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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

#301
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'm not worrying about corner cases here. Theranos is an exception. But someone coming from a startup that died? Yeah, they can talk about it, and I'd like them to talk about how they saw it in an honest way.

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

#302
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…

But how does not having an exiting hobby make them an asshole?

Why did you correlate those? They're in the same comment, but not dependent or related. I know plenty of assholes with fantastic hobbies.

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

#303

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…

I wouldn't use these questions but they're usually coming from interviewers who are trying to have a sense of you as a person/get you out of your shell. (Except the "Where do you see yourself in 10 years" question. That's used to figure out if you want to be management. I have never given a fully honest answer to this question my whole career, and the right answer usually can be found in the job ad.)

Talk about something that you can sound excited/relatable talking about. Friends, family, volunteer work, that all works.

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

#304
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.

You raise a good point, but at least in my case, I don't think that's what's happening, and here's why. Bias tends to strike and morph into "no" before it ever hits that "getting to know you" phase. There have been plenty of studies about the effect of things like "black" names or gender on the initial screening.

A big part of the hiring process, at least at big companies, is taking a pile of 100 resumes and reducing it to a pile of 10 resumes, because there's no way you're interviewing 100 candidates. So 90% are eliminated before ever meeting, and bias is huge there.

But the bias starts even before that. The pipeline itself is biased. There are more men than women, more whites than non-whites (proportional to society as a whole). This is a problem that needs to be addressed at the society level, not the interview level, but it affects the interview level, because candidates who are "different" lead to unconscious bias.

For older technical people... well, I'm one of them. I'm 53, which means a lot of my social group is the same age. I freely job-hop and don't struggle to find work. I've never felt that my age was a bias against me. What I do see, and I see this a lot, is people my age who worked at the same company for 10-20 years and then lost their job, for whatever reason (usually reorgs or dying companies). Their skill set has become largely about intra-company specialization rather than broad industry skills. I watched my spouse go through this. She lost her job of 13 years in a buyout, and it took her six months to find something else. She had gotten deep in a narrow business field (international e-commerce analyst), and there just weren't many jobs for her, even in our busy town. We didn't want to move to the Bay area or New York, and while she could do generic business analysis or project management, without industry-specific skills, she's not much better than someone barely past entry level. Eventually she found a job that suited her long-built skills, but it took a while. And this story is common as dirt, it's happened to a lot of my friends.

That's how age bias works. It's not discrimination, it's just being unprepared for the job market after too many years in one place. Keep your skills up to date and switch jobs regularly, and age is just a number.

So when you talk about monoculturing and bias at the interview point... nah, that's not the problem point. The problems of bias prevent the interview from happening in the first place.

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

#305

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…

how do you know that "reproducible tests from small samples " would never work? Is there an equivalent of Shannons law that you could prove this.

Venous blood is simply venous blood. But capillary blood from fingertip samples contains variable amounts of interstitial fluid, and cell lysis is another issue there.

There are tests where it doesn't matter - consider the blood glucose - the variability of capillary samples vs venous samples is well understood and the introduced error sufficiently small compared to reference range.

But Theranos also tried electrolyte panels, and there you have a problem because the concentrations of ions in blood plasma are very different from the concentrations of ions inside cells. Both are tightly controlled in the healthy body. Slightly less than 50 % of blood is cellular matter, and even small amounts of lysis are sufficient to distort the numbers to render them clinically meaningless. You inevitably have lysis in capillary samples. Carreyrou talks about that in his book.

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

#306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or everyone works remotely, so no one hears their outbursts

[deleted]

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

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. It's a tragedy of the commons type situation. Ultimately, everyone would be better off if companies would tell candidates why they were rejected, but nobody does, because it avoids a slightly unpleasant situation for no immediate benefit. Short-termism at its finest.

