>Combine survivorship bias (you were subjected to it and made it, so that validates the process)
Let me spell it out for you so that we are on the same page and my Bias is utterly clear:
I Do not have the intellectual ability to make it through the google interview process. I consider myself to be a an excellent coder but I cannot pass their process. I also believe that the majority of programmers at google are smarter than me.
There. This is the ultimate form of unbiased judgement, a judgement that marks yourself as inferior. Google creates interviews I cannot pass, do I use bias to disparage the interview process or do I take a neutral viewpoint even when the neutral viewpoint says something about my own abilities?
If you can't score 200 points on an IQ test, is there something wrong with the IQ test or is it you? Which form of judgement are you taking here and which form of judgment am I taking and who is MORE biased?
If anyone is biased here, it is You.
>You phrased this as two parts, but in reality these two things are intricately linked. It's because you don't know how to judge person on their true ability--i.e. that you lack this skill--that you resort to useless trivialities like this whiteboard bullshit.
You assume that if you wrote what I wrote it would be a form of survivorship bias. This is a common mistake. How you interpret other people is a reflection of your own qualities, weaknesses and biases. You would suffer from survivorship bias if you were in my (perceived) situation and you chose to project that quality onto me even though I am possibly one of the least biased people you could meet.
To be unbiased is to have the ability to swallow uncomfortable truths. You'll know if you're such a person because you'll generally be unhappy. Such an ability is rare. I believe I have it, but make no mistake. It is a curse. The world is a dog eat dog shitty place and most people get through it happily by painting illusions around themselves. To see the world in raw untouched form is to wade through a lake of shit everyday. Better to say the google interview process is dumb than to admit to yourself that you just aren't google material.
You inject many assumptions into what I am saying. What you don't realize that I am in complete agreement with your above statement. Nothing was said to the contrary.
I Don't know how to judge a person's true ability because I lack that skill. I admitted this in the original statement but your blindness completely masked this meaning from you. You aren't hearing what I am really saying:
I am saying that No one has the ability to perfectly judge another persons interview ability. We must use unbiased statistics, metrics and methods of measurement to arrive at a good outcome. There are tons of good programmers out there that can program that can't do whiteboards, but there are much much much much less programmers that can do whiteboards but can't program. Thus if you pass an unbiased coding test that means you have a much much higher chance of being a good coder and possessing genetics that make you more intelligent than the person who couldn't pass it.
This makes the whiteboard interview the Best most unbiased process we have to judge other people. Note that when I say "best" I just mean that it is the best we have despite the fact that it's just not a very accurate way of judging people. Whiteboard interviews aren't that great, it's just better than any other method we have.
Using a conversation or a Design discussion to pass a person in an interview is not a measurable metric. It is subject to all kinds of biases. For example, this very conversational thread you assume that I am a survivor of the google interview process. The conversational format and your biases made you blind. Guess what, if you gave me a whiteboard coding interview, you'd know for sure but you made an assumption and instead wrote a response that demonstrated how completely off base and biased such interview processes without whiteboarding can be.
The most unbiased measurable way to detect if someone can program is to do a whiteboard interview. Most other data in an interview gleaned via conversation is subject to bias