Re:Why 37signals Doesn't Hire Programmers Based on Brainteasers
by jemfinch on Thursday January 05, 2012 @08:06PM
(#3431433)
> However, this doesn't highlight good engineers.
It's not intended to. It's highlighting bad engineers, not good ones. It's a negative filter, not a positive one.
> We don't even know how to measure properly if a hire was good or not.
Your company doesn't do performance reviews for employees?
Re:Why 37signals Doesn't Hire Programmers Based on Brainteasers
by bad_user on Thursday January 05, 2012 @08:38PM
(#3431522)
> Your company doesn't do performance reviews for employees?
Every performance review I ever attended was a bad joke, for the same reasons companies have problems filtering between candidates.
Seriously, if there's a problem with the hiring process (it was just an example btw, I'm not saying there is one at your company), then why do you think performance reviews work out well?
Re:Why 37signals Doesn't Hire Programmers Based on Brainteasers
by ori_b on Thursday January 05, 2012 @08:08PM
(#3431438)
Right. I would hope that implementing something like the Pascal triangle is not the only question you would ask. It indicates if someone can't turn specs into code, but not much more.
However, this doesn't highlight good engineers. You know why? Because in the real world finding out the problem is many times a lot harder than coming up with a solution.
Here's a sample:
If I say to you that "I want these and these people classified / sorted, such that I want to find the people that have the best probability of being a good hire" ... I haven't actually told you the problem. I don't really know the problem myself. All I know is maybe that the hiring process is broken for some reason and I'd like to fix it, but I don't know the reasons (I can't put my finger on it).
And that's not a properly defined problem. We don't even know how to measure properly if a hire was good or not. And in the real world, that's how most problems are described to engineers - i.e. I have this pain, solve it somehow.