Software Raises Bar for Hiring

I know it so well that the last person I recommended (for the recruitment bounty) breezed through after I tipped her off on the coding questions. I could get through the whole process easily. I doubt I'm the only person.

What kind of people set questions in interviews without knowing what answer they're hoping for? How do they know if the candidate is any good if they don't know the answer themselves? That sounds.... well, it sounds insane.

The irony is that software engineers are so much rarer than everyone else in the market we can easily be hand screened thus bypassing the very software we created. Finding software engineers is really hard because there are so few so either you don't get a lot of people applying, which makes it easy to screen by hand, or you set the bar very low to get people in the door. Then you go through 6 months to find the right person.

If you aren't a software person its much much harder to find a job because there are so many other people looking for jobs. You have to compete much harder, downward wage pressure, etc. Hence the volume increasingly demands automated solutions that make it even harder to get past the screeners.

I happen to agree with this article that we do a poor job of specifying the skills that are absolutely mandatory vs. what's nice to have. If we back off on rigid skill set we can find great people than can grow into a job.

I don't get your beef.

The phone interviews are there to screen the 80% of the applicants who don't merit the time of my team to interview them. The puzzles are there to watch people think on their feet. The detailed questions are to see if you're looking at someone superficial or someone with deep knowledge of the subject matter. The programming challenges are to see if the applicant wants the job badly enough to spend a couple of hours working on a programming problem that can then be used as a showcase for how they write some software.

Earlier in my career, I didn't have all those interview techniques in place. When I started, hiring people was a complete crap shoot and I ended up with some total lemons. Like the warning labels on products you buy, each interview technique I added to the process was the result of a lame hire that in hindsight, I could have avoided had I used that technique.

The last job I had to interview for used all the techniques above. I found the interview process to be thorough and challenging. I appreciated the rigor of the interview process since it meant that the people hiring really gave a shit about the quality of the people joining their small team. I got the job. In point of fact, if they hadn't had a thorough interview process, I probably would have passed on the job offer since that would have been an indication to me that they were naive and didn't have their crap together.

Do you want to send me your $100 via Paypal?

I'll take your bet, if you are still inclined to give away money.

It's easier to bullshit when interviewing for non-technical jobs. Technical jobs have mostly-objective tests you can give to candidates where they have to program stuff, solve equations, etc. Non-technical jobs have squishy mostly-subjective tests that aren't very reliable at gauging anything.

I don't quite know how we as a culture do it, but we need to wean ourselves off of 'employer-provided benefits'. Getting back to a more consumer-driven market vs large employer group-driven market will make our job/work situations easier for generations to come.

I am still convinced the problem is on the employee side...

The other half of the problem is that our economy creates very few sources of income for the supposed "creative class", the newest Class of the New. If we say that our economy has evolved beyond the need for factory workers and we now need artists, writers, and hackers, we need to actually work on creating jobs for artists, writers and hackers (as distinct from mediocre programmers).

I would love it if companies hired people like colleges select students.

I'm very good at interviews, but I still hate doing them. If would love it if I could write an essay and send them my SAT scores without going through that awful process.

It would probably also weed out people who are just inordinately good at interviews.

I don't overtly try to exaggerate, but a few times I've been offered a job where I thought in the back of the mind that I might not really be qualified. To wit, I thought my interview skills, not my coding skills got me the offer.

It's interesting how we still run to the government to solve our own past mistakes.

This gap may diminish if you're looking at a pool of people who passed some previous threshold, eg they have a degree in math. But even then, some of the gap remains, due to the shape of normal distributions. Think of the heights of men and women, and how even if you looked only at people six feet and taller, the proportion of women in that pool who just barely meet the threshold of 6' would be much higher than the similar group of men; despite the cutoff, the average height of the women would still be less than the average height of the men, within that group. Draw overlapping bell curves to see this visually, and analyze the areas under the graph of each distribution, to the right of a given cutoff point.

We do have a law against invidious racial discrimination. The current implementation of the law states that in practice, if some selection mechanism has a passing rate for one minority that is less than 80% of that whites, that is evidence of discrimination in the absence of validation of that mechanism. This is known as the four fifths rule. A test in which 10% of whites and 7% of blacks passed would fall afoul of this law. Say you set a 115 IQ threshold. That is +1 S.D. from the white mean roughly, and +2 S.D. from the black mean, meaning 16% of whites and 2.3% of blacks would pass, if drawing from the general population. That wouldn't even pass a 'One fifth rule,' let alone a four fifths one.

And validation is no sure thing either - police and fire departments have had these tests validated and still have the results thrown out regularly, due to disparate racial impact, i.e. relatively few blacks and Hispanics (average IQ: ~90) passing the test.

On a related note, explicit racial and gender quotas are more efficient than the race- sex- and IQ-blind, approach in use today. A quota would mandate in effect different thresholds for different groups, but it would allow one at least to use this selection mechanism. Within given groups, one would obtain more efficient outcomes. The problem with quotas is that they make racial preferences explicit, while abandoning such selection methods entirely is only an implicit, de facto racial preference, a rather subtle and hidden one at that.

It's weird, as the actual policy was "requiring a high school education or passing of a standardized general intelligence test".

Surely there's a lot of African Americans with a high IQ, but no degree. Wouldn't this case mean that requiring a certain level of education is worse than requiring a high IQ?

If critical thinking was the skill being sought, rote memorization seems like it shouldn't have any emphasis at all. You can always look up data structures, or whatever, but that is often not good enough.

In general, people aren't qualified to do their jobs. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be doing them, or be hired to do them. It means the qualification system is broken.

I mentioned it in another comment already, but this problem is what I'm tackling with They Meet You (http://theymeetyou.com). At a minimum, I'll be using it where I work, but check it out if you want.

How it works is really simple: You can send a message to anyone that proves they work for a company, if you interest them then they can share their contact information with you.