Journeys up the property ladder: ‘I know that I am just so lucky’

danothy

westernpromise wrote: »

You're making my point for me.

I am not demanding some specialist and rare level of mathematical skill. I am looking for 11+ levels of numeracy. I am looking for someone who can guess the square root of a number.

You are telling me that among current graduates these are rare skills that need to be sought out; that they are not to be universally expected among graduates.

No, I'm telling you the opposite. I'm saying if you are seeing people without these skills then you are attracting the dross, not the cream as you seem to think. That is probably because what you are offering is not as good as you think it is, rather than there being a systemic lack of skill in the wider graduate population. You're mistake is looking at the sample you see and assuming that you've got an accurate cross section rather than thinking you're getting what you deserve out of a wider pool of talent. And if you don't think you deserve it, then ask yourself what the kind of person who denigrates a whole population based on their experience with a few of them deserves.

mwpt

thequant wrote: »

Re your question, there is no excuse for not getting the answer to that one. Quick way to calculate it, is to recognise 256=2^8, therefore the square root is 2^4=16

Since I don't know the context of this, I'll assume that this must be a tech job interview. In which case, no excuse.

But if it's not a tech job, what proportion of people know offhand that 256=2^8? Not a lot, since most human learning is by patterns and recognition and practice. As a smart person, I'm sure you appreciate this.

So, a good way to evaluate answers to that question in a non tech job is to instead check how they approach it. Work out the boundaries and narrow in would be one reasonable way.

Most people are notoriously bad at conducting interviews.

Maelwys

westernpromise wrote: »

I have even given up asking 11+ Numeracy questions, because even those are beyond most graduates. An example of such a question that graduates cannot do is "Without using a calculator or a pencil and paper, what is the sum of all the numbers between 0 and 100?" My daughter answered that question correctly in an 11+ interview, but I have yet to meet the non-maths graduate who can answer it correctly in a job interview.

Disclaimer: When I did the 11+ we were still on Verbal Reasoning, none of this Maths/English STEM key stage stuff!

I'm not a Maths grad; and I use excel and calculators almost daily so my mental arithmetic skills are pretty darn rusty...

Without cheating (or prior knowledge of Gauss's formula which I found afterwards with a quick google) I ballparked the answer mentally as "Well, with any list of sequential numbers the average value is going to be halfway down the list, so multiplying 50 by 100 will get you a good indicator"

Access to pen and paper for a few minutes (or 10 seconds with Excel) would have allowed me to check this for a few test cases and have produced a pattern that corrected my original ballpark from 5000 to 5050.

So you can either do a quick ballpark estimate and refine it as you go, or use extra tools/time/money calculating it exactly right the first time! :rotfl:

(On the other hand, the square root of 256 I got instantly. But 4/16/64/256/1024/4096/16384/65536 etc. should be a very familiar sequence to anyone who's worked in computing...)

westernpromise

danothy wrote: »

No, I'm telling you the opposite. I'm saying if you are seeing people without these skills then you are attracting the dross, not the cream as you seem to think. That is probably because what you are offering is not as good as you think it is, rather than there being a systemic lack of skill in the wider graduate population. You're mistake is looking at the sample you see and assuming that you've got an accurate cross section rather than thinking you're getting what you deserve out of a wider pool of talent. And if you don't think you deserve it, then ask yourself what the kind of person who denigrates a whole population based on their experience with a few of them deserves.

I'm afraid you're exhibiting the usual reaction of the graduate to being told you aren't as great as you thought you were.

What you are now suggesting is that only the dross would apply for a job that pays as much after three years as the best-paid graduates make after 5, and that this happens because the jobs are unenticing. The real quality, apparently, doesn't care about the salary or the prospects, and applies for worse-paying jobs elsewhere. Consequently, only really stupid people ever apply here.

The problem with this analysis is that it completely fails to describe the graduates that we ultimately do end up hiring. We fill these jobs with German, Finnish, French, Spanish, and Dutch university graduates.

No matter what degree they've studied they can, generally, figure out what the numnbers between 0 and 100 add up to.

