WTF with high school questions?
letmypeoplecode.com
letmypeoplecode.com
Mr Shuttleworth has said - here - that he's confident this set of questions is picking the right people, so I'm taking him at his word and not wasting my time or theirs.
A recruiter reached out to me and wanted me to take what I can only but describe as the equivalent of Phrenology and personality quiz through a coding quiz. I reached out to the recruiter and informed him that such things are likely illegal in the US and on top of that, I'd stated on my resume that I do not participate in Leetcode, etc.
What shocked me was the response: "Thank you for your withdrawal of interest in working at Canonical."
I've been a sometimes-active member of the Ubuntu community, contributing to various parts of their wiki until that became less usable, as well as providing help on their IRC channels, occasionally stepping in to help a package maintainer here and there, etc. For the position that they were hiring for (developer relations advocate), you'd think I'm the kind of person they beg for, but it really shows that they wouldn't hire the people who volunteer their time.
Also foreigners that studied in systems that do not have easy analogue to the American GPA. Also autodidacts. Also people not suffering fools gladly.
It was quite obvious to me I would be rejected, as the form is much more focused on "things that look good on paper" rather than "what this person can do", e.g. asking for your GPA.
This presumably reflects the internal culture which leads to a history of user-hostile decisions: snap, Unity, that Amazon fiasco. They probably looked good on paper.
I'm only salty because I think people with atypical profiles like mine could truly make their software better and more adapted to today's FLOSS world. Oh well, guess I'll just keep working on maximizing someone's profits.
What more could you ask for from a form?
Hahaha. I miss Unity though.
But then everyone except Duke Power has ignored Griggs v. Duke Power.
It's funny to imagine that the barrage of questions from Ubuntu is merely a tactic to suppress the obvious question from the candidate: why is the company seeming to fall for that move by MS.
The whole tech industry is insane. Can we please go back to: I give you work, you give me money. And if you want passion then I want equity.
If you won't crawl through broken glass, cool, there are 5000+ people in India who might, and a couple hundred jr IT support types a lot closer who are being replaced with an IAM system.
Two World Wars killed the main working segments of entire generations -- young men -- and allowed the West to take the lead for a while. The tech booms prolonged that a little further. But now them halcyon days are over homie. Hustle, or I'm replacing you with a math whiz from Delhi.
They want to toss my resume for my struggles 20 years ago? So be it. It's as good of a filter for me not wanting to work for them as it is vice versa.
I've hired lots of software engineers in my life, and even for ones right out of university, I'm not sure I could recall what university they attended.
Good for them. The nerds who have dared to live, the misfits, and just about anyone else who finds that whole spiel atrocious will go somewhere else.
Fuck that noise!
I would of closed the tab pretty quickly.
Perhaps the question about language indicates that they're only looking for people who wouldn't have closed their tabs.
The next worst thing they could have asked was my Myers-Briggs personality category.
I see what you did there. And you’re right, but “would have” is not there yet, it’s just a common mistake like swapping your/you’re.
I want to complain that they don't have a "won the state championship" answer for the math question. The allowed responses don't even capture my full, 30 years ago high school glory.
There are a great many other places to work that DO value your actual accomplishments.
More likely they do this because they have so many applications coming in that having to pay more to a lesser worker is worth more than having to hire many more HR staff to process all the applications. The hope is that it will scare off most people, and if that fails a machine can filter on these values. It could be any arbitrary value – race, religion, random number – but courts have effectively ruled that any filtering mechanism that isn't directly related to the job or school could face severe legal consequences, so this keeps the lawyers happy.
"Please indicate how frequently you cried between the ages of 1 and 2. Cries per day is the desired unit"
"How good of a napper were you between the ages of 2 and 4? Did you talk back to the teacher when naptime was scheduled? Did you fake your naps?"
HR: Our records are incomplete, please provide a copy of your degree and transcript. Me: I don't have a degree. HR: We only hire people with degrees! Me: Well I have a contract and get paid so... HR: What is the highest education level you've achieved? Me: I finished high school 20 years ago. HR: Great, please provide a copy of your certificate and transcript.
I ignored them, six months later practically word for word we had the same conversation again.
A tool I hate, surpassed by my hate for mindless sheep following corporate red tape and scripts. Something something fire with fire. Maybe there are positive uses for chatGPT after all, reducing mundanity for all.
