Fascinating use of "Big Data" to cut through the bullshit. Wonder if it will change anything. I suspect the "tough" interview plays well into a company's PR.
from: "The trick Max Levchin used to hire the best engineers at PayPal"
Levchin realized the best engineers wanted to be challenged both in their jobs and in the interview process. “We cultivated a very public culture of being incredibly hard to get in. Even though it was actually very hard to get good people to even interview, we made a point of broadcasting that it's incredibly hard to even so much as get into the door at PayPal. You have to be IQ of 190 to begin with, and then you have to be an amazing coder, and then five other requirements. The really, really smart people looked at it and said, "That's a challenge. I'm going to go interview there just to prove to these suckers that I'm better." Of course, by end of the conversation, I'm like, "Maybe you want to come get a job here because you're pretty amazing.”
http://firstround.com/article/the-trick-max-levchin-used-to-...
(which might not be a problem)
Btw I noticed you like C# (from your profile) so I automatically like you haha :)
I wonder whether the downvote is because of the C# line.
What would stop you from applying at a company with a hiring PR strategy as described by Levchin? They aren't looking for confidence in all fields of life, just the technical job related part...
And no, parceling out work for you to go and excel at on your own is likely not a good use of your skill.
Think of it this way: someone who is concerned with not doing the wrong thing is going to be more sure that what they do come up with is the right thing, that they aren't reinventing the wheel badly.
Well that, or: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect
[0]: https://fbcdn-sphotos-b-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/p480x...
IQ is actually normally distributed by definition. Actual intelligence, if such a thing exists, may not be. The reason for Terman's finding is that there aren't any IQ tests that are valid for people with extremely high IQ.
In my physics courses, my professors were always very careful to stress that "If the theory says one thing and the data says another, it's the theory that needs to change." (Well, unless it's a student lab report that measures the speed of light as different from the commonly accepted value. ;-))
The simple truth is large companies end up with a few geniuses randomly but there rare enough to not be worth optimizing for. What companies really want are people willing to work ridiculously hard for little reason and that's what 'hard' interviews are optimized for. O your willing to put up with hours of BS on the off chance we will higher you, great let's just see how you like 60h+ weeks.
Humans are hive minded despite our best attempts to assert otherwise. A modern computer or a modern bridge can't be built from scratch by one person. A genius can certainly help raise the bar, but a cohesive unit capable of achieving the end result is going to be a better optimization strategy.
Some additional Googling seems to have found some other independent studies:
http://hiqnews.megafoundation.org/John_Scoville_Paper.htm
http://www.abelard.org/burt/burt-ie.asp
I'm curious what sort of population your work draws from. The results above showed that IQ follows a normal distribution until about 140; other papers I've read indicate that IQ correlates with life outcomes until an IQ of about 140, and then appears completely uncorrelated. If you're studying workplace performance, I wouldn't be surprised if a good fraction of high-IQ people simply aren't in the workplace. (See eg. Christopher Langan.)
Cites? The papers I've read, from the Terman study and the SMPY kids, don't show that.
With a bit of Googling, I've found some other support for this, including the Terman study:
http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/grady/emptypromise.html
"Our conclusion is that for subjects brought up under present-day educational regimes, excess in IQ above 140 or 150 adds little to one's achievement in the early adult years." - Louis Terman, 39th Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education Part I, pp. 83-84
Eh. That simply sounds like the correlation weakens a bit, but is far from the claims people make like 'IQ is irrelevant'.
> "Our conclusion is that for subjects brought up under present-day educational regimes, excess in IQ above 140 or 150 adds little to one's achievement in the early adult years." - Louis Terman, 39th Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education Part I, pp. 83-84
Terman may have thought so, but with the full dataset this is clearly not so. Check out http://www.iza.org/conference_files/CoNoCoSk2011/gensowski_m... 'The Effects of Education, Personality, and IQ on Earnings of High-Ability Men', Gensowski et al 2011; IQ never stops mattering, even if personality factors start to matter more.
(Always funny how people can look at a study which goes something like 'X correlates .4 and Y correlates .3, but in the top 1% by X, the correlations are .3 and .4 respectively' and go 'X doesn't matter!' Says something about what they want to believe about X, I think.)
