12 ms·

The original article - http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big-data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/06/

by edent 13y ago

The original article - http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-big-data-may-not-be-such-a-big-deal.html http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-huntin... Distraction free reading and without all the annoying cruft of Quartz. Fascinating use of "Big Data" to cut through the bullshit. Wonder if it will change anything. I suspect the "tough" interview plays well into a company's PR.

Tyrannosaurs 13y ago
I doubt the interviews will be less tough, they'll just be differently tough. After all, they're just changing the mechanism, not lowering the standard.
- hkmurakami 13y ago
  and so applicants will have to figure out the new dance, which is likely to be not so useful yet again.
- joeldidit 13y ago
  I always wonder how Google manages to have so many vanilla Engineers given how high their standards are. I don't think their standards are high in the "needs to be smart" sense, but in regards to all the other BS. Or they must only ask basic data structure (and puzzle) questions that any studious person can memorize the answers to. I don't think knowing the answer to these interview questions correlates with knowing how to do your job well. It only correlates with knowing the answer to these questions. Then again, they also have some of the best Engineers. But I don't think that's a testament to a great hiring process, as that could be the result of great marketing. The "we allow you the freedom to actually do stuff and to work with the best" type marketing. From what I read/saw, the great Engineers didn't seem that happy, so maybe those marketing claims aren't really true, but perhaps things have changed since then.
  - matwood 13y ago
    It's basically like SAT prep. With a little prep work a person can greatly raise their chances at getting a great score. Google's hiring practices are well known so a little prep can get vanilla engineers over the hump. Then again, are there vanilla engineers who would prep in this manner? Just the simple fact that someone preps at all puts them above the 'can't complete fizzbuzz person' ~100% of the time.
- 6d0debc071 13y ago
  There are two kinds of hard though - there's the hard that's hard just because it's boring repetitive work and there's the hard that's hard because it's complex and beautiful and requires an investment in thought and background that not everyone has. And if you're eliminating the former kind of hard without increasing the latter, then your interviews should get easier. Heck, for people in the latter group it will get easier even if you decrease the former and increase the latter, to a point. Just because you're not lowering standards doesn't mean your interviews aren't getting easier. Which is also a thing with exams now I think about it - just because your exam's hard doesn't mean it's worthwhile.
goblin89 13y ago
Their findings wrt. formal education are interesting, too. The first time I see a big company's representative saying “test scores are worthless.”
- ig1 13y ago
  Actually they say they're giving less weight to them (historically Google has weighted them very heavily) which is significantly different from "test scores are worthless".
  - objclxt 13y ago
    You've skipped over the original NYT article, which the qz.com article being linked to here quotes from. He does say they're worthless. Here's the complete quote: One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation This chimes with my understanding and experience that Google only really use test scores and GPA's right now as a filter to manage the vast number of internship/entry-level applicants they get.
    - ig1 13y ago
      Makes sense, most companies only care about university grades for first jobs (because there's very little else to distinguish candidates at the stage).
      - TheAceOfHearts 13y ago
        I think it's a lot more useful to show em your GitHub than it is to show them GPA. That's how I got my first internship :D.
      - pavanred 13y ago
        I quit my job after 5 years as a programmer for my Masters. I must say, just working on one small class project with any candidate can help you find a world of a difference. I think its the experience and my personal interest that drives me towards worrying more about actually learning stuff instead of scoring grades. Getting a grade is more about identifying what a Professor expects and giving it to them. There are many students who slack off their effort in team projects. And, the worst part, the slackers spend a lot of time applying and preparing specifically for interviews, so as I see the ones who get the "best" jobs are generally the ones that I would never hire them if I was looking for candidates for my company.
hkmurakami 13y ago
