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Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews

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Re: Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews

#221

Post by turtlecloud »

nostrademons wrote: post #82
Frondo wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if I'm the only person who thinks an interviewer should assess whether the person can do the job, and that an interviewer pushing someone to their limits seems like an inappropriate activity for the employer-employee assessment process.

I feel like there are two different conceptions about what it means to "do a job" that are co-existing within the economy, and a lot work-related offense and disgruntlement occurs because of mismatched expectations. In one conception, "a job" means that your boss sets out a list of tasks for you to do, and you do them, consistently and reliably. As long as you do what you are told, you will be paid the salary agreed…

Great response. To add more details... the second type of managers respond very poorly to when their workers have no idea what is going on and can’t reach targets/goals. In this case they need more leadership.

The first types of jobs Should have good leadership where the complex parts have already been decided and all that’s left is the implementation.

The issue is what happens when a worker for a type 2 manager is smarter and knows exactly what to do? That employees best course of action in their perspective is to get their boss fired and take their role since they are more capable.

When the type 2 manager gets frustrated due to incompetence that becomes scary since they lash out at their underlings for incompetence.

Type 1 jobs are more relaxing on the psyche as you don’t have to think about

Re: Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews

#222

Post by ericmcer »

twoquestions wrote: post #11

It 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?

I feel like a fairly average programmer. I have a few coworkers who are a little better, but when the CEO is talking about the engineering team it is always "world class" and an "amazingly talented team of engineers". I think the "genius programmer" stuff is just part of the tech industry.

Re: Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews

#223

Post by xkcd-sucks »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #187
beat wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Are we supposed to prepare an answer for that question now as well ? Nope. I don't want a prepared answer. I want an honest answer. Hence throwing them a rough, non-technical question that absolutely will not be on the resume, but has been part of the career of any experienced candidate. "Autocratic management" isn't a good answer, because it's too general. What did autocratic management do? Were the requirements i…

How would a life scientist coming from Theranos before it became common knowledge that the company was a sham talk about their experience in a culturally acceptable manner? Developing reproducible blood tests from tiniest samples was never going to work, and upper management was actively malicious at that company. We now know where the blame was (with Holmes and Balwani), but if you started there because their projec…

"I worked on an awesome project and just kept my head down and worked like a good employee. Then one day I read the WSJ one day, and what do you know, my boss was getting investigated for fraud! Then the company shut down! I had no idea, because the sub project I was on worked perfectly. I heard people complain about managers, but they were on other teams and I didn't see them very much."

Re: Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews

#224

Post by jiveturkey »

akshayB wrote: post #6

One of the biggest factors I think affects the outcome of an interview are implicit bias in first few minutes. It can be related to gender, ethnicity, age, religion or nationality. This can heavily influence the interview process.

well, this is well known to be true. and irrelevant to the topic at hand.

Re: Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews

#225

Post by jiveturkey »

mmirate wrote: post #212
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You shouldn't assume something is no big deal just because it doesn't affect you personally.

It is presumably a big deal to those whom it affects. But why is it a big deal to anyone else besides those folks' friends, family, etc.? (And, perhaps, to some hypothetical peddlers of self-help books targeted at those with impostor syndrome; my unentrepreneurial mind can't see any other way to profit from it, but you get the idea.)

> But why is it a big deal to anyone else

it’s not. what’s your point?

Re: Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews

#226

Post by scarejunba »

sean2 wrote: post #115
taeric wrote: post #12

The practice interview point strikes me as odd. In large, because I have never done one. Do folks really typically do that many practice interviews? I don't even know how to study. I sometimes consider it, but have never spent more than an hour prepping for an interview. :( It worries me, because I know that interviewing is a skill. But are we not setting folks up to over index on that skill such that they have diffi…

As far as practice interviews: Companies always take the full time they scheduled for your interview no matter when they've decided you failed. Then a week later they may drop you an email informing you that they've chosen to pass on your candidacy. They then ignore or deny any request for feedback (something about liability). So, interviewing with most companies may never inform you about why you're getting rejected…

No. That's not true. Many companies will early exit and we'll give feedback that indicates what broad areas weren't a good fit. We won't say "You should have used a probabilistic data structure here instead of a standard set" but we'll say "We expected a different experience from our whiteboard coding sessions." And then maybe something about the interview process being imperfect but the best that we have available to determine competency. So you'll know that it was whiteboard coding you didn't do well at rather than architecture design or culture fit or anything else.

