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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

How do you tell who will learn faster, IQ tests and personality inventories? I don't see how you can put this in to practice when all known forms of interviewing test where the candidate is today, not how fast they can learn.

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In our interview set, there is always a question that requires expert-level knowledge about a topic that the interviewee likely not know (well we'll ask them an easier question first and see if they can answer), then allow them to Google, and we watch the way they do it, their reading comprehension, analytical skills, generalization, assumption checking, .etc will all review. Harder to fake than leetcode questions.

Edit: our assumption is that someone can pull that off in 40-60 second Googling is a super-fast learner. So far we're doing great with our team.

I think a large part of learning faster is having a better willingness/eagerness to learn. That's something that can be gauged to some degree during both the technical and non-technical sections of the interview.

Mostly yes but a lot of tech hiring interviews penalizes asking too many questions and expects you to solve x leetcode problems in y time.

penalizes asking too many questions

Nothing was more frustrating when interviewing a candidate to be given like 5 minutes notice, put in a room to pair interview with a fellow engineer, and the fellow engineer running things like a pop quiz gameshow mixed with a courtroom interrogation, while I was trying to more subtly coax the candidate into comfortably showing their skill level and working style. The candidate basically shut down and stopped answering my fellow engineer's questions, but still answered mine. My colleague interpreted this as personal hostility, and things went downhill from there.

All that is to say, you will definitely learn more about a candidate if you take an interactive, rather than interrogative, approach, and you really need to be on the same page with your fellow interviewers about that.

It's far from the only facet, but slope vs y-intercept could be recast as young vs old or newly graduated vs tenured.

Agreed. It's not explicitly stated in the post but why would amount of experience (aka age) and Y-intercept even be mentioned at all if not to imply that more experienced people have a less steep slope.

I think this is a false axiom that young people have more potential. You actually have very low signal about people that age. They just went from a very structured context to a very unstructured context, so you may be assuming a lot from how they operated in the former context that may not be true now that they are in a different one.

This kind of ties in with another thread on here about OP being disillusioned with the skill level of their FAANG colleagues.

> I think this is a false axiom that young people have more potential. You actually have very low signal about people that age.

That's exactly why they have more potential: they're much higher variance. A lot of the "high-potential" people that have a bunch of experience will have already demonstrated this, and they'll be making $500k+ at a FAANG, which most companies won't be able to compete with.

Technically speaking, it's true the slope must by necessity decrease as you get older, but the effect is grotesquely oversold. It can be compensated for by the fact that when an older person goes to pick up some new tech, they're quite likely to have some previous tech like it they've already picked up and just be filling in some gaps instead of starting from scratch.

I don't think the correlation is large enough in practice to be a useful metric. I'm pretty sure I learn new things faster than I did twenty years ago because usually I have a lot less stuff to learn. Learning how to spell queries for your tenth database is much easier than the first one, for instance, and I've got SQL, NoSQL, columnar, embedded, and I dunno how many other adjectives of experience vs. some relatively young programmer encountering their second database type. My slope on such a task can approach vertical whereas a younger person may need a couple of weeks.

(This example is on my mind because literally today I'm helping someone diagnose why a query is slow on a database I've never even used before. But I understand the fundamentals of how the DB works, and can read the docs really quickly now, because I don't even know how many DBs I've used at this point. Depends on how you define them.)

Internships are a form of interviewing and provide a duration over which you can test how fast the person learns.

People coming in from internships only make up a small portion of your staffing needs, and with the general practice of never giving raises and expecting 2-year turnover, you will never see your intern in a senior or even midrange role.

Never giving raises and expecting 2-year turnover are pretty much one thing rather than the two that they might initially appear to be.

Your parent comment states that there exists no known form of interviewing that captures the trajectory of the candidate. I stated the existence of one, thus showing that there exists a known form of interviewing that captures the trajectory of the candidate.

I didn't state that internships solve all of your hiring problems. I also seem to work in a different company than you because our tenure is higher than 2 years and many interns make it to the senior level.

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