>I suspect the "tough" interview plays well into a company's PR. from: "The trick Max Levchin used to hire the best engineers at PayPal" Levchin realized the best engineers wanted to be challenged both in their jobs and in the interview process. “We cultivated a very public culture of being incredibly hard to get in. Even though it was actually very hard to get good people to even interview, we made a point of broadcasting that it's incredibly hard to even so much as get into the door at PayPal. You have to be IQ of 190 to begin with, and then you have to be an amazing coder, and then five other requirements. The really, really smart people looked at it and said, "That's a challenge. I'm going to go interview there just to prove to these suckers that I'm better." Of course, by end of the conversation, I'm like, "Maybe you want to come get a job here because you're pretty amazing.” http://firstround.com/article/the-trick-max-levchin-used-to-hire-the-best-engineers-at-PayPal##ixzz2WkjzibOA* http://firstround.com/article/the-trick-max-levchin-used-to-...
- skrebbel 13y ago
  That does filter out the genius engineers who aren't also arrogant, doesn't it? (which might not be a problem)
  - hkmurakami 13y ago
    earlier in the interview he talks about preferring avoiding false positives over missing out on false negatives, so this practice does fit into their philosophy.
    - skrebbel 13y ago
      I suspected so. Still, as a super-amazingly competent genius engineer with no self esteem, I hope not many companies follow their lead.
      - hkmurakami 13y ago
        imo such nice people do well by depending on nice friends who can introduce them to competent, well meaning teams (I know a few here and do my best to play matchmaker) Btw I noticed you like C# (from your profile) so I automatically like you haha :)
rdouble 13y ago
Is Google's HR data set really "Big Data" or just "data?" Seems like it would fit into a normal database. Or maybe even an unwieldy Excel spreadsheet.
- robbiep 13y ago
  But then you have a tech company that isnt sprucing a buzz word
- hkmurakami 13y ago
  I quote my friend who works in "Big Data": "sometimes I think Big Data is just Excel on 128GB of RAM"
  - dasil003 13y ago
    Not to go all senselessly pedantic, but doesn't Excel have a limit of like 55,000 rows?
    - hkmurakami 13y ago
      He's saying his file has way more rows than that, so maybe they upped the limit in the more recent versions of excel? (I think he also wrote a bunch of VBA and hooked into some external systems too)
    - objclxt 13y ago
      If you're being pedantic, it's 1,048,576 rows from Excel 2007, 65,536 rows before that.
      - hkmurakami 13y ago
        2^20 rows! :)
    - Joeri 13y ago
      16 384 columns and 1 048 576 rows actually
mtgx 13y ago
Mobile NYT must be one of the very few sites that don't look absolutely horrible when used on a PC browser. I usually hate it when people post the mobile version of a page.
eliben 13y ago
I find the use of the term "Big Data" there bullshit. Even for the largest company like Walmart with 2 million employees - having some data about every one is hardly "big". Collect a whole deluge of data about each and you hardly fill a USB drive. I realize that reporters like to throw buzzwords into anything to cater to the "simpler" readers. But come one, this is outright silly.
- ap22213 13y ago
  I don't know, I'm starting to change my opinion of this. I used to think 'big data' meant anything that didn't fit easily into a RDBMS. At least petabytes. But, more recently, in conversations with non-programmers, I see that 'big data' to them, means 'broad data' - it means trying to track everything possible and make sense of it. The average business user is really excited to be able to cross-relate disparate types of data - in an effort to make things better. 'Big data' enables the breaking down silos and enabling of cross references. It's about making empirical decisions based on data rather than opinion or intuition. That's really good, in my opinion. So, 'big data' in that way is more amorphous than just the size of the data. With services and networks, the question becomes where does the data begin and end? Big data is potentially everything.
  - eliben 13y ago
    If you're right then it's a sad situation. I hate it when terms start morphing into unrelated interpretations by means of public drift.
    - plorkyeran 13y ago
      In this case at least the meaning it's drifting towards still actually means something rather than just a meaningless buzzword.
      - Helianthus 13y ago
        Just wait until Big Data is referred to similarly to Big Oil...
Alex3917 13y ago
Actually here is the real original article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/03/technology/03google.html?ex=1325480400&en=e71cadb22a20a3c4&ei=5088&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/03/technology/03google.html?e... Which there have already been a few HN discussions about: https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&hl=en&ei=ZfzCUYaxEebc4AORxYD4Dw&q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2007%2F01%2F03%2Ftechnology%2F03google&oq=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2007%2F01%2F03%2Ftechnology%2F03google&gs_l=mobile-gws-serp.3..41.8205.9371.0.10400.4.4.0.0.0.0.281.807.0j3j1.4.0...0.0...1c.1.17.mobile-gws-serp.-j9O06UbvVI https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&hl=en&ei=ZfzCUYa...
