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0 pointslemmsjid6y ago0 comments

Tosh's joke ignores that people can struggle with recall and on-the-spot test taking stress, while performing quite well at whatever the test is assessing. When studies have been done on interviewing, nothing has shown that inducing stress is ever helpful, unless the interview is for a job that requires on-the-spot stress, such as interviewing to become a police officer.

To me, here is the actual problem that I see cropping up. FAANG companies have enough volume of applications per position that they can afford to have a system that will strongly prefer false negatives over false positives, so they are willing to err on the side of, "We'll just hire people who can pass our realtime CS-grad battery and sadly say goodbye to equally good candidates who cannot." Ok, FAANG companies can do that as long as they are eyes-open about the situation. Where things screw up is that companies that are not FAANG companies do not understand that, and end up aping the FAANG interview techniques when they do not have the same applicant volume. This starves them of talent, and also leads to good applicants getting rejected by non-FAANG companies.

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2 comments · 2 top-level

chillacy6y ago

Really makes me sad to see startups trying to compete with the same talent profile as google: as a small company you need every edge and chasing after the same candidates receiving fat offers from FAANG is not the way.

hogFeast6y ago

Yep, I think that the guy who you replied didn't work out that it was a joke. I am not really sure how anyone who has spent time in the real world thinks that tests are effective.

Look at Korea. They torture their kids, and are they smashing the world economically? Nope, economy still totally reliant on chaebols, almost no innovation, GDP per capita is actually quite low for such high levels of human capital. I have seen this in financial services...firms that hire teams of PHds get nowhere (one place even has their own postgrad institute at Oxford...still get shitty returns year after year).

I don't think tests are bad at all, I am not saying they aren't useful...but they optimise for stuff that doesn't always work in the real world. And, unf, hiring is one of those things that is just very hard...trying to uncover talent by doing these tests where everyone knows (roughly) what is going to be asked, and people are just preparing with rote study...that doesn't sound like you are actually trying to uncover talent. It sounds like you have decided hiring is hard, and you don't have anyone who can hire...but if you are Facebook and you are hiring thousands of programmers, statistically you aren't hiring the best of the best so...maybe it doesn't matter.