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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • The article I posted pointed out that they’re trying to not waste the candidate’s time, as well. They used to do 12 fucking rounds of interviews—and because it’s Google, people tolerated that crap. One of my best friends is an old-school Googler that got in through that gauntlet.

    Keep that in mind when you claim it’s an employer’s power play—in this case, it’s really not. More than four interviews, twelve, sure I can believe that. You should read about what some of the elite tier government special ops groups go through.

    At this point we’re quibbling over a delta of one interview—I think we’re probably pretty close, or close enough to say “agree to disagree on the rest.”

    Cheers.



  • Google has done way more research on this topic than both you and I collectively and they settled in on 4 interviews being the sweet spot to get enough signal to be 86% confident, while not wasting any more of anyone’s time than needed chasing after single-point confidence improvements. In my experience, I agree with this. I’ve been through 6-round and 3-round (both to offer). Even as a candidate I guess I feel like i wanted that fourth round. Kinda hard to tell what a company culture is from just three meets. And after six rounds I was just freaking exhausted and didn’t really have a high opinion of that company-they couldn’t seem to figure out a clear mission/vision for their product and I thought their overly complicated and drawn-out interview process was a reflection of that.

    Google goes into more depth as to why the three-tech + 1 behavioral/cultural model works for them. They call it a work-sample test.

    The best predictor of how someone will perform in a job is a work sample test (29 percent). This entails giving candidates a sample piece of work, similar to that which they would do in the job, and assessing their performance at it.

    Both articles linked are well worth the time to read. Hiring is a messy and inconvenient process for both companies and employees.


  • I’d say it actually goes further. We have plenty of evidence leading to the realization of fact that simply measuring a phenomenon changes the phenomenon. From a quantum mechanics perspective we say things like “measuring the phenomenon collapses its wave function to a single state.”

    When a quantum system is measured, its wave function, which represents a superposition of multiple potential outcomes, collapses to a single definite state corresponding to the result of the measurement.

    All macroscopic phenomena comprise nanoscopic quantum phenomena.

    Super fucking weird to think about. The classic undergrad physics experiment is the double-slit experiment— particles like electrons create an interference pattern when unobserved, acting like waves and passing through both slits at once. However, when we measure which slit a particle goes through, this wave-like behavior disappears, and the particle behaves as if it went through only one slit. This shows that measurement collapses the particle’s wave function from multiple possibilities into a single, definite state.

    Similarly, despite being depicted as such in early exposures to chemistry, electrons don’t “orbit” the nucleus like planets do their stars—rather they have regions around the nucleus in which they are more probably found. These misleadingly named “orbitals” vary in shape.

    Finally, we have the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle; which states that we can measure either a particle’s speed (kinetic energy) or its location, but not both, because the act of measuring (observing) that particle irrevocably changes it.

    Here’s a macroscopic example of how measuring/observing things changes the thing. When you measure the temperature of an object using a thermometer, the object is either transmitting or receiving thermal energy to/from the thermometer, because the thermometer needs to be in contact and thermal equilibrium with the object. The object’s total energy level has now changed—even if it’s a trivial change it’s also non-zero. Measuring/observing the object in this way has changed it.

    omg it goes deeper. I love physics. Classical mechanics models work well when we want to explain and predict macroscopic and limited chain-of-events phenomena. We can predict with high confidence that a 2000 kg car traveling at 100 km/h will impulse this much force and energy to a stationary object when they collide, assuming a perfectly inelastic collision, spherical cows, etc. We can’t model with any confidence with any classical model how the displaced air molecules from this collision in Nuremberg, Germany will create tornadoes in six months in Wichita, Kansas, USA. That’s the butterfly effect.

    Ultimately, this interplay between measurement and outcome highlights a fundamental truth in both quantum mechanics and chaos theory: the universe is inherently unpredictable at every scale. Just as the behavior of subatomic particles is influenced by the act of observation, the butterfly effect shows us that small changes can lead to significant consequences in complex systems. This intertwining of uncertainty and complexity underscores the limitations of our predictive models, whether they pertain to the quantum realm or the macroscopic world.



  • model_tar_gz@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzHmm...
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    1 month ago

    I don’t know dude. I took multivariable calculus, ODEs, linear algebra, modern physics; and a numerical methods for engineers class— all in the same semester. I was a fucking mess and swimming in integrals and derivatives and matrices and systems of equations (both differential and ordinary algebraic) 177% of the time. I honestly don’t remember anything of that five months of my life. 11/10 would not recommend.

    I don’t know that any one book was a savior. I was reading from like three books per topic all at once to try to make heads and tails of anything and spending every minute I could in my prof’s and TA’s office hours.

    Those two books were some of the only ones I kept, and just donated everything else. Maybe it’s just nostalgia.






  • I’ve rejected someone on their 4th round before—1st round with me. That candidate had managed to convince the recruiter that they had the chops for a staff engineer (>$200k/yr!) and passed two coding rounds before mine, testing knowledge of relevant techs on our stack—at this level of role, you have to know this coming in; table stakes.

    I was giving the systems design round. Asked them to design something that was on their resume—they couldn’t. They’d grossly misrepresented their role/involvement in that project and since they were interviewing for a staff level role, high-level design is going to be a big part of it and will impact the product and development team in significant ways. No doubt they’d been involved in implementing, and can code—but it was very clear that they didn’t understand the design decisions that were made and I had no confidence that they would contribute positively in our team.

    Sucks for them to be rejected, but one criteria we look for is someone who will be honest when they don’t know—and we do push to find the frontiers of their knowledge. We even instruct them to just say it when they don’t know and we can problem-solve together. But a lot of people have too much ego to accept that, but we don’t have time for people like that on the team either.

    Look, I get what you’re saying and clearly I’ve been on the wrong end of it too, but if we make a bad hiring decision, it costs not just the candidate their job but also the team and company they work on can get into a bad place too. What would you do in that situation? Just hire them anyway and risk the livelihood of everyone else on the team? That’s a non-starter; try to see a bigger picture.