[nitwit005]

> First off, these giant tech companies have enormous economic incentives to improve their interview processes as much as possible.

But we have examples where the companies themselves have admitted that their past interview practices turned out not to work: https://business.time.com/2012/10/23/no-brainer-brainteaser-...

> They also do a pretty rigorous assessment of the effectiveness of their interview process

Companies do review their hiring processes, but actual experiments and data seem fairly rare. It's harder than you think. What experiment would you run? Hire a group of people entirely randomly, and compare their performance reviews after 2 years?

[hn_throwaway_99]

> But we have examples where the companies themselves have admitted that their past interview practices turned out not to work: https://business.time.com/2012/10/23/no-brainer-brainteaser-...

That's pretty much exactly my point. In the 90s, wide-scale hiring for software engineers was a relatively new thing - many companies were just figuring it out. And so they did some shit pretty early on that didn't make sense. But for all the times I hear folks pulling out the "Why are manhole covers round?" and "How many cars are there in Manhattan?" examples, I haven't heard these types of brainteaser questions being used for nearly 2 decades.

I'm not arguing that the FAANGs have some perfect, unassailable interview process that can never be improved, but I am arguing that so often I hear grumbling discontent from people who don't like the interview process, but rarely do I see much examination around why those particular hiring processes appear to work fairly well for the likes of Google, Apple, etc.

[nitwit005]

Those puzzle questions weren't just used to hire software engineers. Hiring fads sweep corporate America, despite no evidence of effectiveness, and despite economic incentives to hire well.

Yes, they did move away from it, but that doesn't mean we aren't now in the grip of equally bad fads.

> but rarely do I see much examination around why those particular hiring processes appear to work fairly well for the likes of Google, Apple, etc.

You assume they work well, but you don't have any data to support that. That's sort of assumption is basically where these hiring fads come from.