
The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews - tomek_zemla
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/08/opinion/sunday/the-utter-uselessness-of-job-interviews.html
======
schmit
I find it quite problematic that researchers get to talk about their own
research and present it as facts without anyone taking a critical look.

Over time I’ve become more skeptical about this kind of psychology research
(as more studies fail to replicate) and, as is often the case, here the sample
size is quite small (76 students, split across 3 groups), predicting something
relatively noisy as GPA. It is unclear to me that one would be able to detect
reasonable effects.

Furthermore, some claims that make it into the piece are at odds with the
data:

> Strikingly, not one interviewer reported noticing that he or she was
> conducting a random interview. More striking still, the students who
> conducted random interviews rated the degree to which they “got to know” the
> interviewee slightly higher on average than those who conducted honest
> interviews.

While Table 3 in the paper shows that there is no statistical evidence for
this claim as the effects are swamped by the variance.

My point is not that this article is wrong; verifying/debunking the claims
would take much more time than my quick glance. But that ought to be the
responsibility of the newspaper, and not individual readers.

Politicians don’t get to write about the successes of their own policies.
While there is a difference between researchers and politicians, I think we
ought to be a bit more critical.

~~~
bnegreve
Of course we should be more critical, the methodology here is far from
perfect. But right now, people have much faith in interviewing, and this
research suggests that this faith may not be justified. As you mentioned, this
is not the only research that reaches this conclusion. There is also the work
by Daniel Kahneman[1] which I find pretty rigorous and draw the same
conclusions about interviewing.

So obviously, the title of this article should be _" Maybe interviewing is not
that useful"_ instead of _" The utter uselessness of job interviews"_, but
besides this I find your comment unjustified. In fact, it's quite the
opposite, I believe this type of work contributed to make us more critical by
questioning some basic facts about interviewing, that i would have never
questioned just a couple of years ago.

> Over time I’ve become more skeptical about this kind of psychology research
> _(as more studies fail to replicate)_

ok, this is interesting, where is it mentioned?

[1] Think fast and think slow. There is this short article which mention some
of the results and has been discussed on HN a couple of times already.
[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/dont-blink-the-
ha...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/dont-blink-the-hazards-of-
confidence.html)

~~~
andrewmutz
It's easy to present data that shows flaws with today's interviewing.

It's a lot harder to present a better way of predicting candidate performance
in the workplace, along with substantial data that indicates it's better than
today's methods. Corporations would _love_ more effective ways to determine
effectiveness/performance before hiring.

Interviewing is terrible, but that doesn't mean there is a better option.

~~~
jernfrost
Nonsense. First step is to acknowledge that interviewing doesn't work very
well. You can't keep deluding yourself because you haven't found a better way.
Accept reality.

This is one of the biggest problems I see with business guys today. They want
absolute certainty in a world which can't offer it. Start accepting that there
is a lot of stuff we don't know and can't know at the moment and we simply
have to work towards getting better.

You can't get better if you don't acknowledge that there is a problem in the
first place.

These silly, must have +5 years of experience, and check all these boxes with
technologies to get the job clearly shows the industry is completely lost at
the moment and isn't willing to acknowledge it.

~~~
cubano
I still don't understand why employers can't simply set up a two week "trial
contract" where as promising candidates simply work for two weeks so everyone
can actually see and judge, with real world empirical data, how well the
person does in the environment at the actual job.

Yes yes..of course I know this could be gamed as well, but no matter...you
can't really argue that this wouldn't be magnitudes better then the typical
current/broken interview process.

~~~
AndyNemmity
The concept of a two week trial contract is interesting, but also as flawed as
anything else.

I switched roles to a new team, and the first 2 weeks were a trainwreck. It
was almost of no predictive quality on how I would do.

Now, there are many reasons why that was the case, and perhaps those
underlying issues should be addressed, but from all the role changes I've had,
the first two weeks shows how well the group you're going into can onboard,
more than it shows how productive the individual will be in the long term.

~~~
AstralStorm
You would need a longer trial period, a few months is fine with a clause that
allows earlier termination.

------
gatsby
Laszlo Bock (former SVP of People at Google) did a great job summarizing
decades of research around structured interviewing in his book 'Work Rules!'

For a quick reference, the two defining criteria for a structured interview
are:

1.) They use one or several consistent set(s) of questions, and

2.) There are clear criteria for assessing responses

That second point is really important. You can't only ask candidates the same
sets of questions and have a structured process: you need to understand what a
"one-star" response vs. a "five-star" response actually looks or sounds like.
Training and calibrating all of the interviewers in a large company around a
similar rating system is nightmarish, so most companies don't bother.

The book also outlines that pairing a work sample with a structured interview
is one of the most accurate methods of hiring.

If anyone is interested in some in-depth structured interview questions or
work sample ideas, feel free to email me. I've spent the last few years
working on a company in the interviewing space and would love to chat.

~~~
andrewmutz
How does this work in practice?

If there are consistently used questions and specific criteria for assessing
responses, can a candidate just learn the likely questions and what
constitutes the "right" answer?

~~~
tptacek
This is a good and important question. Also: while I have a lot of respect for
people at Google trying to innovate on hiring, make no mistake: Google's heart
is in the right place, but they aren't at the forefront of structured hiring,
and their hiring processes are notoriously capricious.

The reality is that generating good questions for a structured interview is
difficult. You can't just pose a programming problem. As you've noted, most
programming problems have multiple good answers. Differentiating between
multiple good answers from different candidates re-introduces subjectivity.
Your brain would rather convince you that one valid answer is less good than
another, even when it's not, that to admit to you that it can't differentiate
or generate a narrative for you. The part of your brain that generates
narratives is incredibly powerful and does not care about how accurate your
hiring process ends up being.

What we tried to do was create questions that generated _lists of facts_.
"Spot all the errors in this code" would be an example of this approach (but
none of the three we used). We went into the process wanting to embrace
epistemological uncertainty, generating a historical trail of data that we
could retrofit to candidate performance.

In the end, work sample testing was so much more powerful a predictor for
ourselves that we never fully got around to analyzing the data. Sometimes we'd
get candidates that clearly generated inferior "lists of facts"; I think there
may have been 1-2 instances where that outcome actually overruled work-sample
testing delivered prior (out of a few tens of engineering hires and probably
~100 interviews).

~~~
peripitea
Making sure I understand you: When you refer to work sample tests here, that
refers to the crypto challenges and things like that that you published at
Matasano? And you're saying that was much more predictive than the list of
facts methods, right?

