumulated over the years. Funnily enough this is similar to what the Seal Team figured out about recruiting in a completely different field independently. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJdXjtSnZTI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJdXjtSnZTI

fatnoah 4y ago

> At least the reason why we have Leetcode questions is because Google did the research and came to the conclusion that those are were good at algorithms ended up being more successful at Google, That's just part of the process, though. They (and many others) have coding questions, system design questions, and behavioral questions. Taken together, they answer the questions of whether you can write code, design/build/contribute to a coherent larger system, and are someone who can be effective at working with others in a company. Over time, there's been a massive (IMHO) over-index on the coding portion, since it can usually result in an objectively correct or incorrect answer. With massive numbers of applicants, companies really don't lose out on being over-aggressive with cutting people based on these things. As they tighten their hiring belts, I think this will get worse.

ghaff 4y ago
Yeah. It's absolutely rational for companies/universities/etc. with a bigger pipeline than they know what to do with, to establish an objective (whether or not wholly relevant) and easy (for them) high bar even if it means passing over people who could have done a perfectly good job and even a few who could have been amazing--so long as most of the people they do let in are pretty good.

hgbjkk 4y ago

george574 4y ago

[dead]

mountainriver 4y ago

And is Google itself effective? We all copied Google but do we have their problems? Do we need the type of engineers they needed? Google is beginning to show its age, I’ve seen a number of past coworkers get hired there lately that weren’t effective at their job, but I’m sure they crushed some Leetcode.

george574 4y ago
HIRE THE BEST RELIABLE AND TRUSTED IOS AND IPHONE HACKER FOR HACKING SERVICE ALSO UPGRADING OF RESULTS AND HACKING OF NEARBY MOBILE PHONES, dont miss this opportunity !! CONTACT.: techspypro @gmail com
swsieber 4y ago
> Google is beginning to show its age,... Yup. Goodhart's law strikes again. I am curious as to what the next as-of-yet-ungamed effective hiring metric is.
- idontwantthis 4y ago
  Maybe analytical hobbies. Hire anyone into lockpicking, rock climbing, or music theory.
  - ShredKazoo 4y ago
    I assume that's a joke? Sounds like going back to manhole covers.
    - idontwantthis 4y ago
      I honestly don’t know if I was joking or not but the breadth of replies is interesting.
      - george574 4y ago
        [dead]

yodsanklai 4y ago

> Google did the research Google also operates with their own sets of constraints. What works for them isn't necessarily what works for different types of companies.

eloisant 4y ago
And because they pay a shitton of money, they have a constant flow of candidates and can afford to miss out on many great ones.

nitwit005 4y ago

> At least the reason why we have Leetcode questions is because Google did the research and came to the conclusion that those are were good at algorithms ended up being more successful at Google Isn't the story more complex than that? I certainly didn't just get leetcode questions when I interviewed there, and when I asked, the interviewer said the group hadn't been happy with hires that only knew algorithms.

xyzzyz 4y ago
When was that? In 2008, the candidates who were good at leet code kind of questions were generally unusually smart and skilled: nobody at the time was grinding these problems to prepare, so people who could offhandedly solve them without any special preparation were extraordinary. Now, 10-15 years later, everyone is grinding Leetcode, and as a result, being good at it is not indicative of all that much. When a measure becomes the goal, it often ceases to become a good measure.
- zeroonetwothree 4y ago
  I interviewed in 2007-2009 and there was a lot of preparation as well. It wasn't as widespread as later, but anyone that did 'programming contest' style problems had a huge advantage at interviews. I had something like an 80% offer rate because of this. Ironically I didn't actually get a Google offer though (not sure why, I did solve the problems).
- greenwhite 4y ago
  Nobody was literally solving them offhand in the sense that they had no background in algorithmic problem solving. Those who didn't explicitly "prepare" were the people who liked competition programming and solving these problems for fun in their spare time. Though I'd agree those candidates were probably better quality on average than those who just grind problems solely for the interview
throwaway2037 4y ago
1. What types of questions did they ask instead? 2. Did you get an offer? Did you accept?

