I think this is known for years. Is't it?
It's been known, but there are a lot of naysayers as shown by people who still conduct this type of interview.
Science serves as definitive evidence which side is right or wrong.
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
#182I think we need to come up with effective alternative to whiteboard interviews. Who’d be interested in forming a working group to come up with something?
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#183Earlier 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…
Tech seems to be the only field that does these dumb types of interviews. Accounting, law, medicine etc seems to work well without these filters. Why are tech interviews so stupid?
The other fields have various ways to filter out people.
* Accounting has CPA exams/certifications
* Law has the bar exams/law school
* Medicine has the USMLE/medical school
Tech prides itself on the fact that "anyone" can be a great tech worker regardless of how you get there - read some books, attend a bootcamp, go to college, or even just start banging out code on the keyboard until you gain experience
Unfortunately, that means that the companies have to have some filter
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've been arrogant for years and you know what? So have I. I and many, many people in this industry have been doing this for years. What's different from you and many other people is that you admit and face your bias rather than justify it. I'm seriously curious what google interview board members have to say about this study. People like Gayle Laakmaan have been saying things to justify the whole process for years…
From what I have read from Gayle Laakmaan, they know this throws away many good engineers, but it is acceptable to them because it doesn’t let bad ones through.
This is essentially the point of a lot of hiring and performance evaluation theory.
E.g. it's acceptable (but not ideal) not to promote talented commanders. It's catastrophic to promote someone to General who isn't ready or is unsuited.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#185It 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 proble…
Really? I didn’t study at all for the interview for my current job (although I did put up with some very broken HR software for a few weeks while getting hired.)
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#186I conducted a couple hundred interviews for my first FAANG employer, and I was constantly amazed at the percentage of candidates with years of Microsoft or Facebook experience on the resumes who apparently did not know how to program. I always thought, 'huh, guess I know why they quit after 3 years, amazing that they all lasted this long." Then I interviewed for another company and utterly bombed. It became suddenly…
You've been arrogant for years and you know what? So have I. I and many, many people in this industry have been doing this for years. What's different from you and many other people is that you admit and face your bias rather than justify it. I'm seriously curious what google interview board members have to say about this study. People like Gayle Laakmaan have been saying things to justify the whole process for years…
Gayle Laakman specifically has a business empire dedicated to help people get through the process. Regardless of the actual merits of the process her opinion is going to be biased.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> My takeaway, I guess—parents, make your kids do debate!
He's encouraging parents to make their kids learn this skillset. He is absolutely advocating for it.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#188Earlier 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 don't understand this obsession with leetcode style questions specifically. I just got a job at a FAANG on an algorithm heavy team and all they asked me was linked lists, some basic graph questions, and some basic (and I mean really basic, high school non-calc level) vector math. I think just having a rock solid understanding of the basics will help much more than trying to grind questions and memorize patterns.
By comparison, in a recent FAANG interview for general dev, I was asked to reconstruct a BST from preorder and postorder traversals (Leetcode 889), and also to design a thread pool that is aware of dependencies among tasks. It sounds like the experience really varies!
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#189That 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…
How right you are particularly when a role has any tie to a production support situation. Not only do you need to solve the problem, but you need to do so when other people are weighing on with their opinions on what might be wrong, escalating when it's not solved fast enough, demanding answers you might not have or asking you to defend the ones you do, particularly if they answers are ones no one wants to hear.
This is the genesis of the infamous behavioral interviews where people ask about conflict resolution skills, how and when you'd escalate problems you can't solve, name a time when you had a problem and how you solved it, etc.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#190Earlier 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'…
What is the lowers/raises approach? Google isn’t up to the job (pun was not initially intended, but here we are).
Lowers/raises the bar. As part of interview feedback an interviewer is supposed to rate the interviewee as raises/meets/lowers.
Typically, just one lowers in an a loop of 6 interviews is sufficient to reject. On the other hand, a loop with all "meets" isn't a sufficient either. It needs about 3-4 "raises" to overcome just one "lowers". With two "lowers" the candidate won't even make it to the debrief or worse the loop will be cut-short.
The bar-raiser (it's their job) are expected to specifically look for candidates who raise the bar. Raising the bar == better than 50% of "employees" (not job seekers) at their level. The rationale, when the bar-raiser program was created, was that the collective competency in a corporation should increase as more employees are inducted.
Source: I was a bar-raiser at Amazon; 400+ interviews, 300+ as bar-raiser, conducted hiring boot camp, bar-raiser trainings, trained bar-raisers.