[ubernostrum]

I will stand up for the "meaningless" statement.

The typical tech company interview measures things which have no relationship to someone's quality as a programmer or their effectiveness as a member of a dev team. Any success of such a process (success meaning hires someone who turns out to be competent and a good fit in the team) is the result of factors unrelated to the interview process, and probably has a significant component of chance. But it's treated as an effective arbiter of "qualified" versus "utterly and totally incompetent to work anywhere".

(I firmly believe that Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood have done more active harm to tech hiring than perhaps any two other people, by the way)

Here are slides from a talk I gave last year with a former co-worker about doing better tech interviews, which go into a bit more detail on the issue:

http://media.b-list.org/presentations/2017/pygotham/intervie...

And here's a longer-form piece which touches on interviewing problems as part of a larger issue in the industry:

https://www.b-list.org/weblog/2018/jan/08/degrees/

[dsacco]

I really don't think you can declare that any success of the process is due to chance or "other factors." That particular point is completely unsubstantiated. The process is inefficient, yes, but I really don't see any basis to call it meaningless except for personal dislike.

Even if the process is inefficient (many false negatives), if it yields a population with fewer false positives than the general population it is meaningful. This is an important distinction because many people seem to be unilaterally declaring these hiring practices to be useful due to dislike and anecdata. Of course they're not ideal and there is a lot of room for improvement, but there's no empirical reason for us to act as though the entire system is arbitrary just because we don't like it.

The primary question we should be looking at to inject some empiricism into this discussion is how many engineers end up being fired once hired, how long it takes to fill each technical role on average and how many candidates are turned down. There seens to be a false dichotomy at play, where people are only able to damn the process in its entirety, but it can still be bad and retain some signal. That shouldn't be a controversial point, it should be a minor preliminary observation.

[ubernostrum]

Again: the metrics being measured in typical tech interview processes are not the same metrics those same companies would use to measure success on the job. They are not useful predictors of success or failure on the job.

If the interview metrics are that disconnected, there is no meaning to the interview metrics.

[dsacco]

But even if the metrics are not the same, they can still be positively correlated with each other.