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Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study

news.ncsu.edu

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Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study

#101

Post by jacinda »

ipnon wrote: post #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.

Given that women seem to be around twice as likely to suffer from anxiety as men, this is a result I was not at all surprised to see.

- https://www.webmd.com/women/news/20160606/women-more-prone-t...

Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study

#102

Post by Apocryphon »

twicetwice wrote: post #46

Interesting. 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…

or Model U.N.

Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study

#103

Post by starpilot »

Current SWE interviews seem extraordinarily effective. They've produced corporations that dominate our lives, with systems that have unimaginable capabilities. Their profits currently dwarf other companies such that the S&P500 is basically a tech company index. More companies will adopt hiring practices like these as the applicants become more competitive. SpaceX has grueling all-day multiround tech-like interviews like this, whereas Boeing just does 1 hour with 2 managers. The effect on employee quality is clear.

Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study

#104

Post by gwbas1c »

twicetwice wrote: post #46

Interesting. 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 ... it sounds like I've been thinking sensibly about it.

I've always structured my interviews to weed that kind of thing out.

Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study

#105

Post by jasonlotito »

klodolph wrote: post #19

> 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…

> explaining your work was most of the job and writing code was less important.

That's not what is being asked. It's explaining your thought process while actively doing the work in an "unnatural" environment.

> The whiteboard environment is a bit unnatural

I don't know anyone that codes on a whiteboard.

> but I don’t want to hire someone who gets the right answer if they can’t explain it to me.

Again, that's not what is being asked. They are being asked to explain their work before they get an answer.

Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study

#106

Post by renewiltord »

erentz wrote: post #34
whatever1 wrote: post #21

Earlier 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.

That’s really not a problem. If you think about it, everyone wants to help their network by default. And in startups, you care about outcomes. It doesn’t really matter if you’re shy or gregarious if you can make the crucial thing.

It’s a big company problem, not a startup problem.

Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study

#107

Post by jkubrynski »

I always care about explaining to the candidate how the interview will look like, and what are the most important elements I care about. When you skip this part, the candidate has no idea if for example during live coding, you care about the results, the code quality, IDE shortcuts fluency, etc. The feedback after the interviews proves it is a game-changer.

Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study

#108

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

The corollary may be that anyone with low social anxiety is likely to do better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Fox_effect

I'm genuinely curious - do whiteboarding and code exercises mititgate this at all?

Clearly there has be some minimal standard of ability. But given two similar performers, do performance-interviews favour those who project confidence? Or is there no influence on outcomes?

Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study

#110

Post by RandallBrown »

erentz wrote: post #11

It 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 interviewed someone that several of my coworkers had worked with before, and spoke very highly of. He even was my current manager's manager at their last job together.

He kinda blew the interview. He did okay, but not even close to the level of experience he had.

It was very obvious he was nervous, so we hired him anyway. No regrets.

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