~~~
tptacek
That's what people ordinarily assume I mean, but while our work sample
challenges were similar to the cryptopals and Microcorruption stuff, they were
not the same, or even derived from them. They were designed specifically to
qualify candidates, and in fact predated our public challenges.

~~~
sgustard
Just to further clarify, by work sample you do NOT mean an example of
previously produced work? This still seems fickle: my dozen years of work
output (for example, building and running a site with perfect uptime for
millions of users) is not as valid an indicator of my future performance as
how I happen to score on some arbitrary timed test?

~~~
tptacek
Absolutely not. Samples of previous work are deceptive at the best of times.

------
ravitation
I have some major issues with their conclusions... and the title of the
article (which is mostly nonsensical clickbait).

The real conclusion should be that "unstructured interviews provide a variable
that decreases the average accuracy of predicting GPAs, when combined with
(one) other predictive variable(s) (only previous GPA)."

This conclusion seems logical. When combined with an objective predictive
measure of a person's ability to maintain a certain GPA (that person's
historical ability to maintain a certain GPA), a subjective interview
decreases predictive accuracy when predicting specifically a person's ability
to maintain a certain GPA.

To then go on to conclude that interviews then provide little, to negative,
value in predicting something enormously more subjective (and more
complicated), like job performance, is absurd - and borderline bad science.

There are numerous (more subjective) attributes that an unstructured interview
does help gauge, from culture fit to general social skills to one's ability to
handle stressful social situations. I'd hypothesize all of these are probably
better measured in an unstructured (or structured) interview than in most
(any) other way. To recommend the complete abandonment of unstructured
interviews (which is done in the final sentence of the actual paper) is
ridiculous.

~~~
emodendroket
> There are numerous (more subjective) attributes that an unstructured
> interview does help gauge, from culture fit to general social skills to
> one's ability to handle stressful social situations. I'd hypothesize all of
> these are probably better measured in an unstructured (or structured)
> interview than in most (any) other way. To recommend the complete
> abandonment of unstructured interviews (which is done in the final sentence
> of the actual paper) is ridiculous.

Well, based on what? Is there any evidence for any of these hunches?

~~~
ravitation
I didn't say it was based on hard data, that's why it's a hypothesis...

But, if you really believe that it's a huge leap to hypothesize that
interviews would be a better measure of subjective social skills than metrics
like GPA, I don't know what to tell you.

~~~
emodendroket
I mean let's go further back. I question the assumption that selecting for
"culture fit" does much more than shut people out whose ethnic background or
social class is too different.

~~~
ravitation
I mean, that's an extremely narrow reading of "culture fit".

Believe it or not, there are non-racist and non-classist character traits that
are also not represented in one's GPA.

But, I guess hiring for one's willingness to work with specific clients, or
for one's happiness with the organization's structure (in, for example, a
holacracy) wouldn't be valid things to hire around to you?

------
hobls
I've been a programmer for a bit over ten years. I've worked at scrappy little
startups, midsized companies, now for a tech giant for a few years. The
engineers I work with at the tech giant are consistently better engineers than
my other coworkers have been, and I credit the very structured interview
process. We're trained to ask specific questions, look for specific types of
answers, and each interviewer is evaluating different criteria.

Also, it is quite often not the technical questions that end up making us
decide not to hire someone. That's just one area. I know it's the part that
sticks out, and candidates give a lot of weight to it in their memory of the
interview, but you shouldn't just assume it was that your whiteboard code
wasn't quite good enough. I actually don't think that's the most common thing
we give a "no hire" for.

~~~
dikdik
Which of the companies paid the best/has the best benefits?

If it's the tech giant, it's very possible they attract better candidates
because they offer more.

~~~
NikolaeVarius
In my experience, the big Corps don't tend to offer anywhere near as much
compensation but better days off etc etc.

The best sofware guys I've ever seen work at those big corps. The big corps
are the ones that have the resources to work on the REALLY hard problems and
not writing the same CRUD app over and over again. Those same companies also
provide tons of educational benefits so that you become an expert in your
field.

Things like fighter jet software are fantastically complex. You hear about the
dumb mistakes that are made (International Date Line Issues), but you never
hear about the thousands of hours of testing every change to code goes through
and the insane calculations that are made every second in even standard level
flight.

I have no idea why there is such a backlash against interviews. What's so hard
about studying for a job you want? Even if you don't USE knowledge, you should
at least be able to rederive things using your base knowledge. Thoe interviews
I've seen at aero companies are damn hard. Tons of grilling on if you actually
understand mechanics and fliud dynamics.

~~~
Clubber
>I have no idea why there is such a backlash against interviews. What's so
hard about studying for a job you want?

That's a really good question and I had to think about why I don't like
interviews.

1\. It's an interrogation and the stakes are extremely high. There are so many
aspects of it you don't control. Some guy had a shitty morning, or just
doesn't like you, dropped your resume on the way back to his office, etc.

2\. It's completely phony and it starts with the first question, "So why do
you want to work at generic company X?" "I need money," is not an acceptable
answer. Now I have to be phony and tell them why their company is awesome
(it's not) which makes be feel like a kiss ass. I have to pretend to be
excited about working at a boring ass company. Just shoot me.

3\. We _have_ to do it, unless we have rich parents that died young like
Batman.

4\. The person or people that are interviewing you have no notion of what
you've accomplished aside from skimming your resume. All the hard work I've
done to produce miracles in the last 20 or so years means, really nothing.

5\. Companies only reward tenure at that company. It signals the start of
something new but that's typically a bad thing when it comes to work. Less
vacation, less credibility, less influence, etc.

6\. You really don't know if the person or people you are interviewing are
bozos or not. It doesn't matter, they cut the checks, they have the power.

7\. As the article insinuates, they're fairly pointless.

------
tptacek
Take a second to read about the experiments this author conducted. They
included:

Dummy candidates mixed in with the interview flow that gave _randomized_
answers to questions (interviews were structured to somewhat blind this
process), and interviewers lost no confidence from those interviews.

Interviewers, when told about the ruse, were then asked to rank between no
interview, randomized interview, and honest interview. They chose a ranking
(1) honest, (2) randomized, (3) no interview. Think about that: they'd prefer
a randomized interview to make a prediction with over no interview at all.

Of course, the correct ranking is probably (1) no interview, (2) a tie between
randomized and honest. At least the randomized interview is honest about its
nature.

~~~
vacri
The interview is also selecting for a single thing - GPA. You can be an utter
arsehole and have a high GPA. You can have personal hygiene that stinks out
any room you're in and have a high GPA. Basically, you can be completely
impossible to work with and have a high GPA. The research they've done is
suspect, because they weren't interviewing for an ongoing role, but for a
single KPI.

Similarly, the people doing the prediction were _other students_ rather than
teachers who know better what to look for. The research would better fit HR
people hiring for roles they know nothing about than experienced team members
hiring for roles similar to what they do.

