Hacker News Reader

Comment by solipsism | Hacker News Reader

It selects for people who do well on the whiteboard under pressure, which are very often not the best workers overall.

This gets tossed around as a truism. I'm curious, does anyone have any evidence for it? Call me a skeptic, but these kinds of "everyone knows" truths are often wrong.

Google and other such companies have a vested interest in getting hiring right. They also have the wherewithal to conduct studies, collect data, and let the evidence guide their hiring practices. Google in particular has shown a willingness to completely overhaul their practices by eliminating ineffective practices (remember their reputation for "thought puzzle" type questions?).

So I'm curious if you have anything to back up the idea that they're doing it all wrong.

View on HN

To quote Abraham Lincoln: "Do not trust anything you read on the internet".

I know it from my own experience and that of many others who have been through the gauntlet. Take it for what it's worth, I'm not selling you anything. I don't look impressive on the whiteboard, but I do have a rather impressive track record. Something doesn't line up. :-)

FWIW, as far as I recall there was another experiment at Google where they tried to establish correlation between interview performance and job performance, and as far as I recall, there was no meaningful correlation. This, of course, is not fully representative, because it does not include poor whiteboard performers.

Don't take this the wrong way, but the anecdotes of people who didn't make it through "the gauntlet" are quite likely to be biased. Those of people who did make it are as well.

This is not data.

Did I say it was "data"? The closest anyone has come to "data" on this (that I know of) is Google, in that experiment where they just hired people at random. But they decided to ignore the results and stick to the soul crushing 5 hour interviews anyway, so data did not change the relevant people's minds.

Looking up the actual experiment, you're completely misrepresenting the conclusions. Here: https://www.google.com/amp/business.financialpost.com/entrep...

These were their conclusions: 1. The ability to hire well is random. This is referring to individuals, not the system as a whole. 2. Forget brain-teasers. Focus on behavioral questions in interviews, rather than hypotheticals 3. Consistency matters for leaders 4. Grades don’t predict anything about who is going to be a successful employee. School grades, that is.

So, stop making stuff up from behind your throwaway account.

Ouch, "making stuff up". That's harsh, my man. Thus far I've made absolutely nothing up in this thread, or indeed in any others under this account. And you're using a PR puff piece written by Google HR to discount years of personal experience that I'm sharing here. You're free to not believe me, but let's not level accusations without evidence, OK?

And yet you fail to provide a non-puff-piece link to the study you're talking about?

> Google in particular has shown a willingness to

Google is collecting and analysing data to improve its hiring process... not to improve the hiring process of the industry at large.

There is an effectively limitless supply of great engineers who will jump through hoops to work for Google.

That's just not true for the vast majority of the industry.

Is it really a truism? If anything, the general industry consensus is the opposite, that Google engineers are brilliant, the cream of the crop. Every big tech company and Google wannabe emulates their interview process. My Quora feed for whatever reason is littered with questions pertaining to how amazing working at Google is. In my experience, the people who question the effectiveness of Google style interviews seem to be in the minority.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com