I have found that what best predicts interview success for me is the ability to confidently give answers, even if they are nonsense. One of the problems is that interviewers often aren't sure of the answer either.
Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
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Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#72>All of the women who took the public interview failed, while all of the women who took the private interview passed.
Companies that are serious about avoiding gender discrimination in their hiring practices need to carefully consider what they are really looking for when certain candidates seem to have "the right stuff" after a whiteboard interview. We need more research in this area.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#73Huh, the only successful interviews I have are the ones where I'm burned out after a long, fruitless, frustrating job search. And so I walk in assuming the interview will be a waste of time and just not caring anymore. That's when I get an offer.
People can smell desperation, and rightly or wrongly, it pushes them away.
Some of this is like the Groucho Marx joke "I don't want to belong to any club that will have me". For companies, it's "I don't want to hire anyone that doesn't have a job". The thought being that if they were any good they'd have a job already.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#74It 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…
I feel in the tech industry, networking and knowing people only gets you so far - typically just to the whiteboard interview. Then you have to solve the leetcode problems just like everyone else. Especially so in larger companies. FWIW, all of my friends who somehow managed to get into FAANG or other top tech companies swear that were they to go through the interview again, odds are they would fail. This despite all…
I'm actually a little scared to leave my current FAANG gig for that exact reason tbh. I'm fairly certain I wouldn't make it back in the door without more leetcode grinding + repeated loops than I'm willing to do at this point in my career.
Plus, stack on top of that, I've seen how the sausage is made. I've done 90+ interviews on the other side. At the end of the day, it comes down to how lucky you got in the loop. I've seen some people written off for some bullshit reasons. Similarly, I'VE declined on people who're likely far, far, far more skilled than I am because of the lowers/raises approach and the narrow slice you're tasked with reviewing in the 50min you're given.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#75I 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…
This is certainly the most common rationalization.
But the reality is that the situations are very different and elicit very different responses.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#76The methodology: > For this study, researchers conducted technical interviews of 48 computer science undergraduates and graduate students. Half of the study participants were given a conventional technical interview, with an interviewer looking on. The other half of the participants were asked to solve their problem on a whiteboard in a private room. The private interviews did not require study participants to explai…
I appreciate their effort to use science to support the narrative that tech interviews suck, because I do think they suck and need to change, but isn't N=48 a little small? Also, if it was only undergraduates or graduates, who's to say their performance is indicative of the rest of the tech workforce?
> but isn't N=48 a little small?
Not when the effect is large. 48 people is fine when there is a 2x difference.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#77Interesting. I usually do pretty well in interviews and I've always attributed that to my four years on the debate team in high school. This tells me it might be even more true than I previously thought. Even when I'm nervous as hell, when you put me in front of a judge (interviewer), I click into "performance mode" where I project confidence even if I know what I'm saying is BS, let alone just a bit unsure. This is…
> That and debate gave me the ability to just start a sentence without knowing where it will end and then talk my way to a conclusion that sounds like it makes sense
You're effectively advocating for more bullshit. The problem is that this works in the first place - we shouldn't be rewarding it.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#78> 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…
I would definitely not want to work for you, I think there's something deeply ineffective when most of the job is explaining your code.
I say that as someone who cares a lot about writing easy to read code and has no problem explaining it. Also, I'm very bad at solving a problem while being required to think out loud.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#79It 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…
> If you want a job and good career progression the best advice has to be prioritize making friends with lots of people
Getting good at interviewing should also be a priority, and is doable.
Getting good at interviewing is largely about developing (a) genuine programming skill; and b) at least some people/communication skill.
When you have those skills, you have less anxiety about the interview, and can perform well.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Let's not forget that the type of work in this industry and hours needed in the name of cost savings hinders many peoples' desire for professional development work outside of work.
I don't know about most people but lately, at the end of the day when I make enough progress to meet expectations, the last thing I want to do is anything related to work anymore, even if it's an investment in myself. At some point my life takes precedent over my career.
If delivery expectations are reasonable (i.e. time requirements), I don't mind networking outside of work. I've worked in environments with reasonable expectations and environments with unreasonable expectations. My observation has been that environments with reasonable expectations are in decline in the name of competitiveness and cost cutting measures, passing costs to employees.
This industry is becoming significantly less enjoyable to work in and growing to a toxic point of hypercompetiveness at every layer. It's not healthy for those working in the industry.