The research results are massively over-applied, and in no way whatsoever is
sufficient to use the term "utter uselessness of X". Unsurprising, given it is
research by a 'professor of marketing'.

~~~
tptacek
Like everyone else, I agree a face to face interview is the best way to verify
a candidate doesn't smell bad.

I assume that interview could be pretty short.

~~~
vacri
Well, I suppose you could fish out the most trivial part of the comment and
refute that. Why not set up a battery of short unit tests for the candidates?
"Follow me, Jones, and we'll see how you handle the 'coworker with chewing
gum' test next..."

The study was done on students, who almost universally have zero experience
selecting people to work under them in an industry setting (or at all).
Drawing conclusions from this particularly inexperienced subject pool and then
extrapolating out is bogus, particularly given the extremely certain language
of the article. The subject pool is at an age (18-22) where people are still
figuring out what to make of themselves and others; they have extremely little
adult experience of the workplace and judgment of character - indeed, at this
age, people are notorious for making bad decisions in their personal lives.

When you look at the actual paper they link, out the window goes the
declarative language, and instead the article is unusually full of weasel-
words ('can', 'may'). There's a _major_ difference between "utterly useless"
and the actual conclusion of their paper: "interviewers probably over-value
unstructured interviews".

~~~
tptacek
In the experiment the authors ran, interviewers felt more confident after
interviewing a "candidate" who had secretly been instructed to randomize the
answers. Later, they informed the researcher that so great was the value of
the information they extracted from interviews, they'd _prefer_ a randomized
interview to no interview at all. I think the authors made their point quite
well.

------
Spooky23
It's the whole process that's useless.

Remember a few years ago when this forum was drowning about how to find and
hire "10x" people? 98% of employees were useless in the face of the 10xer.

The reality is, most of the time screening for general aptitude, self-
motivation and appropriate education is good enough.

I've probably built a dozen teams where 75% of the people were random people
who were there before or freed up from some other project. They all work out.
IMO, you're better off hiring for smart and gets thing done and purging the
people who don't work.

~~~
Top19
This I think is a very a good point. The scariest point about Lazlo Block's
book is that he is very against the idea that people can improve or be trained
better. To him there is this idea of predestination. You're either always good
and always have been, or you're not good and won't get better and there is
nothing Google can do.

I feel like as a company you could exploit a lot of value by just hiring
people and training them. Training btw doesn't mean at work. Think how much
you learned in college lectures vs. reading the actual textbook. It means
going home and studying, and the incentive should be that you're getting
things that make you more employable, so this shouldn't count towards hours
(if it was say a very proprietary old programming language though I could see
this argument falling apart).

Not saying this is the best way but shocked that everyone is "trying to find
the best". What kind of world will that leave us in if all companies want to
hire the same 3% of people? Businesses move slower, talent is lost, and
inefficiencies accrue.

~~~
Apocryphon
One wonders what exactly happened to this industry, why instead of training,
companies are offloading the work to universities, MOOCs, and boot camps.

~~~
pdimitar
All about cost and trying to offload it somewhere else. Sadly it's very
predictable, most businesses work that way.

Then again, theoretically this gives a huge edge to the proactive learners.

------
ordinaryperson
The problem is GPA itself isn't necessary a valid data point. It's less
fallible than "gut instinct", as the author here seems eager to claim, but
personality type can be more important than ability to memorize facts.

I'd rather hire a programmer who knew less and could get along with others
than a master dev who's a total a-hole.

------
rb2k_
It should probably have been titled "The Utter Uslessness of Unstructured Job
Interviews", because that's the kind of interview the author criticizes.

In my personal experience, structured interviews can be very helpful in
determining a candidates abilities.

~~~
tptacek
Are you sure you're using the same definitions as the author? In practice,
across a pretty decent sample of large tech companies, I've never seen a truly
structured interview outside of Matasano, where I was almost murdered by my
employees for instituting them. I think we'd hear far more complaints about
them if they were common.

It's possible that what you consider to be a structured interview is in fact
what this author (and I) would call unstructured. Specifically: if the
interviewer has _any discretion about questions at all_ , the interview is
probably fundamentally unstructured.

In a structured interview, the interview is less an interrogator than a
proctor or a referee. Every candidate gets identical questions. The questions
themselves are structured to generate answers that facilitate apples-apples
comparisons between candidates: they generate _lists of facts_. The most
common interview questions, those of the form "how would you solve this
problem", are themselves not well suited to these kinds of interviews. It
takes a lot of work to distill a structured interview out of those kinds of
problems.

~~~
cwyers
How did you feel about your experience using structured interviews for hiring?

~~~
tptacek
Truly structured interviews are better than even the most rigorous traditional
interviews. They are also more expensive to design and much more painful to
deliver. Some kind of interview is probably necessary for every serious tech
hiring process. Organizations should be realistic about the low quality signal
they'll get even from structured interviews. Take time away from interviews
and feed that time to off-site work-sample testing.

~~~
mrchicity
I've tried work-sample testing with middling results:

-The more hoops a candidate has to jump through, the more likely they are to bail out of your recruiting funnel. This is especially bad for college/postgrad recruiting when you aren't the #1 employer in your field. Everyone wants to work for the Googles and Facebooks of the world. It's hard getting someone to spend a couple hours for your startup job.

-People cheat. We usually issue a short coding project, grade for correctness, then do a code review over Skype or face-to-face. Many candidates turn in the exact same responses. I've even seen people cheat and have a friend do the Skype session with a totally different guy flying out. Do you proctor your test in a secure center? Use an online service to lock down their machine and record? Both are pretty invasive. Switching up the questions constantly is tough and makes your signal noisier.

-Industriousness and raw intellect trump skills/knowledge most of the time. Sure there's a baseline level of skill required to train someone quickly enough, like I wouldn't hire someone who didn't know basic data structures, but work-sample tests are often biased to those with a very specific background. I don't want employees who are great at doing what I need today. I want ones who will be great at figuring out what to do years down the line.

~~~
tptacek
First: if you make candidates do work sample tests, you should reduce the
amount of in-person interviewing you do to account for it. Up to a limit, most
candidates would prefer your selection/qualification process to happen from
their homes than from your office. Unfortunately, companies aren't serious
enough about their tests to trust them, and do indeed tend to make this just
another hoop.

Second, incorporate the work sample tests into your in-person (or even
telephone) interviews. Now you have a (hopefully interesting) technical
problem _they ostensibly just solved_ to talk about. Your evaluation should be
by formal rubric, not interview, but it's easy to see if someone actually did
it. We had no problems at all with people cheating (of people we hired with
this process, over about 4 years, we fired not a single one).

Finally, I could not be less interested in the kind of amateur psychoanalysis
tech interviewers hope they're accomplishing as a side effect of quizzing
people about code in their conference rooms.

------
numinary1
This discussion misses an important element, the skill of the interviewer. It
is unsurprising that unskilled interviewers' assessments are poor predictors
of future performance. It would be interesting to measure the accuracy of
interviewers who have had years of experience interviewing, hiring, and
managing people.

Here's how I think it works. Skilled interviewers are biased toward rejecting
candidates based on _any_ negative impression. Structured interviewing has the
same effect. It's the precision versus recall tradeoff. For this use case only
precision matters. Extremely low recall is fine.

Also, in the GPA prediction example, the interviewer is penalized for
predicting a low GPA for a person who performed well. But in hiring, there is
no penalty for failing to hire someone who would have performed adequately.

(Yes, I understand there is an implicit assumption in my argument that
candidates are not in short supply, but that's usually true, certainly at
Google)

~~~
ScottBurson
> For this use case only precision matters. Extremely low recall is fine.

