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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

#131

Post by jacinda »

zelly wrote: post #88

I fear there's a movement to get rid of leetcode interviews and I'm against it. What's the alternative? We go back to "you have to look the part", nepotism, credentialism, and other such BS in other industries. A data structures and algorithms test is fair and objective. You can objectively get all the challenges correct and then there's little reason to not hire you. Compare that to interviewing for, say, an investm…

One alternative is providing candidates with a problem to work on for a few hours on their own (have them bring their own laptop, allow them access to Google and their own development environment), then have them walk you through their solution.

Do this as part of the interview and not something they have to do in their "spare time" at home. It's not uncommon for large companies to do all-day interviews anyway, so a way to structure this can be to have the interviewee come in in the morning, provide them the problem and allow them to ask any questions they might have (as if it was a real work problem), then allow them the morning to work on it.

Then in the afternoon you can review the solution and ask them to talk through how they arrived at it and what their thoughts were during the process.

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

#132

Post by MattGaiser »

Judgmentality wrote: post #77
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 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.

He isn’t advocating it. He is just saying that you must play the system as it is.

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

#133

Post by pantaloony »

weego wrote: post #16
bpodgursky wrote: post #3

Uh, maybe at times, but I assure you -- I've interviewed some VERY confident, VERY incompetent software dev candidates.

You're conflating the personality traits of the interviewee with criticism of the generally accepted 'best practice' of interviewers. On my experience far too many companies are using processes that select for entirely the wrong criteria.

I think it’s pretty funny that HN constantly promotes articles about how shitty tech hiring is, and the threads are always a mix of workers agreeing and then managers often also agreeing but 100% confident that their hiring process works well and weeds out enormous numbers of faking bozos. It’s like, ok but almost none of you have useful actual data to back up your process and you can’t all be anywhere near as good as you think if hiring is, in fact, broken.

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

#134

Post by kritiko »

gwbas1c wrote: post #104
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.

I'd be interested to hear more about how you do that, and what you try to select for instead.

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

#135

Post by leafboi »

DrPhish wrote: post #39

I 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…

Yeah, devs that work for me also work in a critical environment such as yours.

As soon as an issue is raised by our clients, they immediately kick off a 40 minute long timer and put a physical whiteboard in front of us asking us to solve the whiteboard problem in front of them in under an hour. All the while the client is physically behind us commenting on our code and watching our every move as we paint the whiteboard with a solution. This is literally what happens to me and my engineers on the Job. All of our code happens on the whiteboard (we don't use editors or keyboard or mice!.)

The only thing we need to deliver to our client is a picture of our code on the whiteboard along with some trivial complexity analysis and our client pays us money for coding under pressure.

Our interviews just consists of me doing the exact same thing as what happens on the job and therefore our interviews are 100% identical to our real life coding problems.

When science tells someone that the interview process they've been conducting for years is essentially wrong people have to sort of remake reality and their own reasoning to justify the science rather than admit fault. Obviously, this isn't what's happening with me or you in this case.... the interview process at my company is 100% identical to real world scenarios so I'm good.

I've always been telling everyone I know since before this article that I interview for anxiety not useless technical skills; anxiety is what determines whether a developer is great or not.

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

#136

Post by deedubaya »

I just went through an job hunt. I've been in tech for nearly two decades, and tech hiring has gotten definitively worse. It was never good to begin with, but it has become more painful from a candidate's perspective.

Employers are so focused on the well shared "the worst hire is a bad hire!" that they implement obtuse and ineffective hoops candidates must jump through in attempt to weed out "bad" candidates. This results in hiring those who survive the process, not those that will do the best work.

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

#137

Post by TheTruestKyle »

renewiltord wrote: post #106
erentz wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do have data on this? My experience is that everyone is selfish.

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

#138

Post by chpmrc »

It seems pretty obvious to me that this kind of interviews are simply there to assess how much you want to work for a certain company. As in: would you be willing to study for months, go through mock interviews, read books, test your skills etc. to have a shot at working for us? Even though the majority of that stuff will likely have zero impact on your day to day work?

That's all there is, really. I've had no problems in the past implementing complex algorithms, if I needed it to get the job done. Today I'd barely be able to tell you their names. But to get to the point of knowing most of them by heart and being able to implement them with no help whatsoever, would take a lot more work and dedication, knowing that you'll probably end up not retaining most of it anyway.

The same system is used in competitive sports and academic tests. They mostly measure how much you really want to be part of that league/team/school, rather than whether you'll do well or not. If there was a perfect correlation between pre and post entrance test performance there wouldn't be PIPs, performance based layoffs etc.

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

#140

Post by quicklime »

nostrademons wrote: post #58
jcadam wrote: post #6

Huh, 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.

That can help a lot with anxiety. If you think it's pointless and you'll never get the job, you have a chance to just have fun with it and do what you can do. My first time interviewing with Google (in 2008), the press was reporting that they were in a hiring freeze, I had no big names on my resume, so I figured it was basically hopeless and I'd just do the best I could and enjoy my trip to Silicon Valley. After my i…

I also treated my Google interview as a free trip to the Bay Area, and used it to visit a friend and do touristy stuff. Wasn't expecting an offer, but got one and stayed there for many years.

I've read advice that you shouldn't schedule your interview on a Friday, but that's exactly what I did so that I could spend the following weekend in SF :)

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