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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

Does it work? How do they know it works?

There are a lot of people telling you how they interview and why. Almost none of them have shown even the slightly indication that they are aware there there is scientific research on what works for an interview, much less that they apply it. They also are not showing any indication that they have done any testing - to see if their questions help hire better people.

If I said they could get equal results by picking resumes at random and hiring them without any other screening could they refute that? If so have they justified every part of their process or just one step that is useful and the rest they don't know?

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> Almost none of them have shown even the slightly indication that they are aware there there is scientific research on what works for an interview,

The topic of the article is about adapting interviews in the age of LLMs.

Scientific research on interview techniques requires years of retrospective analysis after the hired employees have been evaluated in their roles for a long time.

That research does not exist on this topic. It's too new. I don't think this is a valid criticism of the actual article.

I'd add that even those years of retrospective analysis will be insufficient, because "hiring successfully" is fundamentally about measuring membership in a particular social group. You can never pick the right observable dimensions to measure in your analysis, it will ALWAYS be lacking. Sure, you can measure work done, tenure, etc, etc, but that does not mean a hire was successful.

You might have 2 people with opposite personality traits ace the interview then get put on a team together, now all of a sudden your whole team is worse overall. That's a massive effect but your study will just see it as noise.

The reality is your best hires will just be intelligent people who belong in the group and who push the mission forward.

I never see this question being asked enough.

In my experience (both as interviewer and interviewee), interviews primarily serve to satisfy the ego of the interviewer.

I used to interview people and would generally just have a chat with them about previous problems, projects, or experience at school. I would work out a pseudocode problem with them (designing an elevator). From what I can tell everyone I said yes to has had a fruitful career.

The idea of forcing a candidate to give a third party access to their screen, transcribing AI notes, and forcing them to do 3+ leetcode, and an architecture round, and a behavioral round while I watch over them for hours on end sounds completely idiotic and antisocial. This entire industry is high on its own supply when it comes to interviews.

They do say "Not every onsite includes these new rounds yet, and when you come on-site we’ll give you a heads-up about what to expect."

So that implies that they are testing this, trying to determine if it works better than the current process. Whether they are doing this in a scientifically rigorous way is unclear, however.

Even Steve Yegge got selected (or maybe nearly selected) out by his own process (unwittingly, mind you)

> One day, the recruiters gave us a special round of packets to review. In these special packets, we were able to read the interviewer notes and candidate responses. All personal details were stripped out, and we were told it was a “calibration exercise.” We had to do our regular voting job with these special packets, and see how it went. I think we may have assumed they were from another site, since cross-site calibration was common.

> Our group did our job, and voted not to hire about 2/3 of the packets. This was about par for the course.

> But surprise surprise, this time, those were our own packets from when we had all interviewed at Google. The recruiters had tricked us into reviewing our own interview packets, and we had voted not to hire most of our own group.

From https://yegge.ai/essays/the-last-technical-interview/ (May 2026)

this is fun but doesnt really say that much.

its not like they instantly reviewed their own docs; the hiring bar and comparisons changed

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