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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

And just like the standardized test rigamarole, technical interviews can be gamed by investing in prep courses and materials for those who are willing to dump the money and time on them.

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It's like saying "This guy spent 4 years in college trying to get a 4.0 GPA. Clearly, he only did it to game the system and get a good job/career. So I won't hire him"

A person willing to spend time and money preparing to succeed in a scenario that exists in real life (pass interviews), is one of the types of persons I want to hire.

The situation clearly becomes complicated when an ostensibly purely meritocratic measure becomes something that those with means can improve. If there was free and quality standardized test prep / technical interview prep for all, and then it was just a matter of dedicating enough spare time for the latter, then you might have a better case that it's good. Though you're also ignoring the fact that people have a limited amount of time/energy to devote to that, such as in the case as engineers with children.

Not to mention, Goodhart's law and all that.

>New data shows studying for the SAT for 20 hours on free Official SAT Practice on Khan Academy is associated with an average score gain of 115 points, nearly double the average score gain compared to students who don’t use Khan Academy. Out of nearly 250,000 test-takers studied, more than 16,000 gained 200 points or more between the PSAT/NMSQT and SAT …

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/05/...

I have recently passed several technical interviews at multiple large companies. The first one I botched completely. Then I looked at some algorithmic courses from Princeton on Coursera and passed the rest of the interviews in a breeze.

My point is, there _are_ free and good quality courses out there and if you have enough experience with actual work then it is just a matter of brushing up on the foundation. In the end I’m glad that I did.

> there _are_ free and good quality courses out there

Free only if you discount the cost of your time.

I like eating chocolates. But only if I discount the annoyance of putting the chocolate in my mouth.

Well, yes. However if you are already a good programmer then it will not take that much time, and if you are looking for a job then there is nothing wrong in expecting that you would prepare. And I would argue that it's not sunk time either. In my day to day job I do not use that many algorithms because most of the actually needed ones are hidden by the internals of the language, I got rusty and the refresher was useful.

But the company doesn’t really suffer if they don’t hire that disadvantaged developer who doesn’t have the resources to study for the test. Sure they have to spend some more $$$ on recruiting but there aren’t a ton of companies in America existentially threatened by their inability to hire these hypothetical engineers.

You're stating that the company doesn't lose out with false negatives. That's certainly true with big FAANG companies. But I suppose in my original comment, and when I brought up Goodhart's law in a descendent comment, also suggests that by creating a system that can be gamed by prep, you end up creating a situation that encourages false positives. In the end, is a company of Leetcoder elites and new CS grads going to be a more productive company than one comprised of experienced and capable engineers who don't happen to do as well on those tests? Which I suppose is the question for a different study.

In my experience hiring, the diligence to sit down and practice code tests correlates very highly with being a good employee. Just like strong academic achievement at good schools.

That's not to say there aren't gems in the rough who don't interview well, or skipped college, or who didn't go to good schools. But there's a huge time cost to looking for them.

Does it? Have you hired a lot of people via alternative route to have a valid comparison?

Perhaps it is a cost because your hitting practices are explicitly biased against finding such people, or salary is not competitive?

Time of HR guy doing the interview or a search is cheap compared to years of developer salary. Seriously.

How much more money do you think Google or Facebook can make by improving their engineering recruiting?

Given that the former is dealing with decreased earnings growth and the latter is dealing with decreased user growth, perhaps all options should be explored.

> A person willing to spend time and money preparing to succeed in a scenario that exists in real life (pass interviews), is one of the types of persons I want to hire.

This brings us to an interesting dilemma. Do you want to hire people who know the problem domain you're solving --- or people who really badly want to be hired?

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