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Anyone who thinks they're making sane hiring decisions based on conventional job interviews with developers is deluding themselves. So for example Google, Face
by pfedor 13y ago
Anyone who thinks they're making sane hiring decisions based on conventional job interviews with developers is deluding themselves.
So for example Google, Facebook, Microsoft, are all deluding themselves? Would they be not any worse off if they replaced interviews with say rolling dice?
- tptacek 13y agoYes. That's what I'm saying. I'm not saying that (eg) Google has a better option than conventional interviews; Google has unique hiring problems. That doesn't make the interview system they use better. (Also, I don't have great intel on how Google interviews work; nothing better than you have. Maybe they've solved this problem in other ways... though, I'm skeptical.) Startups, though, have no excuse.
- pfedor 13y agoSo do you believe that if you take a random sample of (eg) Google engineers, and a random sample of all software engineers, there will be no difference in ability between the two groups? Or do you think there would be a difference but attributable to something else than their hiring practices?
- tptacek 13y agoI think conventional job interviews do allow you to target a broad range of competence, with a large margin of error, so if you were to compare Google employees to, say, State Farm line-of-business .NET application developers, sure, the Google engineers would outperform. It's an interesting question whether a random sampling of Google engineers would outperform a random sampling of tech industry product developers from other companies. I don't know. The bigger is, within the broad set of candidates that an interview process selects for, the conventional job interview is arbitrary bordering on capricious; it's inhumane for no business benefit.