If companies interviewed translators the way they interview coders
Gayle Laakmann McDowell, author of Cracking the Coding Interview, commented on Facebook about this article (all text below is her words): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;groups&#x2F;hackathonhackers&#x2F;permalink&#x2F;1642919005763578&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;groups&#x2F;hackathonhackers&#x2F;permalink&#x2F;1...</a><p>&gt; Weird analogy. Companies don&#x27;t ask candidates the history of binary search trees, computer architecture, or anything like that.<p>A better analogy would be if they gave this translator a particularly challenging piece of text to translate -- for example, one that didn&#x27;t have a clear right answer and the candidate had to discuss different tradeoffs.<p>But... then that doesn&#x27;t seem like quite so silly of an interview process.<p>There are absolutely valid criticisms of whiteboard interviews, but most criticisms made are either based on terrible implementations of whiteboard interviews or based on stuff that&#x27;s just incorrect. (Yes, it&#x27;s totally fair to criticize a company who conducted a flawed whiteboard interview. But that criticism doesn&#x27;t apply to the system as a whole. That same company could mess up whatever your favorite interview style is, too.)<p>&gt; By the way: I don&#x27;t actually know how translators are interviewed. But one of my best friends interviewed to be a journalist with some major New York newspapers (WSJ, etc).<p>She was already a journalist before this, so they had lots of public writing samples for her (analogy: GitHub code samples).<p>Did they just hire her based on this? Nope!<p>She had to do a live writing test (analogy: whiteboard coding interviews). She also had to do a pitch session to talk about different potential stories she could theoretically write about (analogy: design&#x2F;architecture interviews). Plus some behavioral interviews.<p>Why not just look at her writing samples? Unlike for coders (which might not have public portfolios representing a significant portion of their work), basically all of her work product was actually public. So why not just hire from that?<p>Well, because all they see is the final output. They don&#x27;t know what direction she was given, how long it took her, how much editing&#x2F;collaboration was involved, etc. A crappy writer in a particular environment can churn out good work -- because someone else is doing a lot of the work. Looking at the final result is actually not a great measure of someone&#x27;s skills.<p>Coding interviews aren&#x27;t that special.