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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

#221

Post by jcadam »

sim_card_map wrote: post #210
nostrademons wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

wait so Google did the entire red black tree interview thing again, even though you already worked for them for 6 years? lol this industry is hopeless

Yea, the "interview" should have been nothing more than a review of past performance appraisals and a conversation to assess motivation/goals/etc.

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

#222

Post by jariel »

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…

It's fine if you believe this is true for your environment, but that's really quite rare.

I can see 'high pressure' particularly in Devops, but that's a different kind of problem solving.

The headline speaks perfectly to my intuition after many years in the trade, and that we are 'measuring confidence'.

Note that they assumed that interviews were set up to be fair - they are not - and that's actually ok. If a company has preferred candidates, it's perfectly within their right to do that (so long as 'preferred' doesn't just mean 'gender' or whatever).

It's been a while since doing this for me, but when I do it again, the 'on site' will be a page with some neat problems, some Q&A and then they take basically as long as they want to go through them, the interviews start when they are ready and you just go over 'what they did' and then interview for the rest of the issues.

'Having someone watch you solve a problem' is very specific social condition.

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

#223

Post by mpalczewski »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #115

I 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…

My experience has been quite opposite.

I worked for a FANG and conducted over 100 interviews. Most of that time I thought I was asking really hard questions and wasn't sure I would have been able to answer them if I hadn't seen the question before.

I later interviewed at a different FANG, surprised myself and answered harder questions than I typically gave and answered them better than most of the people we hired.

Not sure what to make of that.

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

#224

Post by scrozier »

marcinzm wrote: post #203
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…

You're missing the quality they're actually testing for: ability to study and dedicate yourself to a task. Or in other words work ethic. The algorithms don't matter but the fact that you can spend months learning them is an important skill. Intelligence is less important for success than work ethic which is why work ethic is tested for so much. Specifically, work ethic and ability to learn in a related domain as, for…

In my experience, certainly no interviewers think that they're screening for "ability to study and dedicate yourself to a task." In being on both sides of the table for more than thirty years, I have never heard an interviewer mention that.

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

#225

Post by annoyingnoob »

This is why I stopped writing code. After I bombed a bunch of interviews I threw up my hands in disgust, it wasn't me it was the process.

One thing that stands out to me about the process is that everyone gets the same interview, doesn't matter if you are fresh out of school or have a lifetime of experience. Experience counts for nothing in these interviews. Can you design twitter in 40 minutes, thinking through every possible failure mode and issue along the way, or not? Apparently, I can't or not well enough. I think these companies really want folks with great public speaking and whiteboard skills - I'm kind of an introvert and that is a challenge for me where the day-to-day work is not.

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

#226

Post by aswanson »

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?

I had a guy ask me the number of hardware interrupts there were on a processor I used 4 years prior and what the exact part number was on an interview. Just incredibly stupid questions.

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

#227

Post by solidasparagus »

mathattack wrote: post #213

This is why internships are so important. Sometimes it’s still hard to tell after 10 weeks. It’s very naive to think we will know after a 30 minute interview.

I don't think people are naive, they just don't have a better solution. Most established professionals are not interested in a 10 week trial period after which they might be back on the job market.

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

#228

Post by goliathDown »

tsumnia wrote: post #56
codemonkey-zeta wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate their effort to use science to support the narrative that tech interviews suck, because I do think they suck and need to change, but isn't N=48 a little small? Also, if it was only undergraduates or graduates, who's to say their performance is indicative of the rest of the tech workforce?

The small N is addressed by the authors. To acquire a larger N would mean recruiting more participants, which would require either compensation/extra credit or rely on people volunteering ~1 hour of their time. Likewise, collecting that data would require time and money. It is an time/resource issue with human research. You can require a small N and get some results or require a large N and not have enough funding to…

I'm curious as to what makes a good size of N. To me, N=10 would be do small, N=48 seems a little under what is should be, and N=100 seems sufficient, but I don't have a real basis for this (in fact, it's probably because of the original count that had me settle on a min and max of 10 and 100). Maybe a better question is: What are factors that studies consider, besides the logistics you rightly pointed out, in determining a sufficient N?

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

#229

Post by MattGaiser »

sjburt wrote: post #208

I think this is obvious, but look at the alternatives. * Resumes can be exaggerated, falsified, or perhaps more often often leave out important details or relevant experience. Reviewers often also put unconscious emphasis on formatting or style (I had one colleague that I swear would accept anything in Computer Modern). * Take-home projects (if not carefully designed) can be a considerable time sink and reviewers may…

Given all the time I would need to pour into interview prep, take home projects are far cheaper. Leetcode isn't a time sink?

I don't see a bias towards language or code style as a problem as the work will be done in a particular language. Style can be solved with a style guide. Obviously they cannot be judged as harshly as in in company code review, but because language is a job requirement anyway and style can be a set standard, it seems to be better than most choices.

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

#230

Post by oxymoron »

ironman1478 wrote: post #98
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 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 had a similar experience. I just accepted an offer for a senior engineering position at a FAANG, and only got a few basic coding questions. Out of eight hours of interviewing, I think they spent six hours on behavioral questions.
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