Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering interviews”

Re:Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering... by Apocryphon on Saturday February 22, 2020 @06:35PM (#22394083)

Right, but this entire discussion is predicated upon questioning if perhaps the hirers are wrong. Are their interviewing practices serving their organization? A lot of the employers themselves have expressed difficulty at hiring and dissatisfaction with the process. Are they screening for the optimal qualities? There's no shortage of engineering projects that have gone bad. Could that be because the candidates being hired with current practices are suboptimal?

Hiring is still an on-going debate. Google SVP of People Ops Laszlo Bock has admitted previously that internal studies revealed that the interviewing practices at the time didn't really correlate to employee success:

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17196974

We're having a debate here. You can claim the current practices are best, that's fine. But you can't just state it and take it for granted without providing evidence.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Follow-up to “The dystopian world of software engineering... by username90 on Sunday February 23, 2020 @01:36AM (#22395486)

That article is missleading, the actual statement is this:

> Four meticulously orchestrated Google interviews could identify successful hires with 86 percent confidence, and nobody at the company—no matter how long they had been at the company or how many candidates they had interviewed—could do any better than the aggregated wisdom of four interviewers.

So it isn't that interviews have zero correlation, it is that they fond no case of a single interviewer being better than the aggregate of four algorithm interviews. And as you see, four algorithm interviews combined have a very high success rate.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/04/the-sci...

[ Parent | on HN ]