I used to be super anxious and get brain freeze.
This doesnt' happen to me after I grinded leetcode for a couple of months.
you are anxious if you feel unprepared.
Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
31–40 of 1001 posts
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#32> In short, the findings suggest that companies are missing out on really good programmers because those programmers aren’t good at writing on a whiteboard and explaining their work out loud while coding. In most of my programming jobs, explaining your work was most of the job and writing code was less important. The whiteboard environment is a bit unnatural but I don’t want to hire someone who gets the right answer…
So have them explain it to you after they complete the problem with you out of the room.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#33Hmm...but if everybody is stressed out, then it equalizes and you're testing for skills again, just skills under pressure.
And having skills retained under pressure is actually a valuable trait in this industry. And at least at desirable companies, the process is designed to minimize false positive, it doesn't care that much about false negatives. This is by design.
My guess would be that they filter out orders of magnitude more people with poor resume-writing skills or that didn't go to the right school.
Although I do agree that interviews that you can/must practice for are silly and there's a lot oof that around.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#34It was made the clearest to me when I interviewed a colleague who had left to another company and two years later was interviewing to return. I knew he knew everything and had the skills for the job because, well, I know him, I’d worked with him before. He’d done this very job previously. Yet he still performed terribly in the interview and (rightly or wrongly) I had to base my evaluation on my knowledge of him rathe…
Having multiple respectable people that can vouch for you is a much better performance predictor than a 1-day interview. Same reason that recommendation letters are more important than GRE tests for the ones seeking PhD studies.
It does suck that it’s like this in an industry where you have a lot of non-neurotypical people though. People who are very good and capable but on the spectrum, or shy and reclusive, who really can’t do the networking and conference scene thing, etc. Wish there was a better answer than to tell them they just have to be wired differently.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#35Well they are auditions rather than interviews. So it seem to be accurate.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#36That experiment assumes that SWE job is exclusively about solving technical problems, so we can just "lock the candidate in a private room and let them solve it".
In reality human to human interactions, sometimes stressful, are part of the job. Customer & PM requirements, technical debates, giving feedback, explaining your technical solutions, etc. are common.
Maybe part of the problem is the education that does not prepare people to reality of the job.
Note: I do realize that SWE interviews suck, and I'm not trying to defend them. Just making comment on the study.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#37Engineers tend to over-focus on correctness. I’ve run hiring process in the past where over a year we interviewed around 50 engineers. Feedback from our own engineers involved in the process would often be like “Seems like a nice guy. But his solution to the challenge - one he’d never seen before - had a bug in it! And the solution was just O(2^n) and failed to notice the O(n^2) solution. Even though I glared at him a lot and kept distracting him with hints” ... I’m exaggerating for effect of course but some form of that would happen often
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#38This can be said of all interviews, not just tech. It’s hard for great many people to put themselves out there. I mean interview itself is a performance, isn’t it?
Having said that communication and interpersonal skills are big part of most jobs even in tech. We hardly develop software in isolation these days.
I don’t know about other industries, but in Tech there are some really inexperienced interviewers out there, who’re impulsive and lacks discipline in conducting objective and meaningful assessment.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#39I hire for industrial IT, and being able to handle the anxiety of a high-pressure situation with grace (e.g. mill down, losing tens of thousands of dollars a minute) is an important factor. No one expects miracles, but you need to be able to keep your cool and work the problem, not waste time fighting with your own rising anxiety.
Seeing how they deal with a stressful situation is an integral part of the interview in my opinion, and I imagine it is a feature for any IT role where that is the case. Standard dev roles, or other roles where time-based stresses aren't as prevalent, may be different.
Only yesterday I had a candidate bow out 10 minutes into the whiteboarding exercise, which is probably best for both the individual and the company if that kind of situation is untenable for them.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#40Multiple discussions about this on HN today, that's good. Maybe it will lead to the pendulum swinging back a bit.
Interviewers need to do their due diligence. Coding tests can have their place when interviewing for certain kinds of positions, especially for new grads and entry level positions. In the end nothing can replace checking references and looking into a person's work experience.
There is no algorithms and data structure whiteboarding test that can differentiate between a junior and a senior developer. Being senior is a product of acquired wisdom, not just skill. And in fact senior devs can easily bomb out a whiteboarding test because we're further from university CS experience.