How useful are interviews in general? I've been led to believe that an interview is a very poor indicator of future performance[0], and that an interview biases the hiring decision in typically negative ways.
My thought is the purpose of a job interview is to weed out people who are an obvious poor fit for the job temperamentally, and to verify that the interviewee has a working understanding of the relevant skills that they listed in their resume. Beyond that, actual job performance depends on a lot of factors that are very difficult to assess in an interview.
I think a lot of companies have deluded themselves into thinking they've designed some sort of unique interviewing system that can guarantee good job performance (instead of reducing the incidence of catastrophically bad performance), but honestly, job performance itself is very hard to measure in any objective way once you disregard the extremes.
Just because a misused tool is bad at doing the thing you're misusing it for doesn't mean that it doesn't have utility when used for its actual purpose.
You can just get on the phone with them. Talk shop for an hour. Tell them about problems your company is having. Ask them how they would solve them. An experienced engineer can determine a person's relative skill level this way.
Algorithm quizzes aren't the only way to reduce false positives. Can we say definitively that they are the best?
I agree with you - the best way to do the things I talked about is to spend time talking with the person to ensure that they actually understand and can reasonably communicate about the skills they claim to have.
There's probably a place for practical programming tests, too, but whiteboarding algorithms and such seems to be more of a fraternity hazing/secret handshake ritual than anything else. Good if the skill you need to hire for is "Read and memorized 'Cracking the Coding Interview'", not really indicative of anything else.
This is true. This is the advice I've been following: do your best, but never forget that it's basically random chance. Also consider a career change to a field without hilariously ridiculous interview practices.
I've recently started doing interviews for my company, and while there are definitely candidates that we have been on the fence about accepting that would probably have been a great fit, in the end, the false positive rate is more important to us than the false negative rate. Maybe we missed out on some great candidates but the criteria we used to evaluate them also allowed us to avoid a lot of very bad candidates. The perfect interview process doesn't exist, we have to make do with the fact that whatever the interview process is, we will miss out on great candidates and end up making an offer to candidates that will not work out. But indeed: for candidates, this means that you shouldn't take rejections to heart too much: you might have been a great fit for the role and a bad fit for the interview process. If you're consistently getting rejected for positions for which you believe you are qualified, maybe you need to get better at interviews, or maybe you're not as qualified as you may think.
> If you're consistently getting rejected for positions for which you believe you are qualified, maybe you need to get better at interviews, or maybe you're not as qualified as you may think.
This comment represents everything that is wrong with your technical interview process. Big yikes.
The lack of self-awareness displayed by that comment is kind of impressive. Especially the bit about being so keen on identifying "bad" candidates, not realizing that the entire point is that interviewers are actively bad at determining good vs bad candidates.
I think they’re great for analyzing communication skills if nothing else. Depends on the role, but for some positions that’s all or a big part of the job.
I think a lot of companies have deluded themselves into thinking they've designed some sort of unique interviewing system that can guarantee good job performance (instead of reducing the incidence of catastrophically bad performance), but honestly, job performance itself is very hard to measure in any objective way once you disregard the extremes.
Just because a misused tool is bad at doing the thing you're misusing it for doesn't mean that it doesn't have utility when used for its actual purpose.