Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you just assume the way people speak is influenced by their gender?
Is your comment satire?
I'm going out on a limb here but I think they were serious in a way that's bad.
Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews
141–150 of 336 posts
Re: Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you just assume the way people speak is influenced by their gender?
Is your comment satire?
Re: Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
So the interviewer should settle for just good enough and not try to get more for his money ? Still is capitalism here...
"Getting more for you money" means hiring someone overqualified. That's always been considered a bad idea because of the generally accepted (and quite reasonable) belief that people who are overqualified will go somewhere where they're merely qualified, but paid a lot more. So, yes, most interviewers are looking for the best fit .
As someone who interviews people I can speak for myself. No I dont look for best fit.
I look for someone who will be able to grow inside the company and fill gaps. Like to see them do smart things they are hired to do without being told what to do.
Re: Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is that different from the past ?
Not sure if I understand your question. Do you mean the mental issues part? If so, back then we all just thought the HR posting the job was retarded. If I saw something stupid, the person was stupid. It never hurt me. Nowadays the whole imposter syndrome is becoming a bigger issue. People are becoming more and more inadequate in their own skin. It’s all just getting offended by stuff seen, no matter how small. I grew…
Just wondering why people think that being challenged is a terrible thing. Its almost like being mediocre is good and having some mental problem is better than good performance.
Begs the question.. "What is society rewarding ? "
Re: Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you liked this post, you might also like this one: http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas... TL;DR We made women sound like men and men sound like women in technical interviews and found that it didn't move the needle.
This is interesting, but I feel like it isn't as thorough as I would like. Men and women speak differently in ways that can't be masked by voice modulation and I suspect that phrasing, choice of vocabulary, intonation etc. also play a role in how people are perceived. My hypothesis would be that men are more familiar with how men speak, so if a woman also spoke like that, they would see an improvement. I'm not saying…
One day recently, my oldest commented on his observations that when he picks up food at the deli for us, he and other men say things like "Give me half a pound of potatoes." Women typically say things like "Can I have..." They sound like they are asking permission to eat even though they are a paying customer.
My experience is that other people are weirded out when I talk in an empowered fashion like a man. Some people give me push back over that because sexism is alive and well. So it isn't a slam dunk cure for a woman to learn manly phrasing.
But, yes, I think you are correct that men and women typically phrase things differently, so masking the voice is insufficient.
Re: Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's another similar problem that I'm seeing that I don't think has been pointed out before. Recently, I've been applying for web developer positions and am coming across applications with these sorts of questions: - What's the coolest thing you've done both in life and at work? - What are your dreams? - Where do you see yourself in 10 years? I certainly do have answers for these questions, but I can't tell if the…
I've made a point for myself to never ask questions like "what are your dreams" or "where do you see yourself in 10 years" in an interview, ever. For a long time, I've used these as a filter, too. Getting this kind of question in an interview is a big red flag for me and a huge disappointment. Let me elaborate a little. My dreams are none of an interviewer's bloody business. I'm here to work not share the things that…
"Where do you see yourself in 10 years" is a simple way of asking how you expect your career to advance and what they should expect of you in the future - It's totally reasonable for a company to be interested in an employee's personal growth plans and yes, your long-term commitments to yourself
If you don't have any work-safe dreams, you might want to see a psychiatrist. Again, though, you've misinterpreted the question - They're looking for you to express your spark of passion. It doesn't even have to be for the job. People like people who can talk about something passionately.
Re: Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think those questions come from both naïvete and a desire to increase information asymmetry in the hiring process.
Can you elaborate on the "desire to increase information asymmetry" bit? I mean, I get that the employer always wants to be on the upper hand in that way, but I don't see how questions like this do that.
Try and extract that level of detail about the company's internal dynamics, desires, and plans in an interview and see how far you get.
Re: Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been successfully employed the valley for over a decade (and other tech work before that). I've never done a practice interview, I don't worry about my GitHub. I agree with the cargo culting comment. Work on your network. Apply for jobs that interest you. Interview. Get job.
> Work on your network. That's not easy. I work remote, and live in a place where there just isn't a network available. That would leave online and I usually just hang out on HN.
Same here. I've found nearly all of my jobs through my network, but now that I work remotely from a place where it's hard to have a network... I really don't know how I'm going to address the issue in future.
