"The eight-legged essay was needed for those candidates in these civil service tests to show their merits for government service... structurally and stylistically, the eight-legged essay was restrictive and rigid. There are rules governing different sections of the essay, including restrictions on the number of sentences in total, the number of words in total, the format and structure of the essay, and rhyming techniques."
The problems that the imperial Chinese government had to solve was pretty much the same as the problem the Big Tech companies are trying to solve with leetcode.
In earlier times, it used to be that the exams were more freestyle, but when tens/hundreds of thousands of people compete for a handful of high civil service positions, people are motivated to cheat by memorizing essays pre-written by somebody else. And the open-ended questions had subjective answers that didn't scale. So they basically gamified the whole thing.
And it's important to recognize the advantages and disadvantages to ensure that we have proper context.
For example, leetcode may be very appropriate for those programming jobs which are fairly standard. At every job you don't need to invent new things. Industrialization was amazing because of this standardization and ability to mass produce (in a way, potentially LLMs can be this for code. Not quite there yet but it seems like a reasonable potential).
But on the other hand, there are plenty of jobs where there are high levels of uniqueness and creativity and innovation dominate the skills of repetition and regurgitation. This is even true in research and science, though I think creativity is exceptionally important.
The truth is that you need both. Often we actually need more of the former than the latter, but both are needed. They have different jobs. The question is more about the distribution of these skillsets that you need to accomplish your goals. Too much rigidity is stifling and too much flexibility is chaos. But I'd argue that in the centuries we've better learned to wade through chaos and this is one of the unique qualities that makes us human. To embrace the unknown while everything in us fights to find answers, even if they are not truth; because it is better to be ruled by a malicious but rational god than the existential chaos.
>But on the other hand, there are plenty of jobs where there are high levels of uniqueness and creativity and innovation dominate the skills of repetition and regurgitation. This is even true in research and science, though I think creativity is exceptionally important.
Those companies still use leetcode for those positions. It's just a blanket thing at this point.
Yes, and I think it is dumb. I'm personally fed up with how much we as a society rely on metrics for the sake of metrics. I can accept that things are difficult to measure and that there's a lot of chaos. Imperfection is perfectly okay. But I have a hard time accepting willful ignorance, acting like it is objective. I'm sure I am willfully ignorant many times too, but I think my ego should take the hit rather than continue.
Have been on a few panels where candidate passes all leetcodes and then turned out to be very poor on the job with in one case worst “teamwork” I’ve witnessed. These were not FANG jobs though so might be more viable at a larger company where it’s ok to axe big projects, have duplicated work, etc. leetcode is just one muscle and many jobs require more than one muscle.
Exactly what it is. "We had to go through it, so they'll have to too!" plus "Someone who has so little self-respect that they do this will do anything we ask of them."
(I know that some people genuinely like Leetcode and that's totally fine. But that's not why company want people to do it)
Standardized interviews or panels do not necessarily exist to find the best candidate. They exist as a tradeoff to ensure some measure of objectivity and prevent favoritism/influence/corruption/bribery/forgery/impersonation/unfair cheating by getting advance access to the test material; in such a way that this can then be verified, standardized, audited at higher levels or nationally. Even more important for medschool/nursing than engineering.
One of countless examples was the sale of 7600 fake nursing transcripts and diplomas in 2020/1 by three south Florida nursing schools [0]. (This happened in the middle of Covid, and at schools which were already being deaccredited.)
Buyers paid $10-15K to obtain fake diplomas and transcripts indicating that they had earned legitimate degrees, like a (two-year) associate degree in nursing; these credentials then allowed the buyers to qualify for the national nursing board exam (NCLEX). About 37% of those who bought the fake documents — or about 2,800 people — passed the exam.
(Compare to candidates holding a bachelor's degree in nursing (BSN) reportedly typically pass at 90% compared to 84% for those with an associate degree in nursing (ADN)).
Among that 2700, a “significant number” then received nursing licenses and secured jobs in unnamed hospitals and other health care settings in MD, NY, NJ, GA.
Right, sure. But I was saying it isn't by any means only the candidates that we want to guard against misconduct or lack of objectivity, or their schools, but the interviewers/panelists/graders/regulators themselves.
Hazing is just an unfortunately necessary side-effect of this.
For Leetcode, this is one of the typical rationalizations.
It's something a rich kid would come up with if they'd never done real work, and were incapable of recognizing it, but they'd seen body-building, and they decided that's what everyone should demonstrate as the fundamentals, and you can't get muscles like that without being good at work.
And of course, besides the flawed theory, everyone cheated at the metric.
But other rich kids had more time and money for the non-work metrics-hitting, so the rich kid was happy they were getting "culture fit".
The ancient Chinese exams were the exact opposite of what you describe.
The Chinese rulers realized they had a problem where incompetent rich kids got promoted to important government jobs. This caused the government and therefore society to function poorly. As a result of this, many people died unnecessarily.
To combat this, the Chinese government instituted very hard entrance exams that promoted competent applicants regardless of rich parents.
The book Ancient China in Transition - An analysis of Social Mobility, 722-222 BC (Cho-yun Hsu, Stanford University Press, 1965) discusses this transition in rather great detail.
Imperial exams arguably started in the Sui and Tang dynasties, in the 6th century AD.
The 722-222BC in the article you linked to is the "wrong period". That period was a time where Chinese states transitioned from feudalism to empire, and the clan-based aristocracy was replaced by a class of educated and scholars due to societal change (which needed lots of literate administrators, and not so much nepotism). The typical path for a person who aspired to work in government is to apply to be an "employee" (very loose translation of 門客) of a prominent minister, and rise up the ranks by impressing their bosses. It was also common for rulers of the time to hold meetings with intellectuals, who then tried to sell the rulers on the latest ideology/methods to run a country -- if the sales pitch worked, they'd have the job of implementing those policies. In general there were no exams, although one would assume to become an "employee" they'd test your skills in some way, but it was not systematized at all.
Between 222BC and 6th century AD, the educated/scholar class gradually consolidated into a handful of prominent families who tended to monopolize high government posts. During the Jin dynasty (266–420AD) people generally believed one's virtues/abilities were tied to their birth and family status more than anything else. This was a time when prominent families monopolized government power and systematically rejected outsiders from holding important positions, even if they proved their abilities.
The imperial exam system introduced in the Sui/Tang dynasties gradually reversed this trend by allowing commoners to participate in the government exams, though it must be noted in the Tang dynasty exams the circumstances of the candidates were taken into account (family background, social ties, subjective opinion of the examiners, etc.), so it wasn't purely based on the paper exam results.
The exams were gradually systematized in the later dynasties, ultimately ending in the "Eight-legged essay", which was famous for its rigidity in form. It provided a great opportunity for intelligent aspirants from a underprivileged background since everyone took the exam on an equal footing, but it kind of sucked the soul out of learning the classics.
You're 100% right. Gave me a big, big smile after 7 years at Google feeling like an alien, I was as a college dropout from nowhere with nothing and nobody, but a successful barely-6-figure exit at 27 years old.
Big reason why the FAANGs get dysfunctional too. You either have to be very, very, very, fast to fire, almost arbitrarily (Amazon) or you end up with a bunch of people who feel safe enough to be trying to advance.
The "rich kids" w/o anything but college and FAANG were taught Being Visible and Discussing Things and Writing Papers is what "hard work" is, so you end up with a bunch of people building ivory towers to their own intellect (i.e. endless bikeshedding and arguing and design docs and asking for design docs) and afraid of anyone around them who looks like they are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-legged_essay#Viewpoints