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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

#311

Post by scarejunba »

mattkrause wrote: post #292
scarejunba wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh ouch. That was not the intention but I can be socially awkward at times. Perhaps you can help me understand what I said that was wrong? Happy to adjust the way I communicate so long as I can express that it was writing out code that didn't work as opposed to architecture and/or technical communication.

For me, it has two problems. The tone has this anodyne corporate PR flavor: whiteboarding isn’t really collaborative (“our”), nor is it an “experience” in the way that, say, hang-gliding is. It’s also not particularly actionable. Obviously, it implies that you need to brush up on either a) algorithms, b) coding, or c) investigating a problem. However, you could just come out and say that. Some specific feedback on th…

I see. I used to do that but someone told me that telling them about books that were common knowledge just sounded condescending. What I’m trying to express here is also that we just failed to acquire positive signal. We recognize that our process is imperfect (and I say this) so I don’t want to tell them there’s a weakness or anything just a mismatch of expectations.

But point taken and I’ll bias back in that direction. Without any irony, thanks for the feedback ;)

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

#312

Post by pmiller2 »

eberkund wrote: post #235
pmiller2 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's pretty close to the point I was making. They call it the top 5% because 5% of people pass their interview. The company doesn't have any idea whether those people (out of the entire pool) are the best candidates to do the job they were hired to do, because the company probably doesn't measure that. And, they sure don't know that their "top 5%" is representative of the top 5% of all engineers. For starters, how do you measure that?

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

#313

Post by beat »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #308
beat wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

How to describe that? Simple, describe how management was setting up cage matches between competing development teams. I'm not saying "Don't blame management", not at all. I'm saying "bad management" is an insufficient answer. How did they go wrong? Playing dev teams off one another is a different problem than, say, insisting on using tech that isn't up to the task (a situation I've been in before), or an unwillingness to say no to the customer (a situation I've been in before, too).

Hell, I've talked openly in interviews about the problems with a project that I got fired from, and blamed both management and the customer in no uncertain terms. I fault myself mostly for not walking out on it. I still get job offers when talking about how I got fired by incompetent management of an out-of-control project. But part of that is that my story leads somewhere - it leads to my lessons learned, conditions I will no longer tolerate in a workplace, #1 of which is the bottomless budget.

So I care less about how you screwed up, or who or what you blame, and more about what you learned from the failure. Tell me that, and you win my heart.

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

#314

Post by beat »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #308
beat wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 should add, to get back to the idea of how a life scientist at Theranos would explain it... well, did you know you were doing something that couldn't be done? How did you feel about it? What did you do about it? Why did you stay/why did you leave? Did you feel your work was unethical?

Conceptually, Theranos was very exciting. I hope someone actually pulls it off someday. I can understand the attraction for a scientist.

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

#315

Post by beat »

rorykoehler wrote: post #291
beat wrote: 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.

Egotistical bragging is pretty easy to spot. Good team players are easy to spot, too - they're the ones giving credit to leadership and co-workers even for work they take personal pride in. When I see a candidate's eyes light up talking about the manager who led them through a challenge into success, I know they respect others, and that matters.

It's hard for a lot of people to speak well of themselves, which makes the whole interviewing process difficult much of the time. We're trained to a beat-down that gets called humility, but it's not. Asking about successes is a way past that - it's giving them permission to say something good about themselves.

But to be fair, a lot of what I'm after is inflated claims on a resume, which are common as dirt, because people are much more comfortable deceptively bragging on paper than they are in person.

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

#316

Post by beat »

pmiller2 wrote: post #310
rorykoehler wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

Assuming they did good, valuable work, then telling the truth is an excellent way to answer in a way that looks good without lying.

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

#317

Post by mdpopescu »

C1sc0cat wrote: post #275
mdpopescu wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... those types of questions are typically used as a filter. Yep, same here. > Anyone who skips those questions are rejected outright. Any company using these questions is rejected outright. I'm looking for someone who is willing to give me money for code, not a wife.

That's a one sided view of work and how team dynamics work. Please don't take this the wrong way but "presenting" in this way at an interview is not helping you.

My worldview might be skewed because I am normally looking for short contracts (6 months or less), not long term employment. I get bored with never-ending projects; I prefer projects with a clear finality. Given that, I am highly unlikely to care much about team dynamics - I want to do a (good) job and get paid for it.

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

#318

Post by pmiller2 »

beat wrote: post #316
pmiller2 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Assuming they did good, valuable work, then telling the truth is an excellent way to answer in a way that looks good without lying.

But, then, how do you show "leadership" and "ownership" and all those other wonderful things interviewers are supposedly looking for? And it's not just "good, valuable work" they're looking for. Fixing bugs is "good, valuable work," but I get the feeling interviewers don't want to hear about how many bugs you've fixed.

I often have a hard time putting my accomplishments into context (indeed, even seeing them as "accomplishments," because they're simply what I'm supposed to do).

(Incidentally, I hate the word "ownership" in this context. You don't own anything you can't take with you. Try taking work you did for a company with you when you leave.)

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

#319

Post by cirgue »

rorykoehler wrote: post #285
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.

No you don't. I know you don't because you have no idea who the top 5% of applicants are. Not after interviews, not after 6 months on the job, not even 10 years in the job. You can't distill something as complex as humans working in teams that form a part of a larger organisation into a single number like that. That's not how the world works. For example Bob was doing great work but then his wife cheated on him and h…

You're completely right of course, we hire people who we believe are the top 5% of the applicant pool. The point remains the same: what a company says about their hiring standards has little or no bearing on what their standards actually are in the context of the entire universe of software engineers (or any other field)

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

#320

Post by tathougies »

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?

Who has taught people today to lack confidence? I found my first software job out of high school by simply lying about my experience. I believed I was capable of doing the job advertised, so I said that I had ten years of experience (the requirement). I was called back, interviewed, and hired.

What is the big deal here? If you believe you can do it, then who cares what the job description says; just apply. If you don't believe you can do it, apply anyway. There is literally no drawback to applying for a job and there is little draw back to lying about it. When I was finally offered the job, I told the HR person that I had lied on my resume, and he said that he admired by chutzpah.

No one is going to fire you for coming clean after being given a promise of employment. And, if they do decide not to offer the job to you, you still haven't lost anything.

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