silverlake 13y ago
On the bright side, this article will boost the self-esteem of the 100s of thousands of devs like me who didn't get a job offer. "I'm not stupid, their process was stupid!"
killermonkeys 13y ago
I asked these questions until a year ago. Brain teasers were never ok. They are defined as things that require a single insight and/or domain knowledge and could be communicated in a few seconds. "Monopoly" is a perfect example of a brain teaser and anyone using that would be treated pretty harshly by the committee that reviews interview feedback. Estimate questions are not: there's no expectation of a "right answer" and the important fact is the working. Some programming questions border on brain teasers to non programmers but that doesn't matter because you are asking programmers and again, it's the working that matters. Finally different roles get different types of interviews. I worked in PM and there were analytical (these questions), product (design a better x) and technical (basic engineering interviews). The behavioral type was not one I encountered in PM or eng but maybe used elsewhere.
- SilasX 13y ago
  Are we thinking of the same "Monopoly" question? The one where you ask them to sketch out how they would program the game Monopoly? Because that's a lot more like an estimation question than a single-insight brain-teaser.
  - killermonkeys 13y ago
    No sorry the "man pushes his car to a hotel and loses his fortune" question from another comment.
donohoe 13y ago
We built Quartz to be as distraction free as possible - mind telling me what the "cruft" is?
- bornhuetter 13y ago
  Well for starters, there is a huge fixed banner at the top of the page, and a fixed sidebar. If you are trying to read the page in a windows that is not maximised, then you really lose a lot of real estate.
- donohoe 13y ago
  I can't reply directly, but in reference to: huge fixed banner at the top of the page, and a fixed sidebar. I see what you mean - but I don't think I"d call that "cruft" but thats my opinion. Thats the Navigation Bar at the top, and the sidebar is a Queue of the Articles in the feed. These are basic page elements. We get feedback specifically calling this out as good and relatively distraction-free (hence your comment struck me as odd) Also - the width of the page dedicated to text/images is the same as the NYT mobile site (600px aprox)
  - dbecker 13y ago
    Are the users who liked the navigation bar and the sidebar using quartz in a different way from us? For example, are they using quartz primarily to browse rather than following a link to a specific story? I found these page elements very annoying, and I suspect those who liked it have a different use pattern.
  - potatolicious 13y ago
    But the navigation bar doesn't serve any purpose to me, at least not floating. It has your logo, which I care about, but not once I'm deeper into the article. It has a search field I will never use. It has social media buttons I will never use (because if I wanted to share this I would just copy/paste the URL). It has a "more" button that I will never use also. The nav bar is fine at the very top of your page, making it float and scroll with me is just a waste of space. Floating UI elements should be reserved for critical functionality that's core to the site. Facebook gets a pass because the things on the floating nav bar are actually important. If you really must float it, consider floating to the side - most of us on modern laptops have an abundance of horizontal space but not a great deal of vertical space. Some more feedback: - The organization of content is confusing. Just scrolling casually I cannot immediately tell where one post ends and the next begins. The large images aren't a good indicator, since some of them appear to be ads. I shouldn't have to read the tail sentence of something just to determine if I'm looking at the end of a post or not. - There is a mismatch of expectations. When I go to a link that clearly refers to a single piece of content, I do not expect to keep scrolling and go right into a completely different piece of content. - I find the photos oversized for their purpose. In this particular piece you have generic-stock-photo-of-Google-employees, which is only superficially related to the topic at hand. It doesn't have business being this huge. It's distracting and keeps me from the actual content I'm here for. Note in the original NYT link the image is also only tangentially related, but it does not overwhelm the text.
quux 13y ago
The "structured behavioral interview" he mentions is what I've settled on over the years too. You get a much better idea of what the applicant has really done and is passionate about than seeing if they're good at pop quizzes.
nkorth 13y ago
Thanks, Quartz is literally unusable on my phone.

