[tokenadult]

From the original New York Times article that Quartz has linkspammed here: "On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart."

Long before this was reported in the New York Times, this was the finding of research in industrial and organizational psychology. A valid hiring procedure is a procedure that actually finds better workers than some different procedure, not a hiring procedure that some interviewer can make up a rationale for because it seems logical to the interviewer. We have been discussing home-brew trick interview questions here on Hacker News for more than a year now.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4879803

Brain-teaser or life-of-the-mind interview questions do nothing but stroke the ego of the interviewer, without doing anything to identify job applicants who will do a good job. The FAQ on company hiring procedures at the Hacker News discussion linked here provides many more details about this.

[tokenadult]

REPLY TO UPDATE SELF: Yes, the correct term was actually "blogspam," and I appreciate (and upvoted) the grandchild reply that pointed that out. I see that now the Hacker News curators have changed the link on the story submission from pointing to Quartz to pointing to the original New York Times article, which fits the Hacker News guidelines.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(I mention this because many comments in this thread will be very confusing to newcomers if it is not made clear that the thread used to point to Quartz but now points to the New York Times.)

[donohoe]

I find that a bit disingenuous on the part of the HN moderators.

I still maintain that the piece was original. It was based on (and expanded on) one of the eight points made within an NYT article.

To me "In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal" could not describe the same article as "Google admits those infamous brainteasers were completely useless for hiring".

Even the headlines indicate two separate directions.

Please read again and compare this (relevant passage on NYTimes will be Highlighted):

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...

to this:

http://qz.com/96206/google-admits-those-infamous-brainteaser...

Serious question - am I completely off the mark?

[gruseom]

Since your question is serious, here's one serious answer. The article is really two (or three, depending how you count them) pieces of blogspam spliced together with a linkbait title on top. So while it's true that it doesn't draw exclusively on the NYT piece, that doesn't make it original, because everything else is cribbed too. Isn't it?

[donohoe]

I appreciate you taking the time to answer.

First, lets be clear on what "blogspam" is:

  blogspam also has another meaning, namely the 
  post of a blogger who creates no-value-added posts
  to submit them to other sites.) It is done by
  posting (usually automatically) random comments
  or promoting commercial services to blogs, wikis,
  guestbooks, or other publicly accessible online
  discussion boards. Any web application that
  accepts and displays hyperlinks submitted by 
  visitors may be a target.

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_in_blogs

So, while that doesn't address you argument lets call a spade a spade. You may not like the post but that doesn't make it "blogspam".

(You could argue that terms evolve and thats fair enough.)

Second, the headline "Google admits those infamous brainteasers were completely useless for hiring" doesn't strike me as a typical "linkbait title".

Regardless - I don't think I'm going to be able to convince you - but I did want to understand better.

Maybe its ironic then that the NYTimes links to our post from here...

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/todays-scuttlebot-t...

I don't take that as some sort of indication that I'm right etc but definitely gave me pause.

[DanBC]

For what it's worth: There are much worse examples of blogspam posted to HN, so it's kind of frustrating to see this thread derailed.

I'm not making any comment on Quartz, because I haven't seen enough to form an opinion.

[donohoe]

  From the original New York Times article that Quartz has linkspammed

No, this is Linkspan:

  Link spam is defined as links between pages that are present for 
  reasons other than merit.[9] Link spam takes advantage of 
  link-based ranking algorithms, which gives websites higher 
  rankings the more other highly ranked websites link to it. 
  These techniques also aim at influencing other link-based 
  ranking techniques such as the HITS algorithm.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkspam#Link_spam

Lets be clear, there is link-spam and then there is writing an original piece based on information from elsewhere.

The NYT article is about 8 questions and answers from a HR person at Google.

The "puzzle" aspect is 1 of those 8 questions.

From that Quartz references that, links directly to the piece and then expands upon it and links out to other relevant and related information.

[jbapple]

I think you should have made it clear in this comment that you work for Quartz.

[donohoe]

I take it for granted so I forget - but I think its spelt out very very clearly in my profile so I don't have to put an * every time I comment.

[jbapple]

What percentage of readers of your comment do you think click through to your profile?

Of the comments you read, what percentage do you view the profile of the author of?

[donohoe]

I take your point. I click through to most people - but I do not think that is the norm.

[wahnfrieden]

I think he meant to use the term "blogspam", which colloquially refers to paraphrasing or copying other content.

[donohoe]

Fair enough. I still respectfully disagree.

In fact - the NYTimes links back to our article from here:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/todays-scuttlebot-t...

So I feel value has been added.

[renegadedev]

"On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart."

A similar equivalent in coding interviews would be "what does obscure function/feature do?"