The blog post kindly shared here reports on a startup's experiments with offering a new kind of hiring screening service. "We launched Triplebyte one month ago, with the goal of improving the way programmers are hired. . . . Well, a little over a month has now passed. In the last 30 days, we've done 300 interviews. We've started to put our ideas into practice, to see what works and what doesn't, and to iterate on our process." They are currently validating what they are doing on the first steps just against what happens at the later steps in their process: "For now, we're evaluating all of our experiments against our final round interview decisions. This does create some danger of circular reasoning (perhaps we're just carefully describing our own biases)."
I agree with the blog post author that current hiring processes mostly show that "too many companies are content to do what they've always done." And the idea of a standardized, automated quiz of programming knowledge sounds interesting. But what has to happen next is to an actual validation study and find out if programmers hired by this process do better as programmers in actual workplaces than programmers hired by some other process.
Regular readers of HN are aware that I have a FAQ post about this topic of company hiring procedures.[1] Company hiring procedures are the research focus of industrial and organizational psychologists, who have almost a century of research to look back on with long-term, large n studies to provide data on what works and what doesn't work for hiring capable workers. It's a shame that most company human resource departments ignore basically all of that research.
I agree with the blog post author that current hiring processes mostly show that "too many companies are content to do what they've always done." And the idea of a standardized, automated quiz of programming knowledge sounds interesting. But what has to happen next is to an actual validation study and find out if programmers hired by this process do better as programmers in actual workplaces than programmers hired by some other process.
Regular readers of HN are aware that I have a FAQ post about this topic of company hiring procedures.[1] Company hiring procedures are the research focus of industrial and organizational psychologists, who have almost a century of research to look back on with long-term, large n studies to provide data on what works and what doesn't work for hiring capable workers. It's a shame that most company human resource departments ignore basically all of that research.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543