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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

#191

Post by Frost1x »

decafninja wrote: post #41
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 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…

>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 of them being great engineers.

Im fairly confident that's at least part of the dominance of this approach in big tech. If the tech companies can't collude with no-hire agreements (as they have in the past) to prevent developers from jumping ship to seek raises (i.e. introducing direct anticompetitive barriers) they can collude on an unspoken agreement to raising the barrier to entry, making the labor market less mobile and therefore, artificially decreasing competition. It would be pretty difficult at this point to make a case that the current hiring trends are intentionally colluded anticompetitive labor market practices but the end result is the same.

I say part of the reason because the mess that is the current hiring process is really a multifaceted win approach for big tech and loss approach for most of the labor force.

I suspect if you had a large movement of mid-senior level developers that wanted to shift positions at the same time and began refusing businesses participating in this practice, the industry might be forced to make reasonable changes.

The issue is that our industry has no labor organization and the probability of a critical mass of labor independently making such a fundamental shift (especially in the current economic client) is near zero.

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

#192

Post by decafninja »

MattGaiser wrote: post #161
ironman1478 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I think just having a rock solid understanding of the basics will help much more than trying to grind questions and memorize patterns. It isn’t about memorizing patterns, but about hopefully spotting the exact question. A friend is currently interviewing for a FAANG and the recruiter flat out told him that his best chance of passing was to do a pile of previously seen questions for that FAANG and hopefully he gets…

I think it's both.

If all the celestial bodies align and your luck is through the roof, you'll get exact problems you've solved before with the optimal solutions ingrained in your mind.

But second best is you'll get problems that are at least similar and you are familiar with the patterns, tricks, and gimmicks to go about tackling it, instead of having to try to think up a solution completely from scratch.

Horrible luck? It's a question you've seen and practiced but your brain freezes and you can't remember how you solved it. Or something you've seen and earmarked to practice, but couldn't get to it before the interview day. This has happened to me.

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

#193

Post by JamesBarney »

aswanson wrote: post #147
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…

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?

They instead use credentials. Where did you go to school, what was your gpa, where was your residency, what law firm did you work for, how likable are you.

Yes tech interviews could be much better but other industries hiring process is just as if not more broken than ours.

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

#194

Post by leafboi »

MattGaiser wrote: post #169
leafboi wrote: post #159

Earlier 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.

But they're not aware that the filter is just anxiety.

Google is basically using anxiety to filter good candidates and eliminate false positives which works in a sense but is still highly illogical.

Why not use a technical filter to filter for technical candidates? Anxiety seems like a pointless filter.... how does that even eliminate false positives?

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

#197

Post by Clubber »

chpmrc wrote: post #138

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 proble…

The funny thing to me is that Google is known for this sort of thing, they also created a product that makes the need to memorize all this stuff obsolete.

Here's the truth that nobody wants to believe: you will never know how good someone you've never seen perform will perform until they actually perform.

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

#198

Post by proverbialbunny »

daenz wrote: post #7
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.

People can smell desperation, and rightly or wrongly, it pushes them away.

This is one of the things I look for when I'm being interviewed. Does the company want me to be desperate?

Some companies will only hire those who are desperate and will do anything. I assume, hopefully correctly, that those are the companies not worth working for, so instead I use the interview opportunity to get better at interviewing. Because these companies want to take advantage of their employees, I do not feel bad wasting their time.

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

#199

Post by ericskiff »

I experienced this personally as I bombed a whiteboard interview because I'd been studying scala to work with them and programming a side project in C, and literally blanked on simple ruby syntax and idioms when I started to panic. When we started our own consultancy made 2 simple rules:

* Give people a take-home test that mimics the real work we do.

* Pay them to do it.

It's amazing how many candidates we find that are great at the actual work we need to do, and happy to do it, and how many people it weeds out who wouldn't be happy doing our normal work.

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

#200

Post by closeparen »

chpmrc wrote: post #138

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 proble…

>for a certain company

But the same skill is transferable across arbitrarily many companies. This is why many prefer interviews to take-home tests, so that they do not invest too much time in any particular company.

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