Only if you have arbitrarily large amounts of time you can spend interviewing.
Most of us don't.

------
dkarapetyan
> The key psychological insight here is that people have no trouble turning
> any information into a coherent narrative. This is true when, as in the case
> of my friend, the information (i.e., her tardiness) is incorrect. And this
> is true, as in our experiments, when the information is random. People can’t
> help seeing signals, even in noise.

People see patterns where there are none. I think this is fundamentally why
humans fail at statistics. If every fiber of your being wants to see patterns
then you will see patterns. Probably why people hallucinate when in sensory
deprivation tanks as well. The brain will make up patterns just so it can
continue to see them.

The paragraph right after follows up with the statistical failure that pattern
seeking leads to

> They most often ranked no interview last. In other words, a majority felt
> they would rather base their predictions on an interview they knew to be
> random than to have to base their predictions on background information
> alone.

So people would rather do busy work in order to continue to satisfy
established pattern seeking habits than figure out a better way.

------
redthrow
Matt Mullenweg advocates audition/tryouts instead of job interviews.

[https://hbr.org/2014/04/the-ceo-of-automattic-on-holding-
aud...](https://hbr.org/2014/04/the-ceo-of-automattic-on-holding-auditions-to-
build-a-strong-team)

~~~
Merad
That has to be one of the most employee-hostile hiring strategies I've ever
read.

~~~
cwyers
You're pretty much limited to hiring either only the jobless or someone with
the ability to work two jobs at once for an extended period of time while you
hold your tryout. There are a lot of people who can't devote that kind of time
to a second job (some candidates burn a week's vacation!)

And it's not some mere formality, according to their stats they hire about a
third of the people they try out.

~~~
Merad
> or someone with the ability to work two jobs at once for an extended period
> of time while you hold your tryout.

This is the part that's crazy to me. If you think you can accurately judge
someone based the work they perform _after_ a full normal workday/week, I have
some beachfront property on the moon to sell you...

I have a feeling their conversion rate is so low because a lot of people get
another offer during their trial and immediately jump ship.

~~~
pebers
> I have a feeling their conversion rate is so low because a lot of people get
> another offer during their trial and immediately jump ship.

Or because they're just selecting against good candidates in the first place;
if you've got a good job and are performing well elsewhere, you're less likely
to jump through that kind of hoop. It's easy to persuade yourself you're
hiring the best candidates by being strict about selecting from a pool that is
already heavily biased (I'm pretty sure Joel Spolsky wrote something along
those lines years ago, so this is hardly a new insight).

------
santoshalper
As someone who has worked at every level of IT (startup to Fortune 500
executive), hired thousands of people, and personally interviewed hundreds of
candidates of all levels of experience, the conclusion I have come to is that
interviews are almost entirely worthless.

------
akhilcacharya
It's interesting, because I'd argue that the best companies in tech have have
interviews that are _very_ structured and predictable.

~~~
PlaceFan
Is that true? Isn't the generic accusation against AmaGooFaceSoft that your
interview performance largely depends on whether you happened to study some
interviewer's pet topic (e.g. parallelism, dynamic programming, networking,
etc.)?

~~~
rb2k_
Having done interviews at a few of time, I'd say that's mostly false, at least
for the last 2-3 years.

As far as I can tell, there's always a pre-defined pool of questions. Some of
them are pretty 'open ended', but still targeted towards getting a good
impression of a certain area of knowledge.

That being said, I had an interview with Google at some point in the past
where one of the interviewers almost seemed appalled that I didn't know the
exact list of items that can be found in a filesystem superblock. But at all
other companies it seemed a bit more sane. I guess it's partially a function
of the type of personalities a company is willing to hire :)

~~~
anonymoushn
Recently I failed an interview at Facebook because I chose to serialize a
binary tree into a list of N items, rather than a list of N items and O(N)
sentinels. Most of the interview was spent convincing the interviewer that
this could possibly be correct.

~~~
z3t4
i recently failed a programming test after acing all tests except one where i
needed a text diff and pulled in a library instead of writing my own in less
then ten minutes. they said i need to get better at algos. which is fair. but
i dont know anyone that can program a decent working text diff in less then
ten minutes.

~~~
mquander
Based on your description, it sounds possible they were just looking for a
Levenshtein distance implementation, which is definitely in the Universal
Weird Corpus of Interview Questions and for which people who prepare for
interviews a ton would have a good shot.

------
bahmboo
When interviewing for smaller orgs you do have to answer the question: can I
work with this person everyday? Subjective and arguably harder to predict than
technical performance, and oftentimes more important.

------
m-j-fox
Known useless indicators:

* Resumes

* Skills tests (hacker rank)

* Whiteboard interviews

* Unstructured interviews

* Employee referrals

No wonder headhunters have such a good business. Not that they're more
discriminating, but they can pretend to be the solution to an intractable
problem.

~~~
tianlins
I agree with most, but referrals are one of the most important indicators. "A
hire As, B hire Cs". A known issue, however, is the workforce diverse given
the heavy use of referral methods.

~~~
m-j-fox
All my referral tells you is I have a friend who needs a job and that I want
$5000. Whether my friend is any good or not is something you'll find out after
I cash my check.

------
vonnik
The traditional recruiting and hiring process is broken. I say this as a
former technical recruiter. I wrote about the problems of recruiting for a
closed-source startup here:

[https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisvnicholson/recent-
activity/...](https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisvnicholson/recent-
activity/posts/)

I mention closed-source for a reason. For technical hiring, there is nothing
better than open source. Open-source projects allow engineers and their
potential employers to collaborate in depth over time. The company can
experience whether the engineer is competent, reliable and friendly. The
engineer can judge the team's merits in the same way. And they can both decide
whether the fit is right.

Closed-source and/or non-engineering jobs are the opposite. You get a resume,
a Github repo if you're lucky, and a half-day's worth of interviews and tests.
Then you roll the dice on that imperfect information.

This is one reason why a lot of recruiting and hiring happens through the
networks of people that a company can tap into. It may seem corrupt or
nepotistic, but the advantage of those referrals is that someone with more
information than you is willing to stake their reputation on a candidate's
performance.

Large companies with lots of historical data have the opportunity to train
algorithms to learn how job applications and long-term performance/flight
risk/etc. actually correlate. From what I can tell, most haven't.