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

> worthless without data afterwards to prove that their selection process results in high performance > Google did the research Did they? Where is the proof? Pot, Kettle, black

fatneckbeard 4y ago

almost all of Google loses money and makes products that get cancelled. so if you want to lose money and make products that nobody uses or gets cancelled, then i guess leetcode is a good idea.

gautamdivgi 4y ago
That’s not a development fail. They need better product people maybe? Also, google has money to spend so the bar for a launch may have been much lower in the past.
- fatneckbeard 4y ago
  thats my point. what if leetcode tests filter out everyone who is good at making useful products or services, in favor of people who can memorize how to solve puzzles.
  - Jensson 4y ago
    The people who make those decisions aren't doing leetcode tests. Do you think that Thomas Kurian passed a leetcode test? Of course he didn't, the people who make business decisions are in another pipeline that is just a normal management interview.
    - fatneckbeard 4y ago
      so engineering is completely separated from management?
rr808 4y ago
Google is one of the greatest companies in history, measured both in technology and business performance. Sure, not everything is perfect.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  When did they start doing leetCode style interviews? LeetCode looks to have been founded in 2015; of course, though, that doesn’t mean Google couldn’t have had a similar in-house format that predates that founding… But it is hard to say how much leetCode style interviews helped. Post-2015 Google already had quite a bit of momentum.

angarg12 4y ago

I work for a big tech, and I have yet to see any evidence that leetcode-style interviews lead to better hires. If that data is being tracked anywhere, it's kept very secret. In fact the metric that recruitment uses for success is "inclined rate". It's easy to see how that is a lousy metric: I can just say yes to all candidates, but that doesn't mean they will do a good job.

tzhenghao 4y ago
I think it has to do with headcount requirements once you're Google scale too. Leetcode style interviews become yet another "process to avoid disaster at a big company". Disaster here means hiring a bad engineer and then having to fire them for performance reasons or whatever. Google's whole concept of hiring committees like it was graduate school also reinforces this. They probably do this to minimize nepotism at the hiring stage. All these processes become items on a hiring checklist, but to your point, it doesn't guarantee hiring a great engineer. Just one of those tragedies embedded alongside other big co bureaucracy processes.
potamic 4y ago
What is inclined rate?
- Root_Denied 4y ago
  "Inclined To Hire", meaning someone who either interviewed the person directly or reviewed their hiring profile and all the interview feedback is saying yes, we should hire this person. Basically the equivalent of the Roman emperor thumbs up/thumbs down except it's a small group and you need a certain number of thumbs up to move forward. The number of people you need Inclined to Hire differs from org to org that use this method.
Jensson 4y ago
> I work for a big tech, and I have yet to see any evidence that leetcode-style interviews lead to better hires. I worked for Google and at least back then everyone working there could read the studies showing that the interviews worked. The effect was very clear, with there being no upper bar where the interview score stopped mattering. If you haven't seen any data then you just have a set of anecdotes, so your position is very weak. I have seen the data, but a person like you who is convinced it work wont believe me of course. But I'm not sure why Google would lie about that, or why they would keep the interview format for so long if it didn't work. The old article talking about Google interviews talked about what they did before they arrived at this format, what they do today is the best interview according to their data.

VLM 4y ago

Were the new hires more successful or were the hiring managers more successful? Note the hiring managers are the ones picking the criteria. My guess is a dev who passes leetcode but fails to produce is not seen as reflecting upon the hiring manager. It doesn't matter if leetcode correlates or even negatively correlates with the success of the new hire; what would matter is not being able to blame the hiring mgr.

lumb63 4y ago

I think part of it is, within software engineering, what is “high performance”? Is high performance making economically valuable contributions? If so, there is huge inherent inequality between the economic value of projects, so the metric is worthless for judging engineering talent. Is high performance getting good performance reviews? In my experience performance reviews are wrought with favoritism, ageism, and probably other subjectivities that create a very low signal to noise ratio, so that metric is worthless. Is high performance someone who is good at writing software? There are engineers I know who write very good software but lack the decision making or vision to do so in valuable areas. Thus, another metric is worthless. The reality is there is no general “high performance”. There are smarter and more motivated people, sure. I think testing for general intelligence, personality type, etc., are valuable. But I also think a lot of high performance is about finding someone who is a good fit for the organization in terms of the individual’s experience and skills and the organization’s needs.

