
Malcolm Gladwell on Hiring: the Mismatch Problem - MaysonL
http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/conference/2008/gladwell
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noonespecial
This is exactly what always bothered me about Google's white board testing
(and testing like it at other big firms). It lets them know that you can do
pointers and O notation but it completely misses the specific kind of tenacity
that seems to make great programmers great.

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sarehu
But it does filter out people who don't have that tenacity. Those people who
do have that kind of tenacity would already have learned about pointers and O
notation.

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ible
I think Gladwell has a good point that trying to do a job is probably the best
predictor of who will be good at it, and as a general principle moving that
point up, via apprenticeships, internships, coop programs, and so on would
probably be useful.

What troubles me is he seems to say that because people do a bad job of
objectively identifying predictors of future success, that those predictors
simply don't exist, or at least aren't strong enough to be useful. Did the
"exhaustive survey" of law graduates he mentioned really find no correlations
between something that could be measured before a career starts and eventual
success at that career? Perhaps there are no good predictors in various
fields, but I think I'd like to see some much stronger evidence before I buy
that.

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timr
You're being skeptical for the wrong side. We humans have a long, inglorious
history of inventing objective metrics that absolutely fail to be useful at
predicting the things we want to predict. From the IQ tests to the NHL
combine, we're traditionally quite awful at inventing predictive tests of
performance.

Which is to say: if you're being intellectually honest, you should be far
_more_ skeptical that a test does what it claims to do, than you should be of
the opposite argument.

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yummyfajitas
> From the IQ tests

IQ tests actually do a pretty good job.

<http://iqcomparisonsite.com/occupations.aspx>

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timr
Assuming that linked chart is accurate (which I don't automatically grant),
pointing out that the average IQ for a janitor is lower than the average IQ
for a doctor isn't the same thing as predicting someone's success as a doctor
based on their IQ. There's a lot of overlap between those ranges.

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Alex3917
Gladwell is wrong about being able to fix the black-white performance gap in
three years using better teachers. Not only does his argument go completely
against all the prevailing research, but it doesn't even make sense because
every white student would have to be assigned a bad teacher for the numbers to
add up. (C.f. Equality & Achievement, Hart & Risley, etc.)

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DenisM
You're missing the point.

The point being that people make tradition-based voodoo over numbers-backed
science all over the place. This is a hugely disruptive opportunity. For
example a software company that hires people differently can propel itself to
the very top in a span of just a few short years.

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Alex3917
"You're missing the point."

Not really, I've been posting about this same idea on news.yc and reddit for
years:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=157380>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50581>

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DTrejo
Alex, I do not see how the content of the links you posted addresses Malcolm
Gladwell's contention that good teachers could close the Black-White gap. To
refute that idea one would have to get contradictory data on a scale at least
as large as Gladwell's.

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mynameishere
Almost everything he says needs a [citation needed] tag at the end of it. I
guess that's one problem with public speaking--it's pretty hard to take apart
in that manner. One of his comments highlights his overall problem,

 _...that ineffible, illusive gift, "Being a good teacher"_

...in other words, he seems to think that teaching ability is "ineffable" and
that therefore the best way to find the good ones is to (???) hire a large
number, find the best ones, and fire the rest. Or something like that. One way
or the other, objective measures are to be thrown away. That's his overall
point, but that is pretty impractical. Ultimately, you have to measure people
in some manner. You can't hire uncredentialled people on the chance that they
might be good--it just wouldn't work that way.

I don't know why he went on about sports for so long. The "combines" that he
talks about are actually the last measure used to weed out prospective hires.
The sports agents actually do their most important work watching the kids
perform athletics at a high school and college level. Likewise, smart
employers of programmers will look at past projects and jobs, and only then
subject them to brain-teasers and white-board coding. That's always how it's
been.

ADDENDUM: Does it seem like Gladwell waxes a little too long about the
physical beauty of the Russian hockey player at the beginning:

[http://blogs.msg.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/07/02/cherepa...](http://blogs.msg.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/07/02/cherepanov_blog_070207dr.jpg)

...I mean, I may not talk with an aural swish in my voice, but I think I can
tell (for instance) a George Clooney from a Slavic Lummox.

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timr
That argument makes no sense. We _have_ to measure people? Really? Why? If his
claims are correct, then Gladwell is right -- we're doing _worse_ by screening
people according to criteria that are useless, because we're essentially
randomly filtering out a large percentage of the people who are good at the
job.

You can attack the evidence for his claims, but if the evidence holds, then
the conclusion Gladwell reaches is a logical consequence.

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mynameishere
I'm sympathetic to his claims, as I went to a crap school and got a crap GPA.
Okay. I'd love it if people had judged me based upon my winning personality,
my good looks, or my tendency to point out everyone's foibles, but I'm not
sure those are a superior measure of coding skill... Even if they were, they
could be subjected to analysis and so become objective measures themselves.

The practical reality is that lots of jobs have 1000s of aspirants. How many
kids want to play in the NBA? _MILLIONS_. You need something to divide them
up, and if one objective measure is genuinely bad, it needs to be replaced by
a better objective measure.

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timr
I think his argument is that the best objective measurement of a basketball
player's skill is his ability to play basketball.

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mynameishere
Sure. But that's tautological. If that's really his point (and it seems to be,
yes) then he's obviously playing a joke on his audience.

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timr
So what? A tautology is not a bad argument.

If the "objective metrics" are useless discriminators, then the only effect of
using them is to make us feel as though we have control over a situation that
we don't understand. In that scenario, it makes far more sense to restructure
the game to allow more initial participants, and to cull the best players.

You seem to be arguing that we must have "objective" filtering mechanisms,
even if they're random. Gladwell is saying that the whole paradigm is wrong.

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tptacek
Are those silly riddles about candles and ropes and bridges and shit that they
ask you in Microsoft interviews our profession's version of The NHL Combine?

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neilc
... except that Microsoft doesn't ask questions like that for software
engineering positions, at least not when I interviewed there. I found the
interview questions to be reasonably similar to Google's.

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dpapathanasiou
It's interesting that Gladwell doesn't bring up baseball in his examples.

If you read "Moneyball" by Michael Lewis, you come away with the impression
that there _is_ a definitive way to predict the probability of future success,
albeit using untraditional metrics.

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mattjung
Would be interesting to know if software engineering has also a mismatch
problem. Is there any information about that? But in any case it should be
easier to find a good programmer than to find a good basketballer because its
easier to test them while they are doing their actual job. The mismatch
problem should also be an important topic for YC - it's the daily work of an
VC to predict success. Maybe they could provide Gladwell with some interesting
statistics for his book ;)