~~~
kiranmova
Hiring candidates through interviews or through known contacts list is just
about taking a chance. There are several unknowns which can only come out in
the course of time.

I agree with vonnik, that running the Project in Open Source definitely has an
edge in the interviewing process. The potential employee has already seen your
code (or you can make sure that he has), knows what he/she is getting into. I
would seek for some links of their contributions to other projects which will
help me evaluate if their code.

Of-course less than 5% of the job applicants now have had the opportunity to
develop for open source. (Either the folks contributing in the open source
love their job so much, that they hardly look around or they are already being
offered jobs without looking..).

------
Zigurd
It's not surprising. Employee selection is basically voodoo. Outcomes don't
get fed back into redesign of the process, and the process is far more based
in tradition than data. When the process gets challenged it's ripe to fall
apart.

~~~
YZF
The sample size is too small to do any useful feedback and humans are too
complex to be mapped/binned in the way interviews attempt to do. Not only that
but things that happen after hiring may have a bigger influence on the
success/failure of the hire than the factors the interview is looking for.
E.g. who you end up working with, internal politics, the specifics of the job.

Kahenman's work on the illusion of validity comes to mind. It kind of boils
down to our hiring process must be right because we're doing it.

------
daenz
As someone with many interviews coming up in the near future, this scares me.
It's easy to get in a self-conscious feedback loop when you know every
behavior, response, and gesture is being fed into a fundamentally irrational
character-judging process.

The best interview I've ever been on was one for a young startup. They gave
essentially a homework problem, a day to solve it, and then in the interview
we talked about the problem and my solution. The worst interview I've been on
was sitting in front of multiple engineers as each one threw out a random CS
question (from seemingly the entire space of CS) and asked me to talk
intelligently about it. When I seemed unsure of myself, they glanced around
nervously and disapprovingly.

Interviews are the worst. I've spent my time trying to bolster my OSS
projects, so that I can point to them as evidence of my competence, but I
can't help but prepare for the worst anyways.

~~~
crispyambulance
"...fundamentally irrational character-judging process" is really the wrong
impression to go into interview with as a candidate. Seriously, you will
handicap yourself if you see it this way.

Competency is only one component of a hiring decision. After some base
threshold of competency, the question then becomes whether or not you, the
candidate, is going to be someone that the team WANTS to work with.

Bolstering your OSS projects is fine but you'll get a better return on
investment for your time to practice "behavioral interview" questions. This is
absolutely the hardest type of interview but in the hands of experienced
hiring managers it works better than any other technique, IMHO.

If you can find an experienced mentor who will do mock behavioral interviews
with you and give you honest constructive feedback, that will boost your
interview skills more than anything else.

~~~
daenz
Good advice, thanks. My experience so far has been difficulty appearing
confident on the technical portions of the interviews. Other devs seem to
sense blood in the water when nerves and shyness have you fumbling through
whiteboarding obscure topics.

------
exabrial
They're useless if it's attempt to prove you know more tham them about some
algorithm that's been implemented 150x times (every job interview in
California). I'd rather work with someone pleasent, hard working, and
concerned with everyone's well being.

~~~
alfalfasprout
Hell, all I want is someone that could easily learn and understand an algo
they're not already familiar with if needed. I remember being asked to
basically implement the Day-Stout-Warren algorithm in an interview a few years
ago and wondering what that person really learned about me from that
memorization exercise.

------
inopinatus
Articles like this - and the comments that follow - always overlook the
primary value of job interviews, which to me is answering the question: "Do I
want to work for this company?"

~~~
throwaway9475
Sure, because poor management, crippling technical debt, and a toxic work
environment are totally plainly presented to you in an interview. /s

~~~
inopinatus
Not plainly, no, but easily inferred.

~~~
throwaway9475
You should publish because I know I and a lot of other people would be
incredibly interested in divining this information during a job interview.

~~~
flukus
The best I've come up with is a few proxies, like their deployment process.
Someone doing continuous or frequent deployments probably have pretty decent
code quality. A company that takes several weeks, several rounds of QA and a
dozen release documents that need to be signed in triplicate, they have that
process because they've been burned and need scapegoats when the inevitable
happens.

The best part is that most people at companies like this aren't aware that
it's not normal, so they'll be open about it.

~~~
inopinatus
Yeah, that's basically all it takes. Talk to engineers about their everyday
processes. (If the company doesn't let you talk to their engineers during the
interview process, or if they're unwilling to discuss, consider that the huge
red flag).

------
douglasjsellers
All that this article says is that past performance, in terms of GPA, is the
best performance of future performance - rather than a 30 minute interview
predicting future performance. This sees like a basic truism to me and the
main lesson that tech hiring processes can take away from this article.

In my experience (having hired > 100 engineers) one of the basic problems that
tech hiring, as a whole, has is that it misunderstands the point of a
technical interview. Organizations and hiring managers see the interview
process as a way of improving the brand of the engineering organization - "We
have super high standards and to prove this our interview process is really
hard - therefore if you think you meet these standards you should apply". This
leads to the current interviewing trends of super academic/puzzle/esoteric
technology based interviews. Applicants leave those interviews saying that it
was super hard reinforcing the brand messaging (classic marketing).

Rather, in my experience, the best results come from viewing the
hiring/interviewing process for what it is - an attempt to predict future
performance (and specifically performance at your organization) using a
variety of techniques which interviewing is one. In this context, of
attempting to predict future performance, interviews are not a great tool -
better to look at specific past performance.

Past performance is always the best predictor of future performance and the
point of a technical interview, in my mind, is to critically inspect that past
performance to understand how closely it relates to the future performance
that your organization needs.

------
woodandsteel
My basic problem with interviewing is you are observing behavior in one sort
of situation, and on that basis trying to predict behavior in a very different
sort of situation, namely job performance, which is actually a whole bundle of
different types of situations.

It seems like it would be much better to instead put the job prospect in
situations that model the sorts that would come up at work.

------
cricfan
I wonder if we can extrapolate to marriages and to how arranged marriages (at
least in India) having a higher success rate. Usually the parents on either
side decide on a match based on family background, financial stability,
education background etc,. rather than letting the to-be married decide.

~~~
cthalupa
What is 'success'?