908B64B197 4y ago
> The reality is there is no general “high performance”. I've heard that claim times and times again. Often it's from companies believing in "Best Cost IT talent" or whatever the current buzzword is on LinkedIn. Chances are, they never even worked with an SV caliber dev. We've all seen engineers that are simply running around in circles around others. Just think of John Carmack. If any of these organizations managed to luck out by hiring someone from, let's say Apple or Google, it would most likely change their beliefs that there's no "high performance".
twelve40 4y ago
if performance reviews are worthless why do people have them at all? if they are regularly practiced at a company, this means the company puts enough faith in them to overall promote those who deserve it and to decide peoples' and company's fate based on that. Which then makes it quite a decent interview outcome metric. If on the other hand performance reviews are as bad and worthless as you claim, they should be stopped completely, and everyone running them should be instantly fired as a bunch of ageist favoritist pigs who are scamming the company.
4y ago

VoodooJuJu 4y ago

>Google did the research and came to the conclusion that those are were good at algorithms ended up being more successful at Google They could have been fooled by randomness, like many "intellectual" types often are.

dilyevsky 4y ago

Actually I remember Norvig saying that they found no such thing - scoring higher in interview panels did not correlate with performance on a job. The only positive correlation they found was gpa

jfrbfbreudh 4y ago
+1 If I remember correctly, it was actually slightly negativity correlated with work quality because extremely talented competitive programmers would smash the interviews but write competitive programming style code (aka not enterprise quality).[1] 1) https://catonmat.net/programming-competitions-work-performance https://catonmat.net/programming-competitions-work-performan...
- froh 4y ago
  no wait. this is about live competitions, not about job interviews. the interview is about the interaction on a CS topic. how do you express yourself, verbally and in code? that's not: can you crank your the highest performance solution in the shortest amount of time.

KerryJones 4y ago

I really wish I had the reference, but I did the "paid trial" for a week for out interviewing process (startup, 40m evaluation) based on an article that said that standard tech interviews gave you an 18% predictability and that paid trials gave you about 72% (it was only one study). I can tell you that at our company we definitely dodged candidates here and I was very happy with everyone we hired (but you could call that bias, as I was the hiring manager -- but I also worked withe veryone I hired)

richthegeek 4y ago
I can imagine that works fine for fresh-out-of-university candidates but I can't imagine a time in my career where I could (and would want to) take 5 days PTO for a job interview. FAANG-like hiring has the question "What info do you get from the 5th interview that you didn't already have after the 2nd?" - for the paid trial, what info do you get by Friday that you didn't have by the end of Monday?
- KerryJones 4y ago
  I agree it's much harder with someone further in their career (and we worked with candidates to figure out what made sense, either shortening the trial, allowing other time to be included, etc.) To answer your last question. On Monday, it was had to fully tell how someone interacted with the team (there was a particular incident where a candidate ended pushing some extremely strong politics on the rest of the team on Wednesday). I was okay with it (I think people should be okay to express opinions), but the rest of the team was not -- and I value the rest of my team (ended up making the decision not to go forward as they weren't comfortable with the hire). Similarly, when they gave an estimate on Monday for the work they could accomplish on Friday (but failed to do it), depending on their reasoning (did they just grossly miss-estimate, or were there legitimate reasons, are they learning from errors). They had time to keep us updated throughout the week, to readjust, etc. All things that you typically learn with time.

weatherlite 4y ago

> But now that LC has been gamed, How was it gamed? I wasn't aware of anything. Is this about LLMs being able to solve some of the questions?

resonious 4y ago
I think it's only gamed in the Goodhart's Law sense. The original intention of hard CS brain teaser questions was to filter for people who can reason through the questions on the spot. Now because everyone knows the questions and answers, the filter is probably more likely to net you people who put in the memorization hours than high IQ folks.
californical 4y ago
It’s that it doesn’t really test your depth of knowledge of CS topics, it more just tests that you’re able to memorize categories of problems and how to solve them. Sure you need to understand some basic CS to pass a LC question, but it’s more about recognizing a pattern and having memorized the proper algo for that pattern. If you were taking an algorithms interview 20 years ago, you’d have to truly know a huge breadth of CS knowledge. But now you can just memorize problems for a few months and never learn the true meaning of “why” a tree is the best data structure in x situation. It was “gamed” when people learned that you could pass the interviews without truly understanding the material, if you just memorize the rules of the game and can recite them when asked.
- roncesvalles 4y ago
  That doesn't mean it's not testing for the right things. Pattern matching, memory, and understanding are all attributes that help be an effective software engineer. It's also not as easy as you describe - just memorizing patterns. Maybe for the easy-medium questions that ChatGPT can solve, but Google stopped asking such questions a decade ago. The algorithm questions that all the tech companies ask today require real problem-solving.

raverbashing 4y ago

> why we have Leetcode questions is because Google did the research and came to the conclusion that those are were good at algorithms ended up being more successful at Google Did they? I remember hearing about a research they did and it wasn't so clear cut to its advantages as a "job success predictor"

froh 4y ago
coding competitions are no predictor. oral exam style algorithmic interviews are.