Quote:
Originally Posted by Larry Legend
The reason its important that they have already hired someone from the program, which means they have a nuanced view of his background, and some understanding of what he will be like as an employee. Ignoring the fact they have an existing successful employee from the program is super wrong and just obviously not what people will do in practice.
I have to assume I'm missing something here. You were a good hire, does that mean everybody else that finished your bootcamp would be a good hire?
We recruit heavily from a small set of schools. Students all share a common background in all the core subjects and yet there's a massive variation between what individuals actually know/understand.
There's just no way you should be weighing an academic background very highly in a hiring decision. It's somewhat-useful at the screening stage because its a decent proxy of what a person knows. But that's about it.
Either I'm misunderstanding something here or you have no idea whats happening in practice.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Larry Legend
I weighed his self evaluation highly, having paying customers on something he built is incredibly impressive.
Ok, fair enough about weighing his self evaluation highly. As for having paying customers, I agree its very impressive and its a good signal. But its also not anywhere close to making someone a shoe in for a large number of roles.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Larry Legend
For number three, if I have someone on my team who thinks asking a dude with this background about pointers is super important, that's someone who needs to GTFO the interview process. Having a radically wrong view of what is important should never be acceptable.
I mean, you get that it was just an example, right? You can pick whatever today's topics of the year are: dynamic programming, understanding the latest js framework, picking the best algorithm for a problem, writing readable code, having paying customers, etc. etc. etc. The point is that people value different things differently. Even individual employees in the same company. Being interviewed means being exposed to a small group of individuals biases - and its often out of your control if the biases that your interviewers have don't match up well with your skills. (Note: The same thing for 'cultural fit' applies here as well).
You can claim that "Having a radically wrong view of what is important should never be acceptable.", but its almost never this obvious. Knowing what to care about is legitimately hard. I guess if you've solved that at your company, that's pretty cool. But you should probably quit and start a company around that.
Edit:
https://steve-yegge.blogspot.ca/2008...at-google.html
It's outdated, but not out dated. Sadly a lot of it is probably timeless.
Quote:
The thing is, Google has a well-known false negative rate, which means we sometimes turn away qualified people, because that's considered better than sometimes hiring unqualified people. This is actually an industry-wide thing, but the dial gets turned differently at different companies. At Google the false-negative rate is pretty high. I don't know what it is, but I do know a lot of smart, qualified people who've not made it through our interviews. It's a bummer.
...
As far as anyone I know can tell, false negatives are completely random, and are unrelated to your skills or qualifications. They can happen from a variety of factors, including but not limited to:
* you're having an off day
* one or more of your interviewers is having an off day
* there were communication issues invisible to you and/or one or more of the interviewers
* you got unlucky and got an Interview Anti-Loop
Last edited by jjshabado; 10-12-2017 at 10:06 PM.