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

blog.interviewing.io

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

#231

Post by thrower123 »

mo1ok wrote: post #45

Dang, I am so tired of hearing about imposter syndrome. I get it. It exists. Maybe I'm more comfortable knowing that there are lots of things I don't know, even as an experienced engineer? It seems like such endless studies and banter about a relatively minor thing that is (in my opinion) easily gotten over.

It's generally easier to just flag and hide topics you don't care about. A lot of such topics have been beaten to death, and there's little to be gained. The front page gets a lot more interesting that way.

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

#232

Post by [deleted] »

vonmoltke wrote: post #122
cynicalkane wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowdays a senior role at FAANG will often pay a top 1% salary, and salary growth at these companies shows no signs of stopping.

How senior? Obviously not at the seniority I was just offered by Google (and rejected).

[deleted]

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

#233

Post by Stratoscope »

turtlecloud wrote: post #214
beat wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't use these questions when interviewing, but I do try to find out what really excites/motivates candidates (assuming they've survived the first ten minutes of technical, where I probably already have a no and I'm just trying to finish politely). For me, interviewing the good candidates is largely about deciding whether or not I really want to work with this person - I've already decided they're technically comp…

Ugh I hate interviewers like that. Just brings in bias like not wanting to work with black people and other stereotypes (older people/ethnics) etc. That type of culture is unbearable to those that don’t perfectly fit your monoculture.

Wanting to work with interesting people is somehow correlated with not wanting to work with black people? I'm having trouble making sense of this.

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

#234

Post by astura »

Stratoscope wrote: post #233
turtlecloud wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh I hate interviewers like that. Just brings in bias like not wanting to work with black people and other stereotypes (older people/ethnics) etc. That type of culture is unbearable to those that don’t perfectly fit your monoculture.

Wanting to work with interesting people is somehow correlated with not wanting to work with black people? I'm having trouble making sense of this.

"People I find interesting" is usually synonymous with "people who are like me." Even if it's not intentional, we tend to perfer people like ourselves.

My opinion is uninteresting people are just fine for coworkers, you're interviewing for an employee, not a drinking buddy.

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

#235

Post by eberkund »

pmiller2 wrote: post #136
cirgue wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We hire the top 5% of applicants. This says a lot about our applicant pool. It says very little about our team. No one here is from a top program. Many don't even have CS degrees.

How do you measure this? I would wager that, at best, you're hiring the top 5% of applicants based on interview performance. It's likely you know little or nothing about what that says vis a vis job performance, because your interview probably doesn't exercise skills used on the job, except in a very tangential way.

I think he just means that they hire 5% of applicants, by definition they are the top 5% because they are the ones they chose to hire. Unless of course they have a significant number of people going through the entire interview process only to decline the offer.

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

#236

Post by scarejunba »

pmiller2 wrote: post #227
scarejunba wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Because a non-trivial number of people are incapable of accepting feedback (even if only to discard later) and react in anger. That's unpleasant for everyone.

Best to avoid it. That's a safe neutral ground.

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

#237

Post by slededit »

fizx wrote: post #228
Spooky23 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sou…

Microsoft in the 90s figured out how to work around that. Just silo them and have their manager do the external interfacing for them. This was assuming they really were at least an 8/10 which was required to make the whole thing worthwhile.

That of course works much better when everyone has their own office so the angry outbursts are only heard by the 2-3 closest neighbors.

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

#238

Post by foobiekr »

mohaine wrote: post #131
vonmoltke wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have done dozens of interviews in my career and have yet to meet anyone who was this bad. What am I doing wrong?

Probably working for a company with sane resume filtering. We outsourced that.

Some of it is that, but I can say from my own experience that the company itself can draw large numbers of this kind of candidates. For various reasons ($) I’ve worked at a company that people view as a sort of safety school; you get a much higher fraction of incompetents at companies like this.

You don’t see them at startups or at companies with solid technical reputations.

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

#239

Post by blackstrips »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #145
anon84598 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 peop…

As a guy I almost always say “Can I have ...” because there is no guarantee they can fulfill the request. Phrasing it as a question seems more appropriate somehow.

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

#240

Post by __bjoernd »

ravenstine wrote: post #35
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?

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…

Let's focus on the 'cooolest thing' questions as the others are indeed useless in an interview. The whole point of this question is to see if you are excited about something you did and if this excitement resonates with the interviewer/the company. At this point you're trying to see if you and the job match in any way. If your excitement doesn't match expectations, then eventually you might not end up happy with the job. By all means, don't answer what your think they want to hear, but what you really find cool.
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