> High School: I got kicked out of AP English for insubordination in high school.
...is this evidence that the filter is bad, or evidence that the filter is working?
The author's counterpoint might be that there are a lot of similar behavioral/subordination/personal-history questions that they could have asked, but didn't, because, as TFA discusses, a lot of stuff you did when you were barely starting to be an adult doesn't matter after a few years.
What consistently confuses me is why any highly marketable professional would be frustrated about an organization filtering in a way that they disagree with. If you can tell that an organization is not for you in the application form, that's literally the best time to find out. I don't know why anyone would want to go into business with people who they disagree with on how to run a business.
This story is real, but I understand if you don't believe it: The year I finished school, all but one of my school's English Lit students failed the state exam (TEE). The only one that passed was the guy coming bottom of the class.
If you can't do any of those things, like for some recent grads, then the next best predictors of job performance are going to be psychometrics, specifically IQ and trait conscientiousness. Colleges heavily select for these traits during admissions, but less so with the actual course work. These traits are most predictive when you expect to teach a person the job on the job, with their prior experience being irrelevant.
So it's not that there is no evidence for these questions being useful. It's just that there are usually better signals on offer.
Out of curiousity, can you cite these claims? I mean I buy the conscientiousness, but I wouldn't guess they heavily select for it or IQ. Or at least not both together, not past a point.
There are many studies on the correlations here, and you should do your own survey of the literature if you are curious, not trust a cherry picked study posted by some guy on HN.
I also know that, all else held equal, super-intelligence starts to show a negative correlation with success in college if the super-intelligent individual is curricularly mainstreamed in pre-college school. So the correlation with intelligence, at least, does break down in various cases. I'm sure it does with conscientiousness as well.
Whether this is at the level of admissions? I know that selective schools tend to pass on students who score wildly above their average, because the student is less likely to attend if accepted (and for college rankings purposes this looks bad).
Incredibly lazy, and likely not useful
End result was I got an A in the course, but had to do extra credit assignments.
1) There are more questions about high school if you make it into the interviews, so they do take it seriously.
2) There is research indicating that "who or how we are" is pretty well determined in our formative years, with the high school years being a prime driver, so there is at least some rational motivation to ask about it.
Ex: I self-sabotaged two different classes (and my grades therein) due to personality clashes with teachers. If one believes that I am fundamentally "still the same person who did that", then it might seem worth exploring those situations and my responses before hiring.
Not trying to justify it.
I've not subsequently done either of those things for at least 25 years and counting, so I'm not overly sure on point #2.
Ironically, if I was a hiring manager I would much rather care about your history of insubordination than your self-ascribed writing skills.
Hoo boy.
A valid strategy if servility is a trait matching the role.
But I doubt it would be present in those capable of producing insightful or thoughtful writing. Unique value usually emerges from some degree of risk taking, including the risks involved in hiring talented people over reliable sheep where needed.
You're hearing noble assumptions of risk taking and talent, sticking the neck out and lording over the sheep, but all I'm seeing is narcissism and overconfidence.
Yes me too, but that's sampling bias. Not everyone is equally visible.
Also, it was a long while ago.
I would not be surprised to hear that companies that ask these questions also have ageist policies.
The last "team" you want setting every question, and expectation, and results.. is the adversarial side that is trying to get the most out of all candidates with the least trouble to themselves..
I wanna believe most people would pass unless they said their childhood hobbies are torturing animals and setting fires. But I have no idea.
Coding was as much a stimulating intellectual challenge as it was a pretext for gradually increasing the time I spent away from both home and my customary social obligations, down at the library's computer lab."
your move, interviewer.
Culture fit, probably looking for a few keywords or experiences that match a profile.
Seems fraught with peril from a legal perspective, IMO. Lotta hooks or opportunities for discrimination.
OTOH I could also see the appeal, e.g. you're not the ideal-on-paper candidate, but you did a bunch of X and Y, had experience w/ Z, tell me about the other stuff, sell me a little. I'm not an MIT hyper-literati type but give me the chance to show why that doesn't matter, etc. etc.
Can you give me a link to the decision?
Unless you graduated from HS by 1982, you can't say you've been out of high school for 40 years
I have more respect for someone who credibly says "this specific question isn't worth my time" than someone who meekly does whatever is asked.
oh, and the blogger gave a smarta* answer to a free-form text question?
