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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

#171

Post by lostcolony »

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.

Why is it a bad thing? It's off the cuff, and likely less filtered than a prepared statement. If they end up somewhere sensible, then your interview process actually worked; you found someone who when confronted with a new problem, is able to think sensibly about it, even in an interview situation.

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

#172

Post by _qulr »

GaryNumanVevo wrote: post #100
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…

Stress when interviewing is similar, but not the same as on the job stress. One major factor, with a job: you're still getting paid. I think the economic anxiety one faces is pretty stark, if you fail a job interview you're going to be unemployed until you can pass the next one.

Yes, interview stress is completely different. You have to commit a pretty egregious offense on the job to get fired on the spot, but literally anything you do during a job interview can cause you to lose the job.

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

#173

Post by eckza »

loktarogar wrote: post #69

A company flew me out to San Francisco to interview once. On my way into the building in the morning I was mugged (almost right outside). I told my interviewer, they took me to the lunch room to sit down and compose myself. "Take as long as you like", they said. 2 minutes later they came to collect me for my interview. I was a wreck. Worst interview of my life. Didn't get the job. I am pretty sure I would have if I w…

Oh my god. I'm so sorry... that had to have been very, very traumatizing.

It sounds like a net win that you didn't get that job, for multiple reasons. I wouldn't want to work somewhere that I'd gotten mugged on the way in for an interview, nor for a company that didn't give me as much time as I needed to collect myself.

The closest I've gotten to that, was that I had an interview set up with a company in Saginaw, MI, that I was really excited about. I did a quick internet search to learn more about their company, and the first thing that popped up was that a few months prior, an employee had been shot in a drive-by in their parking lot.

I ended up cancelling the interview.

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

#174

Post by pmiller2 »

alkibiades wrote: post #84
goostavos wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

idk if it’s just luck. i’ve had loops in college where i failed them. but then later in my career i had times where i got every company i interviewed at. Excessive preparation was the key difference. I do think luck plays a big part but i don’t think it’s the only factor, or even the biggest. (maybe 2nd biggest)

Even when you prepare for months, your preparation needs to be related to what you'll actually see in the interview to pay off. Because few companies actually tell people what to expect in the interview, even preparation involves luck.

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

#175

Post by kube-system »

derivagral wrote: post #91
kube-system wrote: post #28

I find it interesting that academia often points out that skills interviews have a soft-skills bias, but rarely do I see them consider that this may be a feature and not a bug. > “Our study suggests that a lot of well-qualified job candidates are being eliminated because they’re not used to working on a whiteboard in front of an audience.” This is a common daily task at any company I've ever written software at. Peop…

I've had the opposite experience. In >10 years of software, I've never written code on a whiteboard outside of an interview. Systems layout, designs, code pathing, sure; but never real, compilable code. I agree with the last point, but I don't think either of us can tie our anecdotes to it.

There is something to be said for the soft-skills evaluation being relative to the expectations of the job position, sure.

I'm saying: I find it odd that I rarely see these types of studies discussing the merits of that nuance. Especially when the idea of differentiating between soft and hard skills is not something that would be foreign to the average interviewer.

"Interviews are 100% for soft skills and technical evaluations are 100% for hard skills" seems to be a common assumption which I'd argue is false. Few tasks a developer does is purely a hard or a soft skill, there's always some overlap.

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

#176

Post by commandlinefan »

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.

I'm not sure he's advocating for it, just pointing out that it's true.

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

#177

Post by simonbarker87 »

I had my first coding test for an interview recently (second dev job but a decade of other experience), over a video call, shared screen in a pre built AWS in browser IDE and I assumed I tanked it because it didn’t go perfectly. In hindsight it went like a typical 40 minutes of coding, I started down a path, didn’t quite work, had to console log to see what was up, tried a new tact and then it worked. They were clearly looking to make sure I had some basics of Angular down but also that I could problem solve in the moment and see where I went wrong.

I enjoy interviews (I like meeting people and chatting about their projects and problems) and I think running a VC backed company for nearly a decade has set me up well for detaching my performance in the interview to my self worth/abilities (ie. I’ve grown a pretty thick skin).

Ultimately it comes down to “can I do the job?” and “is their process set up to accurately reflect that?”. If the answer to the first is no then that’s cool, I’d probably have a miserable time in the role and under perform even to my actual level. If the answer to number two is no then I probably don’t want to work for them anyway as they are unable to accurately measure and analyse prospects/opportunities beyond just hiring.

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

#178

Post by president »

Which is why you get a lot of over-confident engineers who are good at memorizing data structure/algo questions and talking BS but are terrible at real day-to-day SE work. The modern tech interview passes over so many great potential engineers.

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

#179

Post by northern-lights »

robgibbons wrote: post #82

Bad interviews make for bad hires. Bad hires can cost a company more than not hiring at all. Whenever I've conducted interviews in the past, I've gone out of my way to help the candidates relax. Need to use Google? Go ahead, I do literally all the time. Need some advice, something explained? Just ask, that's why we have peers. Nobody writes code on a whiteboard, with no docs, with three people watching, silently taki…

>Bad interviews make for bad hires. Bad hires can cost a company more than not hiring at all.

But is that really true? There are plenty of companies who take a Fire Better approach (Amazon, Netflix to name a few) who seem to be doing just fine.

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

#180

Post by sleepyshift »

goostavos wrote: post #74
decafninja wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

I'm in a similar position - a tech lead role at a Big N - and have recently been doing some interviews for senior roles at FAANG. The most frustrating thing is knowing I can't really leverage anything I've learned over the past 7 years of my career in the interview, at least at the early stages. I've been "studying" Leetcode after work for a month or so but always seem to make stupid mistakes under the time pressure of the interview. I don't want to spend my entire career at one company, but it's clear I'll need to be very lucky and/or practice much harder on my own time if I want anything like a similar position/salary elsewhere.
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