My evidence is anecdotal, but I've spoken with multiple Indian women who are
in arranged marriages, have zero real love in the relationship, and aren't
particularly happy, but the idea of divorce is entirely unthinkable to them.
The lack of divorce probably makes this a 'success' by most metrics, but
doesn't seem particularly successful to me.

------
damagednoob
> In one experiment, we had student subjects interview other students and then
> predict their grade point averages for the following semester.

Not sure how using inexperienced interviewers proves anything. Would have been
more interesting to have lecturers interview the students.

~~~
manarth
There's a reference in the article that covers that kind of scenario.

    
    
      The additional 50 students that the school interviewed but
      initially rejected, did just as well as their other
      classmates in terms of attrition, academic performance,
      clinical performance, and honors earned.

------
andrewstuart
I am a recruiter. Recently, I started working with a new employer. We could
not get anyone through their interview process. Eventually I asked the HR
person to clarify precisely what was being asked in these interviews.

She said that, essentially, the interviews were ad-hoc, with the interviewer
just coming up with whatever questions they thought relevant based on the
resume - often asking the candidate to go through their career history.

I explained that the only effective approach I have found with recruiting is
to have a set of pre-defined questions, and each question is specifically
designed to give insight into how the candidate meets the pre-defined job
requirements. Very much like software development, where test cases are
related to software requirements.

I explained also that it is not critical to stick precisely to these
questions, but that should mostly be the case - interviews are human
interactions and some flexibility is required depending on circumstance.

The HR person then explained this to the hiring managers at the company, and
worked with the hiring managers to define interview questions that give
insight into the job requirements.

The next two people interviewed got the jobs, after months of no one getting
through the interviews.

In the early days of software development, the business was often dissatisfied
with software delivered because it simply did not meet the requirements of the
business. So the software development process matured and came up with the
idea of tests that can be mapped back to the requirements via a requirements
traceability matrix. Thus the business has a requirement, the developers write
code to meet the requirement, and a test is designed to verify that the
software meets the defined requirement.

Recruiting currently has no such general understanding in place of the
relationship between job position requirements and definition of quantifiable
questions that identify to what extent a given job candidate meets a
requirement.

Once you get your head around the idea that recruiting should be very similar
to software development in this regard, then it is easy to see that ad-hoc
interviews do nothing to verify in any organised way to what extent a
candidate meets the requirements of a given job opening.

~~~
flukus
> I explained that the only effective approach I have found with recruiting is
> to have a set of pre-defined questions, and each question is specifically
> designed to give insight into how the candidate meets the pre-defined job
> requirements. Very much like software development, where test cases are
> related to software requirements.

This creates a system that can be gamed though. The interviewees can pass this
information back to the recruiter and the recruiter can couch future
interviewees. The recruiter has a vested interest in placing people.

It would be better to have a thousand questions that are randomly selected.

------
RichardHeart
You hear lots of these stories about stupid interviews. You rarely hear the
stories about the horrible, terrible employees that weren't weeded out, got
hired and did great harm to the company and their coworkers.

Interviews can be good and bad, I'd venture to say that many the horrible hire
has been avoided by any interview at all. Thus, don't make perfect the enemy
of good, and try to improve on good.

The set of potential bad hires is vast compared to the good hires, and that
ratio is only remedied by good filtering before and during the interview.

~~~
dragonwriter
> You rarely hear the stories about the horrible, terrible employees that
> weren't weeded out, got hired and did great harm to the company and their
> coworkers.

Actually, stories about horrible co-workers that weren't weeded out by
interview or any other hiring process are quite common workplace stories in
every field, including tech.

------
throwaway71958
One thing interviews can't select for: creativity and motivation. And in tech
those two criteria are the most vital, especially motivation. I can easily
fill in the skills gap in someone who's motivated. I can't do anything with
someone who doesn't give a shit, even if they're the second coming of Albert
Einstein. So folks, please, don't apply for jobs you don't really care about.
Save yourself and your prospective employer time, aggravation, and the
opportunity cost.

~~~
pdimitar
I find it unfair that you're downvoted. I mostly agree with you.

However, "don't apply for jobs you don't really care about" is a very 50/50
advice. Right now I have _zero_ money reserves. If I somehow got fired
tomorrow, I'll be in the red even after 2 days of unemployment. So sometimes
you have to make a hard choice.

That being said, it's good to be open about this after you get your act
together months later and decide what to do with your current employer, during
a lunch for example.

~~~
throwaway71958
Well, don't wait to get fired then. Find a better paying job you like and go
for it. It doesn't seem like you have much to lose anyway, and the best way to
increase your paycheck is by moving around and not letting employers take you
for granted. Just don't sell your soul for a buck in the process. This game is
a marathon, and grinding it out never really works in the long term.

~~~
pdimitar
I fully agree, and that's exactly what I am doing -- even if an offer from
another company ends up only being a leverage to force a raise in my current
company (see below for clarification). However, I am taking it slow and I am
patient (even though NOT being able to randomly go to the cinema or a
restaurant with my girlfriend is getting on the nerves of both of us lately;
money is tight and I'm very unhappy with my current compensation) because I
don't want to replace one problem with the same problem in another company. So
I am picky, I am clear in my requirements, I don't accept terms I know will
make me hate the job, and I am perfecting my negotiating skills during this
entire process.

CLARIFICATION on the leverage remark: it's my opinion that 99% of the time
leveraging an offer from another company that wants to give you more money, to
make your old company give you more money, is a _huge mistake_. Most
businessmen HATE being strong-armed, or, to use a milder language, hate being
shown that their employees have power over them, and this makes them hate you
even if they very much need you in a business sense. They end up actively
looking for a way to get rid of you, even if it costs them more money and/or
stress in the long-term. I've witnessed it.

SOURCE: 4 of my stupider younger acquantainces from 7-12 years in the past.
And an observation from my first job. After I "strong-armed" my first employer
to double my then pretty measly salary, he went on a hunt to replace me (even
though it took him around a year to really do it), but I was smart enough to
detect the signs and resigned long before he had the chance. No regrets.

------
peterwwillis
No interview will tell you the future, so to my mind, the only thing the
interview can tell you immediately is how much someone knows and whether their
personality will mesh with the company's culture.

In order to ascertain this, I propose job-hiring hackathons. Have the company
hold a mini-hackathon, once every 2 weeks or once a month, where all job
applicants must show up and work on projects (corporate employees' presence
can be optional). Just watch them complete the projects and hire the best
candidates.

------
dba7dba
I believe a lot of places hire a candidate through a consensus, meaning some
members in the team accept or reject a potential candidate. When enough accept
the candidate, the hiring is done.

Is there any company that tracks who rejects a particular candidate during an
interview process, and how often that negative feedback turned out to be true.
I guess with the turnover rate at todays tech places, such tracking of a
record of an interviewer is not really possible?