Yep, insubordination is still there. I'd pass on this candidate too.
I also don't think this is a "smartass" answer:
> This is an irrelevant question unless you're focusing on recent grads with no job history.
That is a straightforward statement of his opinion. He's perfectly within his rights not to answer any question, and explaining why he chooses not to is hardly an unreasonable thing to do.
If he doesnt want the job, why waste eveyones time with this childishness? If he does want the job, why not play ball?
But allow me to give you some advice: good managers don't have subordinates, they have a team.
I would love to see their (data centric) justification for this kind of screening. (I highly doubt there is one)
I can think of worse red flags than asking about grades, but not like a lot of worse red flags. Don't put up with this stuff.
In high school, how did you rank competitively in maths and hard sciences? Which university and degree did you choose, what others did you consider, and why did you select that one? At university, did you do particularly well at any area of your degree? Overall, what was your degree result and how did that reflect on your ability? In high school and university, what did you achieve that was exceptional? What leadership roles did you take on during your education?
The first step of applying was filing a bug report, because applying wasn't possible. You can find the github issues people created. Yes, I did withdraw my application.
I could have been valedictorian, but it doesn't mean anything if I can't work with a team.
I'll take Volkerding's memory of history at this point, and his interest in not fixing things that aren't broken. Turns out you don't need to hire all that many people with that approach, AND you end up with a better product.
Tangential, but... has anyone successfully prosecuted against age bias in tech? I've never heard of a single person that was able to prove it, and/or do anything about it.
As someone with 32 years experience, it's kind of freaky, honestly. If it's true that the number of software developers has doubled every 4.5 years (I don't remember where I read this, so don't have a source :( ), then that means there's 1.5% of people in my group and older.
Google settled a couple years ago.
https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/behavioral-...
IBM ended up settling too.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2018/09/18/the-ibm-ag...
And again...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/12/business/economy/ibm-age-...
https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/04/ibm_settles_more_disc...
> IBM is preparing to settle yet more age discrimination and wage theft complaints against the IT giant, though in one instance where it has already done so, Big Blue is accused of failing to comply with the terms of its settlement agreement.
> Back in 2018, IBM was in the headlines, accused of deliberately trying to get rid of older workers and replace them with younger Millennials. Two years later, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) concluded [PDF] that IBM's defense of its decisions – that was just a coincidence if its layoffs seemingly primarily targeted the over-40s – "does not withstand scrutiny" and that "there is reasonable cause to believe that [IBM] has discriminated against [employees] on the basis of age."
edit: Because they wanted "full picture" of the candidates. Meaning that they don't put too much weight on your HS grades, but that having been a consistent performer throughout your life, is a positive trait for them.
> Solid 83% man my whole life, and I'll give you a solid 83 for all 4 years I'm there!
If they ask for proof, spend a few bucks on fiverr and get a photoshop wizard to cook you up a transcript.
But hypothesize that someone in their 30s now grew up in a country like South Africa, Zaire, or one of the Balkans. How exactly do you even prove you attended High School at this point? Much less get a transcript?
What's a bit trickier is verifying the University exists. There are fake colleges where you pay for a bogus degree and subscribe to their bogus registrar service for a period of time so when employers conduct a degree check they answer the phone and lie for you.
But really, lying on resumes is just dumb. You have more to lose than to gain.
Best case you get a job you want. Worst case you apply to a different job. Seems outsized in the gain department, for all parties (considering how dumb a GPA requirement is on a resume).
https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0912/how-lying-o...
https://www.lawdepot.com/blog/the-legal-reasons-you-shouldnt...
I would focus on companies that actually need talent. The big incorrect assumption people have is that if they see positions open then it means they need talent. this is incorrect, most especially for positions that have been open for a long time: that's a big red flag. If a position has been open for more than 6 months, they obviously don't need anyone to fill that role and so have no incentive to learn how to higher the talent needed for that role.
FYI I balked at the same step in the application process.
Being of an older age is not a protected class, so they are able to do this.
> The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) forbids age discrimination against people who are age 40 or older. It does not protect workers under the age of 40, although some states have laws that protect younger workers from age discrimination. It is not illegal for an employer or other covered entity to favor an older worker over a younger one, even if both workers are age 40 or older.
