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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

#211

Post by proverbialbunny »

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.

I got my first salary job this way. After that I did my typical analysis seeing if I couldn't learn from the situation and improve beyond it.

My conclusion was if I interview to gain interview experience, not to get the job, I do far better, and I gain interview experience. This is the local maxima I found from that, but there could be better.

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

#212

Post by shadowgovt »

To a first approximation, that conflation is fine; software engineering is stressful work where the tasks to be solved often involve known and unknown unknowns, and it's important to observe how a candidate performs under pressure because the job will include pressure.

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

#214

Post by aswanson »

lostcolony wrote: post #162
aswanson wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

So you're advocating a license to practice software development? Because the three fields you mention are all licensed.

Sure, why not.

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

#215

Post by rmellow »

The best technical interview I've had:

- Take home: 2 days to read a newly released Deep Learning paper.

- On site: explain the paper to the hiring manager.

- Evaluation: (1) Did the candidate understand it? (2) Did the candidate go farther, and look into the cited papers and understand that? (3) Can they explain Deep Learning concepts and talk their way through related problems?

In 5 months of searching for a job, this felt like the most relaxed interview, because it was really a conversation between people in the field. It was also the most demanding and interesting job I encountered in these five months. I got the job, but this happened especially because the manager actually did the work of respecting my experience and talking to me, instead of going for the traditional and "safe" BS.

An opposite experience:

Technical Interviewer asks me whiteboard SQL question. I answer it, only to be corrected on a minor point. Turns out, when I tried it out on my own, I was actually correct. This person was to be my manager.

I did get an offer from them, but this and other red flags made me decline.

Takeaway for managers who actually care about hiring well:

- Don't force your candidate through one off tasks that don't represent their day to day. Is your Data Scientist really just running SQL queries and optimizing computational complexity of their algorithms? Isn't the main point that they can think critically?

- Hasn't their previous experience shown they can code? Their Github? Sure, give them a (quick) take home project if you really want to make sure. In the rare case they faked their way through the whole thing and you really couldn't tell after talking to them for a few hours, you will surely notice in the first few weeks.

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

#216

Post by ngngngng »

gregkerzhner wrote: post #111

The interesting thing is that Leetcode style problems encourage your code to go into the opposite direction that most production code should go. The game of Leetcode is to write the most consise, clever function that solves the problem in a tricky way. Thats exactly the kind of code I would flag in a review - sure it might be super efficient and elegant, but good luck maintaining it a few months later. I would way ra…

This is an accurate view of take home assignments. Most of the take home assignments I've done were "supposed" to take 5 hours. Most of them too around 20.

The worst take home assignment I ever had was an extremely tricky brain teaser, the answer to which could not be found on google, and had to be done in the not very popular language this company used. So I not only had to write useless brain teaser code, but I couldn't do it in a language I was already comfortable with.

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

#217

Post by mgkimsal »

leafboi wrote: post #194
MattGaiser wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

it would seem it might be 'letting in' a whole load of people who don't have appropriate anxiety responses. There are some situations where anxiety is perfectly normal, and perhaps even useful, but if you screen out people who have normal anxiety, what impact does that have on your company operations and culture?

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

#218

Post by redisman »

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #184
MattGaiser wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Software engineers are not commanders or generals and it is NOT difficult to fire someone in the United States of America. Everyone in this industry has a at-will contract.

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

#219

Post by decafninja »

sleepyshift wrote: post #180
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'…

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…

This is something I find so disturbing, and I experience similar.

I feel extremely little of what I'm doing in my real, actual, job, helps me in advancing in my career. Unless maybe if I choose to stay at my current company until retirement lol.

Otherwise, why bother doing anything more than the bare minimum to get by at work? It would be a far better investment of time and effort to grind leetcode and practice for interviews, instead of going above and beyond to excel at my job. At least until I get into an "endgame company" where I feel it's worth staying long term.

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

#220

Post by candu »

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.

I've definitely repeated that line in the past to justify tech industry interviewing practices - but sometimes it goes beyond "setting a high bar" to something more toxic: an interviewer using the interview as a chance to show off how smart _they_ are, rather than assess the candidate; deliberately creating high-stakes "pressure cooker" environments because, you know, that's just how we work here and they should get used to it; and so on. These things then get rolled into the same justification: after all, we're an exclusive club of ultra-smart 10x ninja pirate Jedi, which of course means we should have the default assumption that others don't belong in this club.

I wonder now: for every "bad one" not let through by this sort of process, how many other "good ones" look at it and say "no thanks"? How many hear about this sort of hazing and are dissuaded from applying in the first place? How many experience it one too many times and just quit the industry altogether? How many of those "bad ones" are even objectively bad, and not just having a bad day or intimidated by a process rife with both intentional and unintentional hostility? In other words: are we actually assessing what we claim to assess with _any_ predictive accuracy, and is the collateral damage to company reputation and the pool of available candidates - a damage often hidden to the individual companies that impose this process - even worth it?

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