I feel like this is a very bruised ego here. I'm not saying any interview process is perfect, and I think a lot of them are very, very bad at accessing the capabilities and value someone provides, but same for University.
No. That logic is just superficial pattern matching.
The point of university is to spend the time and energy to master the subject, test or no, and the knowledge gained is usually valuable in and of itself. The kind of interview prep in question is basically learning how to jump through some arrogant company's hoops, which likely has little to do with anything, including their actual job.
Really? I think most people go to college to get a good job before all else. With that line of thinking, an interview is just another of these “tests”.
But you make a good point about these arrogant companies administering tests. College faculty are never arrogant, but always humble like this guy in the article who just can’t chalk his failure up to being a human being.
That's called credentialism, and it's a perversion of what universities are supposed to be.
> But you make a good point about these arrogant companies administering tests. College faculty are never arrogant, but always humble
What a red herring.
> College faculty are never arrogant, but always humble like this guy in the article who just can’t chalk his failure up to being a human being.
Let's review that professor's story:
> Jacobson has no trouble admitting he totally blew a basic test at the beginning of an interview for a fairly elite job at Google. He has no expectation that had he passed the test, he would have earned a place at the company down the line. He has a problem with the fact that a company with the power, prestige and wealth of Google has developed a recruiting process that is so large and systematic that it can both ask for large amounts of time and energy from prospective candidates and then easily or accidentally hurt or dismiss those same qualified candidates because of a difference, like Jacobson's cognitive disorder.
Does that sound like arrogance to you? Ignoring the sarcasm for a moment, there's a difference between being humble and being a pushover, and it's more of a pushover thing to overlook glaring problems in a process in order to blame oneself.
His story also brings to mind another salient difference that undermines your attempt to compare a Google's interview process to the ACT/SAT: if you flub a standardized test, you can easily retake it. That's not so much the case with an interview.
People are accustomed to jumping through hoops to pay an already rich institution several thousand more dollars.
In contrast, you study for Google's exams, and if you pass, Google ends up paying you.
I wouldn't call those "university tests." Also, you can do quite well by just mastering your High School subjects without extra test prep, and the stuff tested (e.g. Algebra) is stuff you'll actually build on in university. They're also standardized, so even if you decide to do test prep, it's not like you have to prep for different exams for each school you apply for.
It's reasonable for universities to have that expectation because being a university student is considered to be a full-time occupation. It's unreasonable to have that expectation for working professionals. But Google and other big tech do it anyway because there are thousands of people waiting in line to interview.
People rail against these because they are not only brutal, they are a waste of time. We also suspect they have little correlation to actual employee performance once hired.
Steve Yegge, ex-googler, also mentioned the common phenomenon of the interview anti-loop that used to happen at Google: two interviewers in your queue would not have hired each other, so the attitude/knowledge which would satisfy one of them will actually get you rejected with the other.
By contrast, interviews are extremely condensed and an interview doesn't guarantee you a job in the same way that completing degree requirements guarantees a degree. Employers also have the option of firing you later.
Btw, be totally clear, this has been a bad outcome for Google. Google's failure has been well-hidden by the fact that they have a monopoly product that is a cash machine requiring low/zero marginal investment...once you start from that premise, you realise that management has destroyed monumental amounts of capital (your comparison with university is very apt, Google is functionally a bureaucracy operating like a 11th century monastery, you have to spend years studying pointless trivia to get in, a totally institutional mindset).
When I've had power over the interviewing process it's always been enlightening to ask the interviewer to take their own interview. I'd be willing to bet most professors can pass their own exams; the same hasn't been true of interviewers.
This is the cost of fighting professional standards for the industry as a whole. I'm not necessarily for that, but I don't know what the sensible alternative is to inter-corporate pissing matches and job titles that are practically meaningless. Nobody who knows how to build a house or fix a car is going to spend months playing puzzle games about those topics. They are just going to find an opportunity to do the work they enjoy somewhere else.
Edit: to remove unrelated rant.
On the other hand, I get the sense from people who've been through the Google treadmill that the problem isn't so much that it's hard like university courses are/can be but that it's arbitrary.
In the long run you might end up with better results if you don't even try to identify the one optional choice and only focus on weeding out false positives, leaving the rest to a diceroll.
(I'd be surprised if what happens at Google wasn't a weird compromise Frankenstein of both)
I never hear reasonable alternatives to this. Surely you'd rather a coding exercise than a take home coding practice you never feel will be complete enough for people. Or to do what Basecamp does and work for 2 months only to be given the boot.
Once I'm in the university and enrolled in classes, I'll know what to focus on and I'll be willing to study hard for tests.
I know some people see it differently, but I've always considered multiple potential employers simultaneously and I definitely haven't been willing to play the "devote weeks of your life to try to get hired by a specific company" game. On the other hand, some people find that worthwhile, and more power to them.
Companies pay me to work.
They are welcome to pay my consulting rates of $300 per hour for interview questions.