[fnl]

Here's another, even worse example:

> It turns out that people’s interview language of choice matched their most endorsed language on LinkedIn just under 50% of the time, so, you know, just slightly worse than flipping a coin.

A coin has 2 sides. How many programming languages are there, again?

[mulmen]

I read that as flipping a coin to predict if the most-endorsed language will be the language of choice in an interview. I make no claim to the statistical usefulness of such a statement.

[stingraycharles]

Yeah reading that made me realise the whole article is just spam.

[usgroup]

language of choice == linkedin endorsed lang -> {TRUE,FALSE}

Yet if there was no relationship between the two entities and there were N languages, one would expect the random probability of TRUE to be N/N^2 = 1/N.

Although, the writer doesn't seem to allege that he's comparing to random or anything like that.

[leeny]

Yeah, that's exactly how I meant it. But I agree it's confusing. Will remove the comparison right now.

[PeterisP]

And the variables are measuring different things - you'd expect the most endorsed language to mirror the language that you have the most experience in during your (possibly very long) career, and there's no reason to suppose that it should match your current language of choice (which quite likely is more modern than what you used 10 years ago) more than 50% of the time; no matter how (un)reliable endorsements are, this isn't a valid argument against them.

[huac]

And what's the distribution over the languages, in terms of 'preferred interview programming language'?

[leeny]

People overwhelmingly chose one language to interview in, so there wasn't much fo a distribution.

Unless you mean which languages are most popular?

[xapata]

> which languages are most popular?

Is there any other (reasonable) way to interpret that question?

[leeny]

Wasn't sure if you were asking that independently of endorsements.

Right now, the most heavily used languages on interviewing.io are Java, Python, JavaScript, and C++ (in that order).

Ruby, C#, and Go are in the middle.

At the bottom are Perl and PHP.