That's cleared by recruiting, HR, and legal from the SF startup I work at. I did it today.

Re: Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews

#227

Post by pmiller2 »

scarejunba wrote: post #226
sean2 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as practice interviews: Companies always take the full time they scheduled for your interview no matter when they've decided you failed. Then a week later they may drop you an email informing you that they've chosen to pass on your candidacy. They then ignore or deny any request for feedback (something about liability). So, interviewing with most companies may never inform you about why you're getting rejected…

No. That's not true. Many companies will early exit and we'll give feedback that indicates what broad areas weren't a good fit. We won't say "You should have used a probabilistic data structure here instead of a standard set" but we'll say "We expected a different experience from our whiteboard coding sessions." And then maybe something about the interview process being imperfect but the best that we have available t…

Such feedback, while welcome, in my mind, is so vague as to be unactionable. Unactionable feedback is essentials useless to me as a candidate. If Triplebyte can give good, specific feedback without being afraid of being sued, why can’t employers? As long as the feedback is truthful and only about the technical[0] aspects, there should be no reason others can’t too.

—-

[0]: Granted, there’s always the nebulous “not a culture fit” to deal with, but that’s always going to be a thing.

Re: Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews

#228

Post by fizx »

Spooky23 wrote: post #117
saulrh wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I've observed that in pursuing the 1% unicorn candidate, many people step in unicorn shit and hire smart people who are bad employees. My goal is to not hire the bottom 50% of the workforce in a given discipline. IMO, you're better off building teams that make the average+ person more productive.

>I've observed that in pursuing the 1% unicorn candidate, many people step in unicorn shit and hire smart people who are bad employees.

What's fun is that this isn't just a possibility, its likely! Despite the following being a clearly artificial argument, the general shape of it is true.

Let's say that you can rate employees 1-10 on each of technical skill and employability/soft-skills, and that both are equally sought by the market. Given how attractive your company is to work for and what you pay, its quite often true that you can allocate around 12 total points between the two categories. 13 point candidates have better offers from Google; 11 point candidates fail your interview process.

If you only hire people that strongly pass a strong technical interview, ensuring that their technical skill is at least an 8/10, then your employees will have at most 4/10 soft skills.

Re: Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews

#229

Post by reificator »

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #223
HarryHirsch wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would a life scientist coming from Theranos before it became common knowledge that the company was a sham talk about their experience in a culturally acceptable manner? Developing reproducible blood tests from tiniest samples was never going to work, and upper management was actively malicious at that company. We now know where the blame was (with Holmes and Balwani), but if you started there because their projec…

"I worked on an awesome project and just kept my head down and worked like a good employee. Then one day I read the WSJ one day, and what do you know, my boss was getting investigated for fraud! Then the company shut down! I had no idea, because the sub project I was on worked perfectly. I heard people complain about managers, but they were on other teams and I didn't see them very much."

> before it became common knowledge that the company was a sham

Re: Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews

#230

Post by PhasmaFelis »

mmirate wrote: post #212
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You shouldn't assume something is no big deal just because it doesn't affect you personally.

It is presumably a big deal to those whom it affects. But why is it a big deal to anyone else besides those folks' friends, family, etc.? (And, perhaps, to some hypothetical peddlers of self-help books targeted at those with impostor syndrome; my unentrepreneurial mind can't see any other way to profit from it, but you get the idea.)

> But why is it a big deal to anyone else besides those folks' friends, family, etc.?

It's not. Of course, neither is cancer.

Impostor syndrome affects a lot of techies. That alone makes it plenty relevant to Hacker News. You are not the only reader of HN, and complaining about topical, relevant news because it doesn't interest you personally is in poor taste.

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