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Re:How to hire engineering talent without the BS by Jensson on Monday March 06, 2023 @02:47AM (#35038481)
> I work for a big tech, and I have yet to see any evidence that leetcode-style interviews lead to better hires.

I worked for Google and at least back then everyone working there could read the studies showing that the interviews worked. The effect was very clear, with there being no upper bar where the interview score stopped mattering.

If you haven't seen any data then you just have a set of anecdotes, so your position is very weak. I have seen the data, but a person like you who is convinced it work wont believe me of course. But I'm not sure why Google would lie about that, or why they would keep the interview format for so long if it didn't work. The old article talking about Google interviews talked about what they did before they arrived at this format, what they do today is the best interview according to their data.

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Re:How to hire engineering talent without the BS by ctvo on Monday March 06, 2023 @10:45AM (#35042362)
I agree, we don't have enough data. And a common mistake is extrapolating too much from limited data, but here's the most important data point and why we continue to use these practices: these companies are worth trillions of dollars and they hire this way. You want the industry to change its practices? Find an equally successful (impact, market cap, innovation) company that hires differently in software.
Re:How to hire engineering talent without the BS by jen20 on Monday March 06, 2023 @08:16AM (#35040570)
I haven’t seen this mythical closed data, but I have used Google products, so I’m inclined not to believe that whatever they do leads to acceptable results.
Re:How to hire engineering talent without the BS by angarg12 on Monday March 06, 2023 @10:49AM (#35042413)
That's a very judgmental reply that also misrepresent my comment.

I don't work at Google, so I cannot speak for them. My company does have studies and experiments around interviewing, but again, the metric they use for success is "inclined rate" e.g. doing ABC leads to x% increase in inclined rate. I haven't seen any study linking interview outcomes with on the job performance e.g. yearly performance rating or promotions. In fact many people have requested this data over the years.

> If you haven't seen any data then you just have a set of anecdotes, so your position is very weak. I have seen the data, but a person like you who is convinced it work wont believe me of course.

This comment seems quite rude, and again, it misrepresents my position. I didn't say LC style interviews don't work, I'm saying that I don't know, because I have seen no data to prove that they work better or worse than other alternatives.

Also the landscape has change, and what might have worked 5 or 10 years might not anymore. Tech interviewing has "professionalized" in a Goodhart's Law-esque fashion. People have become very dedicated to game the process, which might affect the quality of the outcomes. But just to be clear again, I want to see evidence one way or another.

Re:How to hire engineering talent without the BS by Jensson on Monday March 06, 2023 @10:59AM (#35042571)
> I haven't seen any study linking interview outcomes with on the job performance e.g. yearly performance rating or promotions. In fact many people have requested this data over the years.

But that is exactly what Google did, they linked the interview results to later performance evaluations and that is the correlation I'm talking about. The better they scored on the interviews the better the performance reviews they got later. The correlation was very stable and didn't just appear at low levels.

Your company might not have done such a study, but Google did.

> Also the landscape has change, and what might have worked 5 or 10 years might not anymore. Tech interviewing has "professionalized" in a Goodhart's Law-esque fashion. People have become very dedicated to game the process, which might affect the quality of the outcomes. But just to be clear again, I want to see evidence one way or another.

That is true, the data I saw is nearing a decade old now, but at least the data back then showed that it worked.

Re:How to hire engineering talent without the BS by Peritract on Monday March 06, 2023 @12:43PM (#35044412)
> The better they scored on the interviews the better the performance reviews they got later.

One possible explanation of this is that people who did well in the hiring process were valuable employees. Here's another: people who were good at gaming an evaluation system run by Google were good at gaming an evaluation system run by google.