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0 pointsgxs8y ago0 comments

That's an interesting approach, but I wonder if you're screening for people who can speak and code vs just people who can code.

I'm a product manager and I suspect I would do pretty well in this type of interview unless the snippet is especially complicated and/or esoteric.

In that case you might be screening for people who can talk but not actually code or people who can code but might not be the best communicator.

Interestingly enough, if youre optimizing for specific outcomes, you may not need to screen out the latter.

Engineers who struggle to communicate but are productive can be extremely successful given the right environment - including having someone on the team who knows who to work with various personalities and is technical enough.

Just some rambling, but it's worth pointing out given the scarcity of engineering talent. Not everyone is going to be Paul Bucheit, ace product manager and engineer all wrapped into one.

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TheCowboy8y ago

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, but it's a valid comment. Even if someone disagrees, you clearly communicated a point that adds to the discussion.

Many are taking the article at face value, and are assuming there are no methodological flaws and that this study has been repeated enough times to invalidate any comments to contrary. It also didn't turn this topic into a "case closed" matter, as it's too big of an unsolved problem for that. They also just analyzed interviews, but did they monitor job performance after the interviews and for how long?

Additionally, differentiating between being a "good communicator" and a "good interviewee" is frequently overlooked. People too frequently rationalize their own interview approach as not the problem. Most candidates accept that they could improve and perform better at interviews, but a lot of people conducting the interviews don't think their process could do better.

lj38y ago

> In that case you might be screening for people who can talk but not actually code or people who can code but might not be the best communicator.

From TFA and literally the thing that started this whole thread:

> Furthermore, no matter what, poor technical ability seems highly correlated with poor communication ability – regardless of language, it’s relatively rare for candidates to perform well technically but not effectively communicate what they’re doing (or vice versa).

meheleventyone8y ago

Right but that would also be true and exactly what you'd expect if interviewer mainly judged technical competency on ability to communicate. Since the form is self reported it's impossible to separate out whether the correlation is causal (poor communicators are poor technically) or due to interviewer bias (poor communicators have a harder time convincing interviewers of their technical chops) or even other factors (being flustered hurts both a candidates communication and technical skills).

This is after all an advertorial piece of data spelunking not a study.

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