I always wonder about this.

------
kasey_junk
Structured interviews are better than unstructured ones, but in my experience
they are really a Trojan horse for the idea that interviews in all forms are
largely worthless (as predictors for good hiring).

Once you start collecting data on your hiring pipeline work sample hiring
becomes so much obviously better that it makes little sense to spend the time
to do the hard work of making a good structured interview process.

------
evervevdww221
We had 2 slackers on the team. One jumped directly to Google.

The other jumped around for few years, got laid off by some company, recently
joined FB.

~~~
d357r0y3r
One of the most incompetent developers I've ever known got hired at Facebook,
then Apple. Every line of code the guy right was just...exceptionally bad and
poorly thought out.

I guess he was good at whiteboard exercises, though?

------
sgt101
Odd - I was trained to do competence based interviews 20 years ago, apparently
this is now rediscovered knowledge or something!

------
tempodox
> So great is people’s confidence in their ability to glean valuable
> information from a face to face conversation that they feel they can do so
> even if they know they are not being dealt with squarely. But they are
> wrong.

If people utterly refuse to learn from proven mistakes, then all hope is lost.
Einstein was right, human stupidity is infinite.

------
cordite
I'm sure it has been discussed before, but what factors push people away from
say two-day internships? Is it because these things are so short that they too
can eventually be gamed? Or is it because you need to have staff of the same
specialty dedicating their resources to a potentially short-lived investment?

------
tdelet
The problem is that most people have no training in how exactly to interview
someone. It's like asking people with no training in building rockets to get
you to the Moon and then deciding that because because they failed tickets are
"utterly useless".

------
donovanm
It certainly does feel like job interviews are a coin flip to me after having
done many interviews.

------
mck-
If you care about your company's culture, a person's humbleness, art of
concise debating, etc - more important parameters than sheer GPA or coding
skills imho - you can never do away with in-person interviews.

Calling them "utterly useless" is an utter click-bait.

------
thomastjeffery
> Alternatively, you can use interviews to test job-related skills, rather
> than idly chatting or asking personal questions.

Alternatively? How is this not the focus of an interview?

Sure, confidence and social skills are important, but obviously they cannot
predict a person's actual ability.

------
dlwdlw
The issue with silicon valley interviews is that it's leading a new paradigm
of management styles that deal with knowledge and creative work

This shift MUST be accepted by everybody ornostracism is risked. (Like trump
supporters)

But paradigm shifts take time and the majority of managers still want cogs.
But instead of filtering dor cogs they have to dress the filters up as
filtering for a "i give smart people freedom team" and the convoluted mental
gymnastics needed for this creates shitty interview processes.

All "well this technique worked for us" stories are mostly Not useful because
tehy are just N=1 stories about managers using their preferred filters.

The issue isn't with the filters themselves (all sorts exist) but with a
culture that obligates everyone to out on false facades.

People who just want to be paid and can work well need to pretend to be
passionate. Managers who want well-paid cogs need to pretend to promote
individualistic thinking etc...

------
WalterBright
More accurately, the article is about the use of _unstructured_ free-form
interviews.

------
DrNuke
It is some time we are going towards word of mouth and peer recommendations as
the preferred way to hire new personnel. Cold applications are for outsiders
and as such a very different market, with all the strings and the bulls.it
attached.

------
jasonthevillain
Well, the worst interview I've ever had was the ones where the interviewer
wouldn't deviate from the script, even after he recognized that these
questions made no sense for someone with my background (I was self-taught, and
had never managed my own memory or written a sort algorithm. They were also
irrelevant to the position in question).

It was painfully awkward.

It was also a fantastic way to accidentally discriminate against women and
older candidates.

I'm not saying anyone should conduct an interview completely by the seat of
their pants, but please don't encourage this foolish consistency.

------
JacksonGariety
Does it bother anyone else that the example given in the article (showing up
25 minutes late) is judging interviewing by its worst rather than its best?

------
geebee
I'm coming late to this discussion, but there is one point I'd like to make.
Our "interviews" in the world of software engineering, are immensely different
from "interviews" in the standard sense of the word.

I've worked in different fields, and I talk to people who work in other
fields. Most of those fields work in a way that is described in this article -
interviews are question and answer sessions, where people are evaluated by a
number of highly subjective criteria. "Tell me about your fundraising
experience?" "How do you deal with difficult clients or coworkers". That kind
of thing.

Software interviews are exams. They're not "more like" exams, they are flat
out exams. There is very little banter. The closest I've come in google and
Netflix interviews has been the more open-ended system design style question
they often put in there, but even that has an academic test quality to it.

It's pretty much 5 hours of technical exam. "How do you find all matching
subtrees in a binary tree" might be a question - and you really are expected
to get it written at the whiteboard. "Find all permutations of a set". "Find
all square sub matrices in an NXM matrix." The "top" companies are good at
modifying the question so that you must know how to do this but can't just
regurgitate it.

Alternatively, you may do a "take home" exam. Most recently, I did a mini
rails project. I actually liked my result, I kind of enjoyed writing it.
However, it was a no-hire, one reason given was that my routing was non-
standard. True. I hadn't really thought about it, it was a take-home, so I
mainly focused on the UI and code, and just chucked in a couple of named
routes for demo and testing purposes. The other reason was that there was some
duplicate code (I disagreed and had a reason for this, but there is no chance
to defend your code, you write it and send it in, and they say "no hire").

I have no idea if it was a real piece of crap and they were just being nice.
It had 100% test coverage and git for version control, and implemented a few
features. Unfortunately, like I said, I never got a chance to defend the code.

Our processes in high tech are badly broken. I'm probably done interviewing,
my next job will have to be one that doesn't involve a software interview. The
routing and duplicate code, along with a google interview, pretty much sealed
the deal for me.

My advice to people is (this isn't my idea) be an X that programs, not an X
programmer. Coding is an amazing tool for a job, but avoid making it your job.
For instance, I actually know a fundraiser who does a lot of data science, and
he's a rock star in his field, but I guarantee you nobody asks him to reverse
a binary tree in an interview!

Best of luck out there. Our interviewing processes are their own special
version of horridness, just not uselessness described here.

------
uncensored
How do you know that the person you'll be marrying won't cheat on you and
won't leave you in hard times? If you apply the methods we use today for
interviews you'll end up with a 50/50 chance at best, a coin toss.

Yet why do some marriages last forever (till death do us apart) while others
fail miserably or crumble even after 20 years?

The search for the global optimum cannot be performed by asking a set of
questions. I argue that it cannot be done consciously. It's gut/instinct
thing. If you have a mechanical approach, anyone can game the system and get a
job because humans can be like chameleons to present themselves as the right
candidate, and they can study for the interview. Only way IMO is to have that
3rd eye or whatever you call it... instinct, gut feeling, etc

The problem with this conclusion is that instinct and sexism/racism are often
conflated.

No good answer.

