lbatx

This sort of implies the street criminals become cyber criminals, which seems to not be a matching skill set. Call me skeptical of the study I admittedly haven't read.

Ah, thanks. As in Expired (date). Where date is every day from the day it expires until forever. Not Expired on date, but currently expired. Makes sense now.

Hmm, in that case, it's not really Google's fault. They are following the law (maybe not in every single case, but if the protections in the US are more loose, then they can/will do things here they wouldn't do somewhere with stronger employee protection).

So then do you believe that Google acts differently in other countries, and only (allegedly) conducts this abuse in the US?

Note: genuinely curious as to your viewpoint. Not sure what my own opinion is here yet...

Clicked on your link just to get on the list (or move up, I suppose). ;-)

There seems to be a weird bug on the Google Patents site. I've noticed that the expiration date of a patent is always the day I visit the site, even for patents I know expired a while ago. This may be something like that.

And how do people decide they like the trade itself? Fine line there. How are people to know about the trades if all they hear is "go to college"?

Agreed. I don't see how you can leave out (among other things) databases, Big O notation, networking, and call it a computer science primer. Good for what it is, but misnamed.

You make an interesting (unsupported) assertion here. You, who find talking to an IRQ controller, real-time clock, etc. interesting, find Scheme boring, therefore others (who may not share your interests in such details) will also find it boring. Bit of a logical fallacy there...

Taking your comment to its logical conclusion, then, no one should become an electrician. Too dangerous. Low (relative to a degree) pay.

Well, who then is going to fulfill this necessary role?

I've always thought of "order of magnitude" as adding a zero, so anything less than 10 is a different order of magnitude.

Gets weird thinking about 9 being both one number less and one order of magnitude less than 10, while 99 is both 89 more and the same order of magnitude, but it's supposed to be a rough approximation.

I don't have the stats in front of me, but my recollection is something like (using the same base number for Phone Screen but our rates):

Applications: 5000 candidates; ~20% pass rate (vs unknown)

Phone Screen: 1000 candidates; ~50% pass rate (vs 40%)

Technical Test: 500 candidates; ~40% pass rate (vs 25%)

On-site interview & reference checks: 200 candidates; ~50% pass rate (vs 40%)

Offer: 100 candidates; ~80% hire rate (vs 60%)

Hired: 80

So by some arguments you could say Firebase was 2.5x as selective (40 offers vs 100). With a funnel like this, even small changes to the percentages end up having a larger overall effect.

Unfortunately, we don't have the Applications number from the blog post, though he says "we considered a great deal more applicants than that [1000] on paper." I suppose a "great deal" could be anywhere from double to 10x...

That could be an even more efficient version of our test. As long as it screens for what you're looking for, I would definitely agree that shorter is better.

It feels like it tests something different than writing code, though both may be a proxy for "quality candidate".

Hate it all you want. In this case, it's true. There are no hidden factors in my description. There was no token and it was a public API.

I'm sorry you've been burned, but that doesn't mean there aren't tests that actually take < 2 hours. I can't speak to every language, but what modern toolset can't open an input file, make an http(s) call, and write to a file?

I also don't understand why we shouldn't figure out how long something takes before administering it. Several people took the test and the time ranged from 15 minutes to an hour and a half, depending on language and experience level. I will say that if someone couldn't do it in 2 hours, they wouldn't have been a good fit for the team. If several team members took it, of course we're going to make an assumption about how long it takes.

Furthermore, since we didn't prescribe a specific language, there's no reason why someone wouldn't have all of the tools pre-installed. Even so, if you had to install your favorite development environment, you'd have been fine. That also wouldn't have been part of the two hour time frame (which wasn't a limit, BTW, just how long it ended up taking competent developers).