> The only thing that the interviewer was evaluating was my ability to do math problems in my head after being interviewed for 6 hours.
Although I agree with you about the (ir)relevance of the task, I disagree with this particular move you're making when other people do it.
Typically when people want to trivialize test results they don't like, they say it's over-fitting to the immediate situation (like IQ tests "don't measure anything intrinsic, they just measure how well you do IQ tests"). Unfortunately this criticism can be logically generalized across any statistical or empirical measure whose job is not to let people into the job/tell the truth, but minimize the impact of something bad happening if the test returns a false positive, or the opportunity cost if it's a false negative. This means two things:
(1) Because the chance of error always exists, there are always going to be people who feel gypped by the process; yet on the other hand, it is supremely difficult to come up with good measures of anything that is too costly to observe directly no matter what the domain. Thus sour grapes that want to claim over-fitting.
(2) For software companies like Apple, they can probably afford to have bullshit tests to weed out applicants, because the alternative of having to place each applicant through a probationary period for three months is quite costly, if we're willing to refute all tests as being narrow or irrelevant indicators in the manner above.
With Apple, it's still possible that they have an internal model for hiring that claims to have predictive power that relies on this particular task as a proxy in conjunction with all the other ways that they've tested you, before they move you over to a probationary period. But as the article pointed out this is also unlikely since the effectiveness of interview practices is understudied in a formal setting.
Although I agree with you about the (ir)relevance of the task, I disagree with this particular move you're making when other people do it.
Typically when people want to trivialize test results they don't like, they say it's over-fitting to the immediate situation (like IQ tests "don't measure anything intrinsic, they just measure how well you do IQ tests"). Unfortunately this criticism can be logically generalized across any statistical or empirical measure whose job is not to let people into the job/tell the truth, but minimize the impact of something bad happening if the test returns a false positive, or the opportunity cost if it's a false negative. This means two things:
(1) Because the chance of error always exists, there are always going to be people who feel gypped by the process; yet on the other hand, it is supremely difficult to come up with good measures of anything that is too costly to observe directly no matter what the domain. Thus sour grapes that want to claim over-fitting.
(2) For software companies like Apple, they can probably afford to have bullshit tests to weed out applicants, because the alternative of having to place each applicant through a probationary period for three months is quite costly, if we're willing to refute all tests as being narrow or irrelevant indicators in the manner above.
With Apple, it's still possible that they have an internal model for hiring that claims to have predictive power that relies on this particular task as a proxy in conjunction with all the other ways that they've tested you, before they move you over to a probationary period. But as the article pointed out this is also unlikely since the effectiveness of interview practices is understudied in a formal setting.