~~~
scottshepard
This article is critiquing the unstructured get-to-know you interview. It is
not critiquing highly structured interviews with clear goals, nor technical
challenges, nor references checks or past performance.

In your example, how would you structure a series of questions and procedures
to limit the risk of marrying someone who will abandon you or cheat on you? I
think you can apply good interview process techniques to this quite well!

1\. Have they been divorced or cheated on someone before? People who have been
divorced before are much more likely to divorce again. The 50% divorce rate in
the US is slightly misleading, as many of the divorces are concentrated in
repeat divorcees. In fact, among younger (early to mid twenties) first-time
marriages, the divorce rate plummets to something like 15-20%.

2\. Have their parents been divorced or cheated? Children of divorced parents
are much more likely to get divorced themselves.

3\. Have they been physically, emotionally, or sexually abused as a child?
People with traumatic early childhood experiences are much more likely to
develop trust issues with long-term partners, especially if they never had
extensive counseling.

4\. Do they have a good relationship with their family? People who have a
difficult or unstable relationship with multiple family members are more
likely to see tumultuous relationships as a norm.

This is all equivalent to reference checks in a job.

Then a long dating / engagement period is necessary. How do you they treat you
during this period? Do they cheat? Are they abusive? Do they leave you during
a period of difficulty? Do you have the same religious views? Do you split
housework evenly? Do you both want kids? How do you view money? The three most
common reasons for a fight among couples are 1) money, 2) housework, 3) free
time (and how to spend it).

People who are otherwise happy and well-adjusted adults who get married and
then divorce bitterly after 10 years are not the norm. Most divorces can be
predicted. And most divorces happen before 2 years of marriage. If you are
aware of the warning signs and are not blinded by a "gut instinct" I think you
can definitely minimize the potential for marrying a snake -in-the-grass.

~~~
rntz
The trouble with this advice is that, while it's accurate if your one and only
goal is to predict the likelihood of someone divorcing or cheating on you, it
seems profoundly unfair.

To examine this "unfairness", let's imagine it at its most extreme: a society
in which divorcees are so stigmatized that it's practically impossible to ever
re-marry; in which children of divorcees are likewise stigmatized; in which
victims of child-abuse are further victimized by a society that considers them
potential "snakes-in-the-grass". Do we really want to live in such a society?

Obviously I don't think you were advocating this. But it's a thought
experiment which demonstrates a classic class of problem: what's good for the
individual isn't always good for society, especially taken to extremes.

~~~
Houshalter
Isn't that true for any system you use to predict? If you rely on "gut
instinct", then you filter out people who aren't good at fooling gut instinct.
Ugly people, short people, people with poor social skills, autistics, etc.
That's hardly fair either.

If you want to make the most accurate predictions possible, you absolutely
should not use gut instinct. If you want to be fair, then have a lottery or
select randomly. You can't have both. There's nothing remotely fair about gut
instinct. See, e.g. judges giving unattractive people twice the sentences of
attractive ones. I can provide tons more examples of stuff like that. Gut
instinct should be illegal.

------
Boothroid
But surely structured interviews just test a candidate's ability to improvise
plausible stories? Whether they are truthful or not is a different matter..

~~~
threatofrain
Structured interviews improve the ability to systematically test the
relationship between policy and results. Real experiments are then possible.

As opposed to a situation where your interviewers are asking off-the-cuff
questions, and you're uncertain whether the questions have a systematic bias
toward a bad direction -- racism, sexism, or just selecting for something
idiosyncratic that adds unnecessary constraint to your candidacy pool. You
also now don't know whether it's your policy that's systematically bad (or
good!), or that your interviewers are systematically bad.

~~~
vacri
And yet unstructured interviewing basically works and the world keeps
spinning. If 'random' truly was a better result (as the article suggests),
then in a hiring round for a programmer last year, we might have discarded our
candidate that won and is awesome for the one that _couldn 't conceptually
'get'_ FizzBuzz.

Or put another way: if 'random' was better than 'unstructured', you'd never
have a round of hiring where there were _no_ unsuitable candidates - one will
have been chosen.

~~~
Boothroid
Better to give someone a job related task perhaps?

------
nameisu
i have an interview with apple for a mechanical engineer. i will report back
once its done.

~~~
pdimitar
Please do. I'll be watching for your response to this message.

------
ppidugu
Such a careless claim and writing articles and throwing on peoples faces gives
just a chance to everyone to debunk ny times articles

------
erikpukinskis
Once we get to the point where most people have several jobs with separate
contracts, interviews become superfluous because you can just hire someone for
a few hours at a time and then fire them. The only reason that doesn't work
today is we're still clinging to the idea that you only work for one entity at
a time. Never mind that most people already manage at least a couple bosses
within the same company.

~~~
wpietri
I've done a bunch of consulting and contract work, and that can be fine. But
it's expensive, because to be continually finding new work, you must
continuously invest in marketing, and every time you do something new there's
a lot of switching cost. A company also needs a lot more supervisory capacity
to be monitoring people who come and go, so it's not cheap for companies,
either.

It's also limited. I can be much more productive when I do one thing full time
than a bunch of things part time. Depth takes time, as does keeping up with
changes. You just can't get as far with fractional attention as with serious
focus.

And uncertainty is also uncomfortable. Many people just want to settle into a
solid, reliable situation and do the work. They want to be able to plan their
future with some confidence. Even if they can make more money juggling a
variety of things, they'd rather make less and have less chaos.

So I don't think we'll ever get to the point you suggest.

~~~
pdimitar
You both have a good point.

I too quit my freelancing for a stable remote job but looking at it 18 months
later I found out that I sucked a lot in managing my freelancing gigs.

So IMO with some good contract and budget management -- and confidence, and
actually having a choice -- you can reap most the benefits of freelancing and
almost none of the drawbacks, if you can take the thought of switching
customers every 3-6 months.

I understand not everybody can pull this off -- I am not sure I am yet ready
to do this that well. But I've seen people doing it very successfully and
almost stress-free.

------
nebabyte
> not one interviewer reported noticing that he or she was conducting a random
> interview. More striking still, the students who conducted random interviews
> rated the degree to which they “got to know” the interviewee slightly higher
> on average

Yeah well, when you're asking questions of someone who looks thoughtful very
briefly, then answers almost immediately after, it sounds like you might have
more reason to think you know them better than the one actually considering
their answer

Might be introducing a confound or two that you then _proceed to completely
ignore_ and even conclude past lest someone accidentally draw other
conclusions