Thoughts welcome!
Re: Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews
#149It doesn't help that job ads are wanting "Top 3% only!" or "Only top 1% Ninja Rockstars need apply!". Kind of reminds me of the market for singers or concert pianists, you absolutely need to be the best, even imperceptibly worse makes you unemployable. Should those of us who aren't top 5%/didn't go to a top school just find another industry, one where sub-perfect work doesn't actively make other people's jobs harder?
Notice that, when they say they only hire the top 1%, there's a vicious sampling bias at work: even in a worst case where they're being literal they're actually hiring the top 1% of their applicants , not the top 1% of engineers . Think about how many jobs you usually apply for before getting one. Now imagine someone that's less successful than you at getting hired and think about how many times they're interviewing.…
> people that are required to interview for every job on the board to maintain unemployment.
I'm pretty sure you're being hyperbolic, but that sounds hellish. I have GAD and dread interviewing so much that I'd forego unemployment and just work as a Task Rabbit or something.
To preempt the inevitable responses: Yes, I do have a family to support and, yes, I have worked as a Task Rabbit or done manual labor when faced with similar situations in the past.
Re: Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews
#150Of course it does, it's not a gender problem, who said it was? How many of you have heard your friends and colleagues tell you, "wow I'm so lucky I got through that interview, there's no way I would pass it if I did it again today." You shouldn't walk away from a good interview feeling like you nailed it. An interviewer should push you to your limits and the more you know, the more they should push. It doesn't mean y…
> An interviewer should push you to your limits and the more you know, the more they should push. Granted, this is HN, but this viewpoint is very tech-engineer focused. Most jobs aren't like this at all. Chicken-parts processor interviews aren't like this, para-legal interviews aren't like this, firefighter interviews aren't like this, teacher interviews aren't like this, etc. For the vast majority of jobs out there,…
Chicken-parts processor interviews aren't like this, para-legal interviews aren't like this, firefighter interviews aren't like this, teacher interviews aren't like this, etc.
Doing this sort of interviews on programmers probably wouldn't work even if current programmer interviews do suck for both parties and they're mostly embarrassing, too.
I'm guessing here and might be wrong but all these professions have a rather fixed set of limited skills they have to know in order to qualify. Teachers have to teach a certain curriculum: on top of that they can be bad teachers or good teachers but basically what they have to achieve each year for each class is known and predicated. Firefighters have their training and as a baseline it's sufficient to be a good team player and just execute. Firefighters will have to improvise at times, and they will have opportunities to make some really good judgement calls based on their experience alone, but that's sort of extra. You're still a good firefighter if you just stick with doing it by the book.
Now, the same for programmers would be something like "Must know Java and we'll hire you". This didn't end very well in the IT bubble twenty years ago. Knowing Java inside out doesn't make you a good programmer, not even a good Java programmer, there's so much more to that. Would you hire an artist based on "Must know how to paint in oil, watercolor, and draw in charcoal"? That's where the real skills begin, not suffice.
If you're a Java programmer it doesn't mean you can just sit down and program anything for any company: there are hundred domain-specific skills and questions, all sorts of CS theory of which you know one or two fractions based on what you've worked on before, and a very specific mindset that makes a good programmer for a specific role. To some extent you can be a generalist and learn a bit of this and that but especially for heavy specialists it could take years to transition from one specific subdomain to another.
All programmers are cathedral builders but they will all make very different cathedrals and they are continuously requested to make cathedrals that have not been built before. Then there are other jobs where they follow the blueprints and produce a cathedral one after another, meeting the same requirements each time.
I'm not saying programmers are superb to these other professions when it comes to complexity and depth. It's just that a programmer's job can be about anything: the number of problem domains is endless and more so as the world becomes more software than hardware. You can do so much with computers and programming that whatever baseline there exists alone doesn't yet take you anywhere as a programmer.
There's the fizzbuzz level of a baseline, there's the skillset, buzzwords and qualifications baseline, and there are a lot of other baselines that need to be met. That's why you need to figure out a way to interview programmers that takes all this into account.
There's no single interview that could be used to qualify people for being hired as a programmer because the requirements are never fixed.