Nothing wrong with the question, imho, if you have lots of applicants. I doubt it adversely selects for the job. It drops a lot of legitimately skilled people, but every method does.
For interviewing, it makes sense to budget an amount of time you want to spend on interviews per unit time, an amount of time you're willing to spend per unit hire, and just optimize those metrics. If you're hitting those targets, there's no harm in all sorts of arbitrary selection criteria that don't hit protected categories. They do two things: help you hit the time budgets, and transmit your priorities to candidates.
Personally, I find it hard to be upset about someone else's selection criteria. That's their honest expression of what they care about. It's like people complaining about interview feedback. Why ask if you're going to fight about the answer? It's like that.
This makes me think you don't know many awesome engineers.
To me this simply shows a lack of life experience. One of the best engineers I know left school before graduating. Has ADHD, was a bit messed up with drugs wrong crowd etc at that time.
He’s also a genius, had his life together for over 20 years and a very senior person at my current company. Why should some bad decisions over 20 years ago have any relevance to the value he’d provide now? Why should anything you did over 20 years ago have any relevance, good or bad?
This is unquestionably yet another example of ageism in an industry that is riddled with it.
This was discussed not too long ago
OK, so I lie about my high school achievement from decades ago? Now what. How are they going to decide whether I'm lying about smoking behind the bikesheds or getting a gold star for being quiet at lunch or whatever.
Sure maybe this is useful for 20 year olds going into entry level jobs, but for the majority of people?
False positive: people can lie with no meaningful way to verify.
False negative: you're increasing the funnel drop rate of your recruiting pipeline while simultaneously selecting against more experienced and non-traditional candidates.
Why would you ask this except for cargo culting?
Seriously. Here is how to do it.
I'm looking for a React Developer, I ask the following simple questions:
1. Tell my about your contributions to major projects you have been involved in. (if they share their work ask more in-depth questions about it)
2. With $givenTechnologyStack, how do you usually solve state management / routing / styling / responsiveness / SEO / performance / security / validation...?
3. Why do you think, concretely, that you can help solve our problem?
Any experienced interviewer will know by the answers if they're dealing with a pretender or the real deal.
Edit: I know recruiters don't have in-depth technical knowledge they should simply forward the few interesting candidates to tech. If you have time for 5 rounds of nonsense you have time for 1 round of quality interviews.
Too many counter examples irl who had shit grades but were geniuses at actual work to discount.
The problem is, this initial funnels are just recruiters. They're technologically clueless. They're just putting words on paper and finding people that say those words with the right number of experience attached.
Firstly because that's not their job, and secondly because recruiters aren't just there to hire for developers and they aren't going to be subject matter experts enough to judge between good answers to questions like that and bullshit.
Most companies I've interviewed at over the years (basically all but the smallest startups) have had dedicated recruiters for developers; different people hired sales or marketing or other roles. This doesn't mean that they should be expected to be technical experts, but I do think it's interesting that the box-checking type of interviews rather than just having a genuine conversation also seem to be more common the larger the company is. It's probably not surprising, since the need for standardizing interviews is higher when you have a larger number of people performing the interviews, but it's a little ironic that the most boilerplate interviews I've had were all with recruiters who specifically only interview developers.
Then again, I also tend to get bounced around to different recruiters far more frequently with the larger companies. There have been times I've been passed around to half a dozen recruiters within the span of a month or so; one makes the initial contact, then another talks to me on the phone, then another coordinates my technical interview schedule, and then another actually gives me the offer, who then refers me to one final other recruiter to actually respond yes or no (and maybe negotiate if possible). I know some of these are probably a more entry-level position that I've seen referred to as "recruiting coordinators" rather than full-fledged recruiters (meaning that they often handle the logistics like scheduling but don't perform interviews themselves), but it still feels absurd to have to talk to so many different people for basically the same thing. My impression is that it's somewhat intentionally trying to put me at a disadvantage by making it impossible for me to carry over any expectations from one step to the next (e.g. one recruiter might say something about compensation or benefits and then the next one conveniently doesn't know what I'm talking about and can claim that no one would have told me that).
YMMY, but I was once interviewed in this style days after Elon mentioned it's his go-to style of interviewing.
Was easily the worst, most pointless interview of my life.