by edent 13y ago

Tyrannosaurs 13y ago

I doubt the interviews will be less tough, they'll just be differently tough. After all, they're just changing the mechanism, not lowering the standard.

hkmurakami 13y ago
and so applicants will have to figure out the new dance, which is likely to be not so useful yet again.
joeldidit 13y ago
I always wonder how Google manages to have so many vanilla Engineers given how high their standards are. I don't think their standards are high in the "needs to be smart" sense, but in regards to all the other BS. Or they must only ask basic data structure (and puzzle) questions that any studious person can memorize the answers to. I don't think knowing the answer to these interview questions correlates with knowing how to do your job well. It only correlates with knowing the answer to these questions. Then again, they also have some of the best Engineers. But I don't think that's a testament to a great hiring process, as that could be the result of great marketing. The "we allow you the freedom to actually do stuff and to work with the best" type marketing. From what I read/saw, the great Engineers didn't seem that happy, so maybe those marketing claims aren't really true, but perhaps things have changed since then.
- matwood 13y ago
  It's basically like SAT prep. With a little prep work a person can greatly raise their chances at getting a great score. Google's hiring practices are well known so a little prep can get vanilla engineers over the hump. Then again, are there vanilla engineers who would prep in this manner? Just the simple fact that someone preps at all puts them above the 'can't complete fizzbuzz person' ~100% of the time.
6d0debc071 13y ago
There are two kinds of hard though - there's the hard that's hard just because it's boring repetitive work and there's the hard that's hard because it's complex and beautiful and requires an investment in thought and background that not everyone has. And if you're eliminating the former kind of hard without increasing the latter, then your interviews should get easier. Heck, for people in the latter group it will get easier even if you decrease the former and increase the latter, to a point. Just because you're not lowering standards doesn't mean your interviews aren't getting easier. Which is also a thing with exams now I think about it - just because your exam's hard doesn't mean it's worthwhile.

goblin89 13y ago

Their findings wrt. formal education are interesting, too. The first time I see a big company's representative saying “test scores are worthless.”

ig1 13y ago
Actually they say they're giving less weight to them (historically Google has weighted them very heavily) which is significantly different from "test scores are worthless".
- objclxt 13y ago
  You've skipped over the original NYT article, which the qz.com article being linked to here quotes from. He does say they're worthless. Here's the complete quote: One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation This chimes with my understanding and experience that Google only really use test scores and GPA's right now as a filter to manage the vast number of internship/entry-level applicants they get.
  - ig1 13y ago
    Makes sense, most companies only care about university grades for first jobs (because there's very little else to distinguish candidates at the stage).
    - TheAceOfHearts 13y ago
      I think it's a lot more useful to show em your GitHub than it is to show them GPA. That's how I got my first internship :D.
    - pavanred 13y ago
      I quit my job after 5 years as a programmer for my Masters. I must say, just working on one small class project with any candidate can help you find a world of a difference. I think its the experience and my personal interest that drives me towards worrying more about actually learning stuff instead of scoring grades. Getting a grade is more about identifying what a Professor expects and giving it to them. There are many students who slack off their effort in team projects. And, the worst part, the slackers spend a lot of time applying and preparing specifically for interviews, so as I see the ones who get the "best" jobs are generally the ones that I would never hire them if I was looking for candidates for my company.

hkmurakami 13y ago

>I suspect the "tough" interview plays well into a company's PR. from: "The trick Max Levchin used to hire the best engineers at PayPal" Levchin realized the best engineers wanted to be challenged both in their jobs and in the interview process. “We cultivated a very public culture of being incredibly hard to get in. Even though it was actually very hard to get good people to even interview, we made a point of broadcasting that it's incredibly hard to even so much as get into the door at PayPal. You have to be IQ of 190 to begin with, and then you have to be an amazing coder, and then five other requirements. The really, really smart people looked at it and said, "That's a challenge. I'm going to go interview there just to prove to these suckers that I'm better." Of course, by end of the conversation, I'm like, "Maybe you want to come get a job here because you're pretty amazing.” http://firstround.com/article/the-trick-max-levchin-used-to-hire-the-best-engineers-at-PayPal##ixzz2WkjzibOA* http://firstround.com/article/the-trick-max-levchin-used-to-...

