| >These people are not particularly good at interpreting statistics. Maybe that is a tad bit too harsh, but surely the use of "big difference" and of "significant" seems like not being justified by the actual data: >On average, successful interviews had final interview code that was on average 2045 characters long, whereas unsuccessful ones were, on average, 1760 characters long. That’s a big difference! This finding is statistically significant and probably not very surprising. An average of 1760 vs an average of 2045 indicates a general average-average of around 1900 lines, so that would be 1900+/- 7%, and anyway the difference in ranges is so little that anything could cause it. To have more or less 200 characters, merely calling variables a, b, c, etc. vs. FirstUserChoice, DefaultArrayIndexingField, you know what I mean, would be enough. Same goes for: >On average, successful candidates’ code ran successfully (didn’t result in errors) 64% of the time, whereas unsuccessful candidates’ attempts to compile code ran successfully 60% of the time, and this difference was indeed significant. As I see it 60% or 64% as an average are almost exactly the same number, and bear very little significance.
Maybe it is just me missing some sensibility ... |