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posted by mrpg on Monday December 31 2018, @09:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the arcane dept.

Microsoft drops brain teasers from employee interview process

The interview process for Silicon Valley developer jobs has always had a reputation of being an arcane trial by fire exercise designed to weed down thousands of applicants to just the selected few antisocial geniuses.

Microsoft has however been making an effort to improve their hiring process to make it more useful and inclusive, and in a blog post John Montgomery, partner director of program management at Microsoft, explained the changes Microsoft has made to the process, which has meant cutting out such as questions as how many golf balls will fit into a 747.

Rethinking how we interview in Microsoft's Developer Division.

Also at Business Insider.


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday December 31 2018, @03:20PM (2 children)

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Monday December 31 2018, @03:20PM (#780270) Journal

    As you noted, the legal issue is mostly about whether a test is discriminatory.

    Since the ruling you cited, we've had stuff like Jordan v. New London, where a person was denied admission to a police officer program because he scored TOO HIGH on an IQ test. IQ tests -- or tests that mimic them -- are widely used as screening for various jobs.

    (Digression: Just remember that when you read about all the recent cases of police officers beating the crap out of minorities, etc. Many police departments have traditionally discriminated against smart people -- who are not a legally protected class. Not that smart people can't be corrupt or do bad stuff -- certainly they can -- but it's probably a little more likely that those of lesser intelligence who already are applying for a job to get others to "respect my authoritay!" could turn into mindless thugs who beat up or kill those they don't like. Frankly, it's likely going to get to crisis levels in a few years: many PDs are reporting shortages now -- the dumb thugs have realized a blue uniform is no longer license to beat the crap out of black people, so it takes out most of the fun for them. And the smart people who previously were volunteering and being rejected are now looking at a career sullied by bad press and thinking, "No way do I want to be anywhere near this crap!" so they won't apply either. I know the attitude around here is that all cops are evil, but they are a necessity for protection of law-abiding citizens... And shortages are going to get much worse.)

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 31 2018, @04:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 31 2018, @04:27PM (#780297)

    Thanks, I can't believe that I forgot about that case.

    The testing material included the Wonderlic Personnel Test and Scholastic Level Exam (“WPT”), which purports to measure cognitive ability. An accompanying manual listed recommended scores for various professions and cautioned that because overqualified candidates may soon become bored with unchallenging work and quit
    [...] We require no supporting empirical evidence and will not strike down a classification as unconstitutional unless “‘the . . . facts on which the classification is apparently based could not reasonably be conceived to be true by the governmental decisionmaker.
    [...] The Court held that classifications need not be perfect, because "‘the problems of government are practical ones and may justify, if they do not require, rough accommodations - illogical, it may be, and unscientific.’"
    [...] Plaintiff presented some evidence that high scorers do not actually experience more job dissatisfaction, but that evidence does not create a factual issue, because it matters not whether the city’s decision was correct so long as it was rational.

    http://www.aele.org/apa/jordan-newlondon.html [aele.org]
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_London,_Connecticut#Jordan_v._New_London [wikipedia.org]

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Arik on Monday December 31 2018, @11:16PM

    by Arik (4543) on Monday December 31 2018, @11:16PM (#780427) Journal
    "IQ tests -- or tests that mimic them"

    Some of these are certainly better than others, but at a fundamental level they're all the same exact thing.

    You take 100 questions and make a questionnaire, you score the tests and rank them from best to worst, and assign scores based on that. The people who score well are smarter than the ones who do poorly. Of course, you can slant the test towards certain types of intelligence by choosing certain questions, you can add more questions to improve the reliability of the test, there are lots of fine points that help to sharpen the resolution and widen the lense, but as long as they're all questions with definite right and wrong answers you've got the bulk of the thing down.

    "Many police departments have traditionally discriminated against smart people"

    I'm really not sure how /traditional/ this is. I'm aware of the case - I've pointed to it here before - but it's fairly recent. I have friends and family that were in law enforcement earlier than that and never heard of such a thing though. I think traditionally they tried to recruit smart people - but with relatively little success as most smart people opt for less dangerous jobs that pay better and scratch some sort of intellectual itch. I think the part about actively screening out applicants for being too smart is a newish thing, and as far as I understand it came from that source of so much evil in our world: /Human Resources./  You see, someone thinks that more intelligent police officers are more likely to change careers down the road than dumb ones. I'm not personally aware of any empirical proof of this, but it wouldn't surprise me a bit if it's true. If it is true, then excluding them does reduce the number of recruits that go through academy (at significant public expense) but leave the force relatively quickly. To that point it makes sense - the problem is that the obvious predictable side effect is more than enough to offset the savings.

    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?