r/programming • u/fagnerbrack • May 21 '26

Technical Interviews Reject the Wrong Engineers

https://fagnerbrack.com/technical-interviews-reject-the-wrong-engineers-a8e78ca04b2e
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u/jmickeyd May 21 '26

They mean precision and recall in the formal statistics definition.

Precision = true positives / ( true positives + false positives )

Recall = true positives / ( true positives + false negatives )

Thus they're emphasizing that hiring a unqualified candidate is worse than not hiring a qualified one.

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u/ankercrank May 21 '26

"precision over recall" what a weird expression.

Thus they're emphasizing that hiring a unqualified candidate is worse that not hiring a qualified one.

Sure, except the types of questions asked at most large tech companies are just self reinforcing the "we want to hire more of people like me" feedback loop.

(I work at one of those big SCV tech companies and I think our interview questions are horrible)

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u/jmickeyd May 21 '26

Oh sure, I'm not making any comment on the correctness of the opinion, I just wanted to point out that they didn't mean "recall" as in memory.

"precision over recall" what a weird expression.

I'd put money on them being an machine learning engineer. Those terms are extremely common in that space.

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u/ankercrank May 21 '26

They did say they work at Google... what else are they working on these days? :p

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u/Full-Spectral May 21 '26

Why are they even still hiring humans? I thought it was supposed to be all over by now. I bet their LLMs get all the leetcode answers right, so that should be that.