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by throwaway894345 1940 days ago
I agree with this (maybe not the "you sound bitter" part), but it still seems like there's something interesting going on. Why are Palestinian youngsters outperforming experienced engineers from elsewhere? Presumably we would expect Palestinian youngsters to perform on par with youngsters elsewhere unless they had access to additional relevant education or experiences, right? Maybe there's some selection process that filters out all of the under qualified Palestinian youngsters before they enter repl.it's pipeline?
2 comments
ilianam 1940 days ago
Hi all, jumping in here as the CEO and co-founder of Manara just to say that all the Palestinians that Repl.it interviewed came from Manara (I think). We have in place a very intense vetting system and a training program to teach these CS grads how to interview effectively. At Google our referral-to-hire rate is 67%. That probably explains this experience.

The talent in the Middle East & North Africa is very strong. We believe it's the next Eastern Europe, which used to export refugees and is now a hub of world-class talent.

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borski 1940 days ago
It's simply selection bias. Anyone can write up a resume and land an interview. Most great people have jobs and aren't interviewing, so the talent pool of 'active interviewees' is limited to those who either couldn't land jobs elsewhere or are new. It's rare, but sometimes someone takes time off.

The quality of folks coming from a very selective program in a different country, however, has selection bias in the opposite direction; nearly everyone from there is going to be better, on average, than the 'average' interviewer, because as mentioned elsewhere, roughly half (likely a bit more) of people we interviewed could not pass FizzBuzz, despite having stellar resumes.

We saw the same thing with MEET, which I helped teach a decade ago too.

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tcgv 1940 days ago
Exactly. I was reflecting on this topic as well and for lack of a better word I started calling it "code fluency" [1].

These kind of programs select developers with much higher code fluency, which is usually the result of a deeper dedication to coding, either in a previous work experience, in their free time or taking part in additional training.

[1] https://thomasvilhena.com/2021/01/code-fluency

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