As with everything, it probably depends on the person. A good interviewer can do almost anything and come away with a good signal. A bad interviewer can do the same thing and come away with noise.
The process is less important, I think.
Frequently experienced candidates with interview practice will simply ramble for many minutes - listing extensive contributions in excessive detail. Unfortunately when this happens it’s usually pretty awkward for everyone.
The ideal candidate will answer this question very gracefully and enable us to proceed directly into problem solving questions.
Gotta agree with your point about good/bad interviewers. I want to add that good interviewers/interviewees know how to manage the “risk” of such open-ended questions leading to a pointless interview.
Also when people research interviewing styles, the "conversational" approach apparently ranks pretty badly. People can be good at BSing, reading the bold print etc.
Effective communication skills are also important.
What types of interviewing styles rank well?
And conversely, there are people who are not good at tech, but good at casual conversation about tech. Those people tend to become your boss :)
Would that not imply they aren't a good fit for the OP's workplace? And presumably, a lot of larger tech companies, since communication must be a large part of your job.
I am admittedly not good at talking on the fly if I haven't prepped for it. I try to make up for it by trying to focus on writing well.
If you need specific technical skills in React for an urgent project then retain a contractor or consultant, don't hire an employee.
Competent hiring managers look for folks with 10 years experience with React, C#, Java, DevOps, Embedded C++ Development, Mobile cross platform dev and ofc Rust for good measure, each.
We have long forgotten about doing one thing and doing it right.
The real question is: Why don't the courts? Everything else is just to cover asses when the discrimination lawsuits appear.
A recruiter without technical background will not be able to judge the answers other than „was able to form sentences“ or „couldn’t phrase anything“
IMHO, complaining about the status quo is easy and giving armchair hot takes about circumstances one does not understand is also easy. If one wants to play the smart game, there are some facts that can leverage to one's advantages:
1) job postings being above the fold vs long tail is a thing. There are tons of companies/roles you will never hear about from by perusing linkedin search.
2) following from that, interview criteria often needs to be adjusted based on various factors and plenty of companies have to make more streamlined funnels in order to have a fighting change of capturing any talent at all.
3) even for high visibility/demand companies, recruiters have incentives to think outside the box to find truly valuable talent, because these people are not even in the market for a new job, let alone willing to put up w/ bullshit. The catch that many people miss is that just accruing a high number of years of experience doesn't necessarily translate to being valuable, especially on the fast changing world of tech.
Small companies don't care because they want someone who can do the work.
Large companies' decision makers are much more risk averse. They're looking for a reason not to hire you. If you're a poor employee that makes no difference to the,, they are fine, if they take a risk by hiring you despite you once getting a B in high school spanish in 1837, they're the ones that will be embarrassed.
This is why small companies will take a CV, interview twice and hire you. But big companies have a dozen committees, a HR "portal" that takes a CV AND then asks for all the same details and more field by field and insists on giving you personality tests and a full horoscope. Those are not there to find good employees (or to weed out the old). They're just arse covering by middle management. And for that purpose they work.
So you can stand outside shouting that it's "not relevant" or you can apply elsewhere or you can jump through the hoops. No approach is right or wrong, they're just pragmatic decisions based on what you want.
Good companies don't ask about high school unless they are getting interns (and even then they usually ask about college)
Debian is solid. Ubuntu's layer on top is a bit ymmv.
Context: In 2019 I built a desktop (my personal workstation) and it was my first machine without a windows or Mac OS partition. That machine is still my personal daily driver (outside of work). Using it for ML/MLOps/misc engineering projects has taught me a ton about parts of how Linux works and is organized.
For a long time Debian refused to bundle closed source firmware with the installer but they've relented on that now.
The holdout I know of is Ubuntu have zfs in the kernel and Debian as a package. That seems to make no difference in practice.
With your logic we should never question anything or anyone because positing our own truth is irrelevant.
Someone asking me about my strengths in high school, which was decades ago, then that tells me they are looking for young people. (And from the link at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30735678 you can see they don't care about my grad school experience, which was much more formative to my career path.)
In the US, age discrimination for employment for people 40 years or older is illegal. As the author of the linked-to essay correctly points out, these questions comes across like trying to discriminate on the basis of age without outright saying it.
Which trespasses on a special form of government monopoly that it can enforce.