To be a statistician is to ignore experience. I once interviewed someone who was a statistics major. When I asked him a performance optimization question, the first thing he told me is that he'd write a program to compute the standard deviation of running time. He could've solved it in two minutes just by running the thing. No hire.
I think it's a pretty good idea actually, because with standard deviations (and means, of course) you can run statistical tests to make sure your improvements are statistically significant and not due to chance. I hope the candidate had a chance to explain themselves before he got no-hired.
The candidate is probably now happily working under a manager who doesn’t complain “why are you using your skills? Just [do the simplest thing that occurs to me], you idiot.”
Does anybody else find that people boasting about their "hires or no hires" a) come off as showing off, b) most of times are in the wrong end of the decision?
We can comment on why we think a practice is bad -- as in, with arguments. Not about how we ditched some candidate because they followed it.