Even more remarkably, they're also a lot more literate than the locals are. Our literacy test includes giving them a piece of writing with all the punctuation removed and having them put it back in. A Finnish law graduate or a German music graduate can do this better, in what is to them a foreign language, than a local can in their own.

The connection with house prices, of course, is that these are the people flooding into London, making £55k at 25 and £100k at 30, at which point two of them pool their bonuses and salaries and bid £750,000 for a two-bed flat in a really nice part of town.

You might like to reflect on whether there's any connection between this, with your view that local graduates rightly turn their noses up at jobs like this as not being good enough for them, and with the locals' well-documented inability to afford London prices on what they earn.

You are being outcompeted. London may be the financial capital of Europe but nothing about this means the locals are entitled to any of the jobs.

If what we offer isn't of interest to local graduates. we must not repine. I guess we'll just have to try to get by with the cream of everywhere else.

westernpromise

mwpt wrote: »

Since I don't know the context of this, I'll assume that this must be a tech job interview. In which case, no excuse.

But if it's not a tech job, what proportion of people know offhand that 256=2^8? Not a lot, since most human learning is by patterns and recognition and practice. As a smart person, I'm sure you appreciate this.

So, a good way to evaluate answers to that question in a non tech job is to instead check how they approach it. Work out the boundaries and narrow in would be one reasonable way.

Most people are notoriously bad at conducting interviews.

It's futures operations, actually. So it's a bit industry-technical, but you had better be able to add up, you had better be able to work out what's urgent versus what's merely important, and you had better be able to write a plain-English account of a technical problem for an exchange or a regulator. You also need to be in the habit of taking good notes of conversations.

So all I am really looking for here is how the candidate goes about guessing at this.

The approximate root of 256 is not an obvious number, but if you know what a square root is, you should know that the square root of 144 is 12. So it's obviously more than 12. Fairly obviously it's less than 20, and it isn't 15 either because 15^2 would end in a 5. So it must be more than 15 and less than 20, so about 17 or something.

That would do for an answer. I particularly remember a Swedish art history graduate we interviewed who boggled at us in amazement and asked it it was a trick question before she gave us the answer 16, because "everybody knows this from computers". We then had to ask her something else to see how good she is with numbers under stress.

westernpromise

Maelwys wrote: »

I ballparked the answer mentally as "Well, with any list of sequential numbers the average value is going to be halfway down the list, so multiplying 50 by 100 will get you a good indicator"

The answer my 11-year-old gave to this was broadly as follows.

"You said all the numbers **between** 0 and 100...so that means from 1 to 99. So 1 plus 99 make 100, 2 plus 98 make 100, 3 plus 97 make 100...and from 1 to 49 there are 49 of those pairs, and the 50 left over in the middle, so the answer must be 4,950."

Very good, said the interviewing teacher.

"There's another way," she went on. "If the lowest number's 1 and the highest is 99, the average number is 50. There are 99 numbers, so that's 100 minus 1. 100 50s are 5,000, so that minus 50 is 4,950 again."

And that's how it's done. Notice though that in the first way you pretty much get the answer given to you simply by restating the question logically, which is what I am interested in seeing candidates do. Of course I'll settle for just the right answer.

danothy

westernpromise wrote: »

I'm afraid you're exhibiting the usual reaction of the graduate to being told you aren't as great as you thought you were.

I have not been told I'm not as good as I think I am, so I can't be reacting like that.

westernpromise wrote: »

What you are now suggesting is that only the dross would apply for a job that pays as much after three years as the best-paid graduates make after 5, and that this happens because the jobs are unenticing.

There's no now, I haven't changed what I am suggesting. I am suggesting that if you get poor quality applicants at the graduate level as the norm then what you're offering is not a good prospect because you're getting poor quality applicants, not the good quality ones who naturally apply for and get the ones they want. That you have apparently concluded that there is a lack of quality in the wider population is telling.

westernpromise wrote: »

The real quality, apparently, doesn't care about the salary or the prospects, and applies for worse-paying jobs elsewhere. Consequently, only really stupid people ever apply here.

