Comment by makach | Hacker News Reader

Comment by makach | Hacker News Reader

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Excellent blog post. One of the big issues, unfortunately, is that there are too many of THEM. I just sat through a job interview where they bombarded me with topics and asked me to rate myself on a scale from 1-know nothing, 2-familiar and 3-expert.

I immediately understood that this was a pointless exercise for me. I knew That I don't consider myself an expert. I haven't studied any topic long enough to call myself an expert. On the other hand, I like to believe that I don't fall in the "clueless" part either. I have worked in the computer industry form many years now and have overall pretty good problem-solving skills and am able to produce work that generates value for my employers.

Still, I learn every day and improve on my skill, but it will require a lot before I dare to call myself an expert. Others call me an expert, a wizard, and other nice things, but this is never anything I would use to describe myself.

I never got the job offer. Good riddance! I doubt I would have accepted the job anyway.

This type of rating system is always disappointing. Candidates and interviewers each have different ideas of what expertise means -- I guess because there is no real context around the question. Maybe it's a trope to say, but it seems like competence and likelihood to rate oneself an expert are inversely correlated (barring hubris or real expertise!).

I used to ask candidates to rate themselves from 1-10, e.g., in database performance analysis, and often would get people rating themselves a 9 or a 10 without being able to articulate anything about the topic. It just seems very meaningless, since we were going to have a discussion anyway -- and the conversational part of the interview is more revealing, in any case.

I usually find that (within a broad range of capability) someone's actual knowledge on a given topic is inversely correlated with their self-rating on a 1-10 scale.

Perhaps especially in the pressure of an interview

I’ve found some companies use the rating systems to tailor interviews to your strengths by providing descriptions at each level (e.g. “10 means you wrote the book about it”). It’s not always useless.

I personally never experienced it myself. But I can imagine it being useful in a relativistic sense. For example if the candidate puts 9 for PHP and 5 for Haskell, you can get the rough idea what language they prefer or are more comfortable in using. You are not comparing these ratings against other candidate's ratings.

Precisely -- one's estimates about a skill, are accurate (only) when compared with one's own other estimates about oneself.

And can be helpful when preparing for an interview (for the interviewer).

I find it surprising this didn't occur to the other commenters

> it seems like competence and likelihood to rate oneself an expert are inversely correlated

There is a name for this, it's called the Dunning-Kruger effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

The THEM in the article are "The Elders of Mathematics" though, and in particular his professor, who _didn't_ have any issues admitting ignorance. When you say that there are "too many of THEM" you probably meant the "wrong crowd" people.

I feel you; if it helps, have you considered that this maybe raises some 'red flags' about the job itself? Maybe you dodged a bullet there...

Also, are you supposed to answer on a relative basis, or absolute? If I was running the intervied and was asked that question in response, I would consider it a Good Sign.

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