skrebbel 13y ago
That does filter out the genius engineers who aren't also arrogant, doesn't it? (which might not be a problem)
- hkmurakami 13y ago
  earlier in the interview he talks about preferring avoiding false positives over missing out on false negatives, so this practice does fit into their philosophy.
  - skrebbel 13y ago
    I suspected so. Still, as a super-amazingly competent genius engineer with no self esteem, I hope not many companies follow their lead.
    - hkmurakami 13y ago
      imo such nice people do well by depending on nice friends who can introduce them to competent, well meaning teams (I know a few here and do my best to play matchmaker) Btw I noticed you like C# (from your profile) so I automatically like you haha :)

rdouble 13y ago

Is Google's HR data set really "Big Data" or just "data?" Seems like it would fit into a normal database. Or maybe even an unwieldy Excel spreadsheet.

robbiep 13y ago
But then you have a tech company that isnt sprucing a buzz word
hkmurakami 13y ago
I quote my friend who works in "Big Data": "sometimes I think Big Data is just Excel on 128GB of RAM"
- dasil003 13y ago
  Not to go all senselessly pedantic, but doesn't Excel have a limit of like 55,000 rows?
  - hkmurakami 13y ago
    He's saying his file has way more rows than that, so maybe they upped the limit in the more recent versions of excel? (I think he also wrote a bunch of VBA and hooked into some external systems too)
  - objclxt 13y ago
    If you're being pedantic, it's 1,048,576 rows from Excel 2007, 65,536 rows before that.
    - hkmurakami 13y ago
      2^20 rows! :)
  - Joeri 13y ago
    16 384 columns and 1 048 576 rows actually

mtgx 13y ago

Mobile NYT must be one of the very few sites that don't look absolutely horrible when used on a PC browser. I usually hate it when people post the mobile version of a page.

eliben 13y ago

I find the use of the term "Big Data" there bullshit. Even for the largest company like Walmart with 2 million employees - having some data about every one is hardly "big". Collect a whole deluge of data about each and you hardly fill a USB drive. I realize that reporters like to throw buzzwords into anything to cater to the "simpler" readers. But come one, this is outright silly.

ap22213 13y ago
I don't know, I'm starting to change my opinion of this. I used to think 'big data' meant anything that didn't fit easily into a RDBMS. At least petabytes. But, more recently, in conversations with non-programmers, I see that 'big data' to them, means 'broad data' - it means trying to track everything possible and make sense of it. The average business user is really excited to be able to cross-relate disparate types of data - in an effort to make things better. 'Big data' enables the breaking down silos and enabling of cross references. It's about making empirical decisions based on data rather than opinion or intuition. That's really good, in my opinion. So, 'big data' in that way is more amorphous than just the size of the data. With services and networks, the question becomes where does the data begin and end? Big data is potentially everything.
- eliben 13y ago
  If you're right then it's a sad situation. I hate it when terms start morphing into unrelated interpretations by means of public drift.
  - plorkyeran 13y ago
    In this case at least the meaning it's drifting towards still actually means something rather than just a meaningless buzzword.
    - Helianthus 13y ago
      Just wait until Big Data is referred to similarly to Big Oil...