PS: Often the limit is as low as 135.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5915459
Yes, you can define a concept as a normal distribution centered at 100 with a standard deviation of 15. But if you claim that this concept can be measured with IQ tests, and then the observed distribution of IQ scores doesn't match the predicted curve - it's the curve that's wrong, not the tests.
The studies that the "fat tail" results were from all used the Stanford Binet L-M test, which has a ceiling of around 230.
PS: There is no way they had enough data to support an IQ rang up to 230. Do you bave any idea how many people you need to sample to have 50 people with an IQ between 205 and 220.
Seems like it would fit into a normal database. Or maybe even an unwieldy Excel spreadsheet.
"sometimes I think Big Data is just Excel on 128GB of RAM"
Difficulty in "big data" should be about its horizontal breadth (covering many aspects of a system) rather than its vertical depth (covering one aspect of a system in great resolution).
And "Small Big Data" is probably data as well.
It really doesn't look like something big.
So 1 million CVs per year on which to do some sort of evaluations, and 200k individual assessments per year. Over the past five years that roughly 6 million data points.
Since there's no hard-and-fast rule on this, that's why I called it small Big Data.
Big data is a million times 100 million rows.
[citation needed]
This whole thread is pointless. There is no definition of Big data.
We get it, big data it's not really "big" unless you talk giga(tera?)bytes.
Do not take upon yourself to educate any single person that misuses the term. It's not worth it. :)
Most of the people here do, so these comments are really preaching in the wrong place...
Its "not" big data in the sense that it needs a cluster to process but it is a pretty large sample set of the current population of engineers who might want to work there.
I realize that reporters like to throw buzzwords into anything to cater to the "simpler" readers. But come one, this is outright silly.
But, more recently, in conversations with non-programmers, I see that 'big data' to them, means 'broad data' - it means trying to track everything possible and make sense of it. The average business user is really excited to be able to cross-relate disparate types of data - in an effort to make things better. 'Big data' enables the breaking down silos and enabling of cross references. It's about making empirical decisions based on data rather than opinion or intuition. That's really good, in my opinion.
So, 'big data' in that way is more amorphous than just the size of the data. With services and networks, the question becomes where does the data begin and end? Big data is potentially everything.
That's how language has always worked. There are people who are still uptight by the current "misuse" of words like "awesome" and "hopeful", but those of us who grew up with different meanings in common usage mostly just shrug.
For technical terms, usually I can live with words having domain-specific meaning that differs from common usage, but "theory" is one I still can't get over. It causes too much miscommunication.
eBay has a 9 petabyte DW that cuts across all of the types of data on their whole site: listings, bids, feedback, categories, clicks, etc.
Sometimes big data is actually big data, both in terms of raw size as well as complexity.
http://gigaom.com/2013/03/27/why-apple-ebay-and-walmart-have...
"Monopoly" is a perfect example of a brain teaser and anyone using that would be treated pretty harshly by the committee that reviews interview feedback. Estimate questions are not: there's no expectation of a "right answer" and the important fact is the working.
Some programming questions border on brain teasers to non programmers but that doesn't matter because you are asking programmers and again, it's the working that matters.
Finally different roles get different types of interviews. I worked in PM and there were analytical (these questions), product (design a better x) and technical (basic engineering interviews). The behavioral type was not one I encountered in PM or eng but maybe used elsewhere.
One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation
This chimes with my understanding and experience that Google only really use test scores and GPA's right now as a filter to manage the vast number of internship/entry-level applicants they get.
This is almost exactly the same effect as the fact that SATs do not predict college GPA. SAT scores are used as one of the major factors for admission to colleges; having separated the students into cohorts based (partially) on SAT, it is completely expected that SAT scores have minimal correlation with grades assigned within each cohort.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/03/technology/03google.html?e...
Which there have already been a few HN discussions about:
https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&hl=en&ei=ZfzCUYa...
huge fixed banner at the top of the page, and a fixed sidebar.
We get feedback specifically calling this out as good and relatively distraction-free (hence your comment struck me as odd)
Also - the width of the page dedicated to text/images is the same as the NYT mobile site (600px aprox)
I found these page elements very annoying, and I suspect those who liked it have a different use pattern.
It has a search field I will never use. It has social media buttons I will never use (because if I wanted to share this I would just copy/paste the URL). It has a "more" button that I will never use also.
The nav bar is fine at the very top of your page, making it float and scroll with me is just a waste of space.