Early on in my career I actually did give someone some advice post an interview and what to read up on etc. He sent me an email thanking me. Then six months later he thanked me saying he got a job at what is now a famous startup after studying up on the topics I recommended (algos and data structures in general and the basics in particular - he wasn't a CS major). I was proud of that one but man would it have been se…

Yes, it absolutely is short-termism. Denying candidates feedback they can use to improve means its harder for them to improve. Granted, not all will use such information to actually get better, but none will if you don’t give them the information to begin with. I think we can agree that having better candidates is, well, better in the long term, right?

Also, people who will react angrily aren’t going to have a favorable impression of the company anyway. Nor are people who are rejected without a real reason likely to. But, if you give someone a reason and they use it to actually get a job, that can stick with them. You can’t even buy that kind of goodwill. I guarantee you could contact that person you helped about a job opportunity in the future, and they would at least seriously consider it, unlike the tens of recruiter spams they probably get monthly.

As for proving one is trustworthy enough to warrant the interaction,” that’s your fundamental problem right there. Employers have all the power in the employment relationship, so they owe a duty to the weaker side, provided there is no material risk.

It takes probably 10 or 20 minutes to give someone who’s given you at least an entire day of their irreplaceable time a detailed feedback note. The candidate has invested far more time than any individual at the company. A couple of temporarily bruised egos and some hurt feelings is not a material risk. To anyone who reacts angrily, cut them off, block them from contacting you, and move on; you don’t want those people as candidates in the future, anyway. In other words, suck it up, buttercup.

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

#308
post #301

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'm not worrying about corner cases here. Theranos is an exception. But someone coming from a startup that died? Yeah, they can talk about it, and I'd like them to talk about how they saw it in an honest way.

Theranos was founded in 2003 and when people first started asking hard questions in 2012 or thereabouts they were marginalized. Holmes was the darling poster woman of Silicon Valley until the WSJ started investigating in October 2015. They were very much alive for over a decade.

Startuplandia has a way of attracting hucksters, unscrupulous businessmen and crazies with a firm disregard for what is physically possible. I notice that Ubeam was founded in 2011 and they are still around!

I once worked for an outfit where one founder was named party to an investor suit (he had awarded himself stock options after a clinical trial came out favourable) and the other was frankly incompetent and afflicted with cluster B personality disorders. It ended as well as one would have predicted. Failing startups because of founder personality and founder competence issues are unfortunately common, they are not corner cases at all, and for the person coming out of one the incidence is 100 %, but discussing such matters in an interview will torpedo your chances. No honesty for you, it's counterproductive for the jobseeker!

Seriously, Dave, if you were interviewing a candidate that had been working on the gluebot that Carreyrou mentioned in Bad Blood, how would he have to spin the story to get an offer out of you?

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

#309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I missing something, or do you mean they didn't know `myDict['key'] `?

Yes. One candidate remembered to do it that way after some searching, the other never did. Both started out by looping over the items in the dict and stopping at the correct one. Asking if there was a simpler way to get values out of dict didn't help. The third candidate really didn't get far enough to get the dict wrong so I counted them as well but they may have known how to do a dict lookup. Here is the exercise:…

I remember how I didn't believe that Fizzbuzz eliminates some crazy-high percentage of candidates until I started interviewing. I think most of the people I have interviewed are relatively smart people, but a lot of them really haven't had a lot of need to practice their algorithms, so they don't.

I've had people fail the "tell me if these two strings are anagrams" thing, with one person's response being to have 26 counters, one for each letter.

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

#310
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often ask interviewees about a project they worked on that was very successful, and why it was successful - what did they like about it? That's a good way to find those passion points. It's also a good way to find weak candidates without independence or leadership skills, because they can't really talk about their role in a big success - they didn't have much of a role, usually. A flip-side question is to ask about…

>they can't really talk about their role in a big success - they didn't have much of a role, usually. I would wager that at least half of candidates are just good humble team players. Your approach optimises for egotistical braggarts at the expense of normal people.

That raises a question: how can “good humble teammates” answer these types of questions in a way that makes them look good without lying?
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