My Worst Phone Screen

Re:My Worst Phone Screen by bherms on Saturday March 19, 2011 @04:03PM (#2344558)

Short interesting post that brings up a good lesson, not for job seekers, but for recruiters. The Dunning-Kruger effect, for those unaware of it, states (paraphrased) that the more competent you are, the less confident you are in your competency. Inversely, the less competent you are, the more confident you become in your ignorance.

Recruiters almost always want to hear someone tell them "I'm the best of the best" in an interview, but generally the only people who think that are middle of the road at best. Recruiters should know this sort of thing and look for the guys that say 6-7 instead of the guy claiming to be the Michael Jordan of computer programming.

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Re:My Worst Phone Screen by arghnoname on Saturday March 19, 2011 @04:16PM (#2344603)

This is true relative to their own ability. A highly competent person may consider themselves to be more skilled relative to average than an incompetent does, but the highly competent person will most likely still be under-estimating his ability and the incompetent over-estimating their ability.

This is critical, because it means thinking you suck doesn't imply that really you are good. A 95% percentile person might think they are in the 60th percentile, and so might a 5% person. Both have the same opinion of themselves.

Another critical point is Dunning-Kruger hypothesized that for highly skilled individuals this effect was due to their lack of awareness about how relatively unskilled others were. When they were given a chance to look at other work they were able to more accurately assess their knowledge.

One possible control is instead of asking individuals how good they are would be to show individuals existing code and ask them how good _it_ is. Dunning-Kruger would suggest that incompetent people would be too ignorant to accurately assess it, and most likely over-estimate its skill, whereas skilled people _are_ able to accurately assess fault in others' work.

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Re:My Worst Phone Screen by rottendevice on Saturday March 19, 2011 @05:40PM (#2344812)

The Dunning-Kruger effect explains why an arrogant boss I once had thought he knew how to program.

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