Floating UI elements should be reserved for critical functionality that's core to the site. Facebook gets a pass because the things on the floating nav bar are actually important. If you really must float it, consider floating to the side - most of us on modern laptops have an abundance of horizontal space but not a great deal of vertical space.
Some more feedback:
- The organization of content is confusing. Just scrolling casually I cannot immediately tell where one post ends and the next begins. The large images aren't a good indicator, since some of them appear to be ads. I shouldn't have to read the tail sentence of something just to determine if I'm looking at the end of a post or not.
- There is a mismatch of expectations. When I go to a link that clearly refers to a single piece of content, I do not expect to keep scrolling and go right into a completely different piece of content.
- I find the photos oversized for their purpose. In this particular piece you have generic-stock-photo-of-Google-employees, which is only superficially related to the topic at hand. It doesn't have business being this huge. It's distracting and keeps me from the actual content I'm here for. Note in the original NYT link the image is also only tangentially related, but it does not overwhelm the text.
Social buttons are doubly unnecessary in the floating toolbar since you already find social buttons at the end of the article.
It shows several stories at once, not just the google brainteasers stories.
2. In general, people would rather read the real article instead of a summary of the article. When someone submits a summary of an article to a site like HN or reddit, it is usually flagged as blog-spam because we'd rather read/support the original content than a summary with questionable value.
3. For long form articles, nothing beats reading the print-preview page to get rid of all the sidebars, comments, ads. Look at the print preview page: it is not possible to get less distraction free than that. Any other format has more distractions.
Even aside from that, the New York Times has some of the best information architecture in the business. These are the guys who did NYTProf. Their web team is awesome.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...
4. Some visual issues I had with quartz:
4.1: No left/right whitespace around images.
4.2: I see a vertical scroll bar in the middle of my screen on Firefox.
4.3 The black header bar which is fixed and stays on the screen all the time even though it conveys no useful information to me.
4.4: A bunch of text blurbs on the left side of the screen that convey no useful information to me.
You say you're trying to be as distraction free as possible, but that's not actually true because it isn't possible to have your business model and be as distraction free as possible. The print preview page is as distraction free as possible.
1. ... It shows several stories at once, not just the google brainteasers stories.
2. In general, people would rather read the real article
instead of a summary of the article.
3. For long form articles, nothing beats reading the print-preview page...
Even aside from that, the New York Times has some of the best
information architecture in the business. These are the guys
who did NYTProf. Their web team is awesome.
4. Some visual issues I had with quartz:
4.1: No left/right whitespace around images.
4.2: I see a vertical scroll bar in the middle of my screen on Firefox.
4.3 The black header bar which is fixed and stays on the screen
all the time even though it conveys no useful information to me.
However we used to have it disappear altogether and people complained about that too....
4.4: A bunch of text blurbs on the left side of the screen
that convey no useful information to me.
You say you're trying to be as distraction free as possible,
but that's not actually true because it isn't possible to
have your business model and be as distraction free as possible.
The print preview page is as distraction free as possible.
Also - take a look at the ads... do we have them all over the place? Nope - we have them at the end of an Article - not in-between, not embedded, not inline. Thats important.
We are not perfect, but we aspire to continuously improve. Focus is on the user and the reading experience but with recognition that we have to pay the bills for 20 or so editors and journalists across five (maybe more?) countries. (I'm not counting devs, sales, hr etc in that)
I'm going to try to be a little bit more helpful. At first I didn't really know why I felt a bit uncomfortable on the page, but I think it comes from a feeling a bit lost. My attempts to try to understand why:
1. The pictures don't have any borders, so at first I think a part of the picture is hidden outside the window. I widen the window to see the whole picture, but instead of revealing any missing part the picture just gets bigger.
2. If I continue increase the size of the window until the picture stops scaling, I eventually see the grey area to the right, which give me the feeling of locking behind the coulisses at a theater. I shouldn't be there and see that. Contributing to that might be the lack of shadow on the right side, which makes that border flat compared to the left side.
3. I scroll down to gauge the length of the article before I start reading, and it just continue to scroll and I realize after a while that I'm in some other article and I have scrolled through a whole bunch of them. The boundaries between the articles are very weak compared with the pictures and in particular the thick black fields with the captions.
1 - Viewing it in Android Chrome just doesn't work. See this comment and its responses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5907648
2 - On some pages (with full-screen window), some or all of the thumb of the scroll bar is hidden on my browser under the black bar.
