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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

#261

Post by Apocryphon »

me551ah wrote: post #232
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…

If not algorithms then what would you use to test a generic programmer? You would have to setup a custom panel based on each candidate. A person who has only worked for PHP would need a different panel from someone who has worked on C++ all his life. Algorithms is language and framework agnostic. It doesn't matter if you work in embedded or data science. It doesn't matter if you code in C or Python. The same question…

Maybe they can figure out a less anxiety-inducing format for testing algorithmic knowledge instead of whiteboarding?

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

#262

Post by yks »

zelly wrote: post #88

I fear there's a movement to get rid of leetcode interviews and I'm against it. What's the alternative? We go back to "you have to look the part", nepotism, credentialism, and other such BS in other industries. A data structures and algorithms test is fair and objective. You can objectively get all the challenges correct and then there's little reason to not hire you. Compare that to interviewing for, say, an investm…

> A data structures and algorithms test is fair and objective.

Anything but! For starters, in 2020 brute-force solutions are not acceptable anymore. Then, there are often several working approaches and substantial percentage of interviewers will fail you just because you use the approach they are unfamiliar with.

But even if you implemented the optimal approach, if the interviewer disliked you as a person then they find a way to fail you regardless. "Sloppy code", "bad communication" - no fairness and objectiveness in those assessments.

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

#263

Post by redisman »

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…

At some rare companies people ask questions about real-world scaling which has been nice to leverage some actual knowledge but that's usually just a small part of the process and almost treated as a soft-skill which is kind of hilarious.

We just really want to hire a senior dev who can spit out highly optimized code that in the real-world would be handled by a stable open source library rather than people who have built stable systems.

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

#264

Post by u67583 »

leafboi wrote: post #159
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…

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…

She will just say that the process is designed to minimize false positives and the expense of more false negatives. A bad hire is more expensive than a no hire.

The problem is this isn't what gets you the smartest people on the planet. A small number might be interested in DS&A to that level, but most are not. They will learn enough to know how to google what they need and move on to what they are interested in. Smart people are constantly getting job offers from coworkers and bosses who move to other companies if they don't start their own.

The few smart people who do put in the effort necessary to go to the FAANG companies always leave after getting the golden sticker on their resume. They leave behind them a residue of SAT preppers who have PhD's in inversing binary trees.

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

#266

Post by kyleee »

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…

wow that is incredible, they didn't offer to postpone or anything?

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

#267

Post by lallysingh »

leafboi wrote: post #159
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…

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…

I interviewed a lot of people while I was at Google, and sometimes the people were clearly, clearly too anxious to interview. Like one fresh-grad who's hands were shaking. I thought about how much pressure the kid must have been under.

You try to help them relax, but you don't have much time, and the whole thing is just so unnatural.

Other places I've since been at, and interviewed with, give you a laptop, a problem to solve, and some time. You can focus on the problem instead of the situation much better, and I think that really helps. As an interviewer, it also helps keep some distance from the interviewer. It's too easy to try to micromanage the interview and keep the candidate uneasy. But there's a natural "don't interrupt someone when working" instinct that keeps interviewers more distant when the candidate's programming.

Coderpads on video conference, I think, are pretty good when the candidate has a good space to work in. They're in comfortable territory and you can see them by their keystrokes. The interviewer feels like they're getting more accurate data about how the candidate really operates. I just wish it could do keyboard shortcuts better -- emacs users like me hate seeing Ctrl-N bring up a new window.

The issue of IDE/compiler/keyboard/keybindings is also there, but that's easier to work with.

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

#268

Post by invalidOrTaken »

me551ah wrote: post #232
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…

If not algorithms then what would you use to test a generic programmer? You would have to setup a custom panel based on each candidate. A person who has only worked for PHP would need a different panel from someone who has worked on C++ all his life. Algorithms is language and framework agnostic. It doesn't matter if you work in embedded or data science. It doesn't matter if you code in C or Python. The same question…

Radical idea: don't test them. Train them.

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

#269

Post by Osiris »

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…

At my company we interviewed two people. Both did fairly poorly in different ways. One we hired because he was a referral and came highly recommended despite a not great interview. He's been great.

The second guy was rejected but later hired as a contractor and he's worked out well as well and now we're looking at offering him a full-time position.

My conclusion is that our interview process isn't good at determining if a candidate would be a good employee.

My preference would be to hire someone as a contractor and give them a project then use that to determine their quality and fit. Unfortunately, HR tells me that's not feasible for reasons I don't understand.

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

#270

Post by proverbialbunny »

rmellow wrote: post #215

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, t…

That's a great idea! Was it for an MLE job?
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