I never commented on what the "real quality" cares about, just that if you're only ever getting stupid people applying it's not because there's only stupid people. It's because you only see the stupid people. As yourself why that is. My bet is that it's not, as you seem to have concluded, that there are only stupid people.

westernpromise wrote: »

The problem with this analysis is that it completely fails to describe the graduates that we ultimately do end up hiring. We fill these jobs with German, Finnish, French, Spanish, and Dutch university graduates.

So now there are high quality graduates? Or it's just British graduates that are systematically below standard?

westernpromise wrote: »

You are being outcompeted.

It's cool that you're trying to make this personal, but bear in mind that I'm a graduate who's not baffled by your reported interview questions, nor am I finding I'm not employable. I am annoyed by your general badmouthing (based on poor reasoning I might add) of a set of people I happen to belong to though.

The simple fact of the matter is that the sample of graduates you see is too small and uncontrolled to draw meaningful conclusions about the larger population of graduates, but you do so anyway. Seeing a deficient sample in this situation is indicative of a sampling error. In this case that would be a job opportunity that doesn't attract a representative sample of graduates as applicants, and because you're seeing a low skill sample, that most likely means something about the job is pants.

westernpromise

danothy wrote: »

So now there are high quality graduates? Or it's just British graduates that are systematically below standard?

Broadly, yes. Graduates from outside the UK are better than those from the UK, broadly speaking, in the sense that they have skills such as 11+ level mathematical ability regardless of degree subject.

It's cool that you're trying to make this personal, but bear in mind that I'm a graduate who's not baffled by your reported interview questions, nor am I finding I'm not employable. I am annoyed by your general badmouthing (based on poor reasoning I might add) of a set of people I happen to belong to though.

The simple fact of the matter is that the sample of graduates you see is too small and uncontrolled to draw meaningful conclusions about the larger population of graduates, but you do so anyway. Seeing a deficient sample in this situation is indicative of a sampling error. In this case that would be a job opportunity that doesn't attract a representative sample of graduates as applicants, and because you're seeing a low skill sample, that most likely means something about the job is pants.

Your sample appears to be yourself, which is a smaller sample still.

It's not just me saying this. It's hardly a controversial observation. For some years now a widely-made observation among employers is that the current crop of graduates aren't up to much.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/8819425/British-graduates-not-fit-to-start-work-say-majority-of-bosses.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2091855/University-graduates-lack-right-skills-graduate-placements-according-bosses.html

http://graduatefog.co.uk/2014/3387/graduate-jobs-madness-graduate-employers-unfilled-vacancies/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-18957712

My experience reflects this exactly. Fortunately we can attract foreign graduates who are much better, but it's a problem for those who can't.

danothy

westernpromise wrote: »

Broadly, yes. Graduates from outside the UK are better than those from the UK, broadly speaking, in the sense that they have skills such as 11+ level mathematical ability regardless of degree subject.


Your sample appears to be yourself, which is a smaller sample still.

I'm not sampling myself, my reference to myself is in response to you telling me I am being "outcompeted". If I am to compete against people in a game of answer those questions then I am not likely to be "outcompeted".

westernpromise wrote: »

It's not just me saying this.

That still doesn't make you right.

westernpromise wrote: »

It's hardly a controversial observation.

It is if you're making an observation about a population based on a sample.

thequant

mwpt wrote: »

But if it's not a tech job, what proportion of people know offhand that 256=2^8? Not a lot, since most human learning is by patterns and recognition and practice. As a smart person, I'm sure you appreciate this.

.

It's the binary series, i.e. 2,4,8,16,32,64..............

Everyone who has used a computer, knows that memory and other computers things come from this series. You don't need to be a maths grad to know this.

Yes lots of people learn by patterns and this series of numbers is extremely commonplace, there's no excuse for not knowing it.

westernpromise wrote: »

That would do for an answer. I particularly remember a Swedish art history graduate we interviewed who boggled at us in amazement and asked it it was a trick question before she gave us the answer 16, because "everybody knows this from computers". We then had to ask her something else to see how good she is with numbers under stress.

I rest my case.