3 - As I drag the scrollbar down the size of the page jumps so my mouse pointer is no longer on the thumb.
4 - Sometimes I use the space bar to scroll because my hands are on the keyboard, not on the mouse. It doesn't work unless I click first.
5 - I often tile windows on my machine. This window is exactly width of the left-hand half of my screen (2011 MBP). Because of the responsive design I get a ToC when I visit the home page, which is annoying. It feels like the developers said "all users will have maximised windows".
Other frustrations I've had in the past but can't remember now, perhaps it was changed since last time I tried to use it on the desktop. I just get the feeling that (and Quartz isn't alone in this) the developers tried to re-implement functionality and didn't do it well enough to be worth it.
Regarding AdBlock - our site looks the same with it on as it does with it off.
Medium.com seem to be doing everything right.
On that article, I was completely unable to bring the location/page-controls back into view -- I was stuck on that page, trying to figure out how to escape -- until I clicked a link - then the controls showed up while it was loading the new content.
Screenshot: http://imgur.com/fFqt2ud
Maybe I'm a bit irrational about this, I know scrolling isn't hard, but I came to read your text, dammit.
Edit:
Also, seriously... HUGE thanks for asking!
Edit 2:
Scrolling down I'm noticing that your image height is actually bigger than the height of the viewport (minus the height of your top bar). Even if you disagree with the idea that the image shouldn't push the text below the fold, I hope you agree that the image should at least fit my viewport.
Editors choose "Featured Images" and we really want to allow for the big expressive photos.
Its hard to constrain them and maintain a sane aspect ratio. I'm not disagreeing with you - I don't have a good answer.
These definitely work really well on larger monitors - however laptops, older computers its not the ideal.
Will need to think about this more.
Edit: I think the reason it bugs me is that text is the primary value your site provides. The image is ambiance. Ambiance that blocks me from the value I seek goes from tasteful to gaudy real fast. I get the desire to let editors be expressive, but if you're in a situation where you're forced to prioritize, always prioritize the thing that brought the visitor to your site in the first place. Otherwise you might not have need for the editor at all.
It's a waste of space and it makes it much much harder for me to read on my laptop. Vertical space is way too valuable to throw away like that.
- Scrolling down into the next article and having the article list as a sidebar is a neat way to encourage exploration. It makes the site a bit more "sticky".
- I like that ads are unobtrusive and placed at the end of the articles. And unlike nytimes.com, there's no paywall.
- I find the site's overall design crisp and relatively uncluttered compared to most news sites.
I say cruft because I'm reading on mobile. I've got a Galaxy Note 2, and I'm using Chrome. It's hardly a slouch of a machine.
First, after clicking the link, I have to watch your spinner for a ~5 seconds. I'm on 65Mbps ADSL - just how much content are you sending me?
Second, the sheer weight of the JavaScript slows everything down. My browser is perfectly capable of scrolling through a page - yet because you've overloaded that, the scrolling is slow, jumpy, and the text renders poorly.
Thirdly, the Note has a huge screen, so I don't mind your static header. If I had a small screen it would piss me off.
Finally, when I switch from Portrait to Landscape, your page jumps all over the place.
Now, compare that to the Mobile NYT page. Yours looks more beautiful, but the NYT is quicker, easier to read, and doesn't get in my way.
You have great content - and an interesting product - but it needs to go on a diet and be user tested on a wider range of devices. I dread to think how it performs on low end phones.
T
After all, they're just changing the mechanism, not lowering the standard.
Then again, they also have some of the best Engineers. But I don't think that's a testament to a great hiring process, as that could be the result of great marketing. The "we allow you the freedom to actually do stuff and to work with the best" type marketing. From what I read/saw, the great Engineers didn't seem that happy, so maybe those marketing claims aren't really true, but perhaps things have changed since then.
Then again, are there vanilla engineers who would prep in this manner? Just the simple fact that someone preps at all puts them above the 'can't complete fizzbuzz person' ~100% of the time.
And if you're eliminating the former kind of hard without increasing the latter, then your interviews should get easier. Heck, for people in the latter group it will get easier even if you decrease the former and increase the latter, to a point.
Just because you're not lowering standards doesn't mean your interviews aren't getting easier.
Which is also a thing with exams now I think about it - just because your exam's hard doesn't mean it's worthwhile.