Alex3917 13y ago

Actually here is the real original article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/03/technology/03google.html?ex=1325480400&en=e71cadb22a20a3c4&ei=5088&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/03/technology/03google.html?e... Which there have already been a few HN discussions about: https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&hl=en&ei=ZfzCUYaxEebc4AORxYD4Dw&q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2007%2F01%2F03%2Ftechnology%2F03google&oq=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2007%2F01%2F03%2Ftechnology%2F03google&gs_l=mobile-gws-serp.3..41.8205.9371.0.10400.4.4.0.0.0.0.281.807.0j3j1.4.0...0.0...1c.1.17.mobile-gws-serp.-j9O06UbvVI https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&hl=en&ei=ZfzCUYa...

silverlake 13y ago

On the bright side, this article will boost the self-esteem of the 100s of thousands of devs like me who didn't get a job offer. "I'm not stupid, their process was stupid!"

killermonkeys 13y ago

I asked these questions until a year ago. Brain teasers were never ok. They are defined as things that require a single insight and/or domain knowledge and could be communicated in a few seconds. "Monopoly" is a perfect example of a brain teaser and anyone using that would be treated pretty harshly by the committee that reviews interview feedback. Estimate questions are not: there's no expectation of a "right answer" and the important fact is the working. Some programming questions border on brain teasers to non programmers but that doesn't matter because you are asking programmers and again, it's the working that matters. Finally different roles get different types of interviews. I worked in PM and there were analytical (these questions), product (design a better x) and technical (basic engineering interviews). The behavioral type was not one I encountered in PM or eng but maybe used elsewhere.

SilasX 13y ago
Are we thinking of the same "Monopoly" question? The one where you ask them to sketch out how they would program the game Monopoly? Because that's a lot more like an estimation question than a single-insight brain-teaser.
- killermonkeys 13y ago
  No sorry the "man pushes his car to a hotel and loses his fortune" question from another comment.

donohoe 13y ago

We built Quartz to be as distraction free as possible - mind telling me what the "cruft" is?

bornhuetter 13y ago
Well for starters, there is a huge fixed banner at the top of the page, and a fixed sidebar. If you are trying to read the page in a windows that is not maximised, then you really lose a lot of real estate.
donohoe 13y ago
I can't reply directly, but in reference to: huge fixed banner at the top of the page, and a fixed sidebar. I see what you mean - but I don't think I"d call that "cruft" but thats my opinion. Thats the Navigation Bar at the top, and the sidebar is a Queue of the Articles in the feed. These are basic page elements. We get feedback specifically calling this out as good and relatively distraction-free (hence your comment struck me as odd) Also - the width of the page dedicated to text/images is the same as the NYT mobile site (600px aprox)
- dbecker 13y ago
  Are the users who liked the navigation bar and the sidebar using quartz in a different way from us? For example, are they using quartz primarily to browse rather than following a link to a specific story? I found these page elements very annoying, and I suspect those who liked it have a different use pattern.
- potatolicious 13y ago
  But the navigation bar doesn't serve any purpose to me, at least not floating. It has your logo, which I care about, but not once I'm deeper into the article. It has a search field I will never use. It has social media buttons I will never use (because if I wanted to share this I would just copy/paste the URL). It has a "more" button that I will never use also. The nav bar is fine at the very top of your page, making it float and scroll with me is just a waste of space. Floating UI elements should be reserved for critical functionality that's core to the site. Facebook gets a pass because the things on the floating nav bar are actually important. If you really must float it, consider floating to the side - most of us on modern laptops have an abundance of horizontal space but not a great deal of vertical space. Some more feedback: - The organization of content is confusing. Just scrolling casually I cannot immediately tell where one post ends and the next begins. The large images aren't a good indicator, since some of them appear to be ads. I shouldn't have to read the tail sentence of something just to determine if I'm looking at the end of a post or not. - There is a mismatch of expectations. When I go to a link that clearly refers to a single piece of content, I do not expect to keep scrolling and go right into a completely different piece of content. - I find the photos oversized for their purpose. In this particular piece you have generic-stock-photo-of-Google-employees, which is only superficially related to the topic at hand. It doesn't have business being this huge. It's distracting and keeps me from the actual content I'm here for. Note in the original NYT link the image is also only tangentially related, but it does not overwhelm the text.

quux 13y ago

The "structured behavioral interview" he mentions is what I've settled on over the years too. You get a much better idea of what the applicant has really done and is passionate about than seeing if they're good at pop quizzes.

nkorth 13y ago

Thanks, Quartz is literally unusable on my phone.