Harder programming questions do a worse job of predicting outcomes

Re:Harder programming questions do a worse job of predicting... by mlthoughts2018 on Monday February 18, 2019 @06:32PM (#19195468)

Maybe we just see it differently, but I’d consider everything you’ve listed as exactly the sort of stuff that just gets memorized. I don’t even think the breadth of what you listed is that bad actually. Especially for recent grad brogrammer types with no serious life obligation time commitments, memorizing an entire program of study like that is probably only an investment of ~1 month of time, and has practically no correlation to on the job effectiveness once hired.

I’m speaking from ~10 years of experience running my team’s recruiting in a quant finance firm, where many interview requirements / tests / etc., came down from executive managers, so I got to see a wide range of performance on tests of all sorts, riddles, hardcore algo trivia, etc.

The sum total of all that leads me to believe quite strongly that the best signal to noise comes from super careful and tedious resume selection followed by conversational and behavioral interviews that recursively probe into more specific technical details.

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Re:Harder programming questions do a worse job of predicting... by kragen on Monday February 18, 2019 @08:51PM (#19196102)

I agree that any one of the questions could have been memorized, but it seems to me like it would take a year or two of constant memorization, like more than 8 hours a day, to get all of it, even assuming there was a place that had the relevant information conveniently formatted for memorization — which, as far as I know, there isn't. But maybe I'm just bad at memorizing things?

I note that you didn't answer my question. Have you taken the TripleByte exam or not?

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