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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

#271

Post by MattGaiser »

throwawayiionqz wrote: post #257

There is a lot of anecdotes in the comments about these interview processes. The ones with the best data are the company themselves, especially those who interview thousands of candidates a year. These companies (e.g., all FANG) have enough data to assess which interviewer, which interview questions and which interview process have positive correlation (and even causation) with future employee performance. And they c…

There is no data could collect that would tell them whether they are efficiently sorting good candidates from the herd.

Say that I wanted to sort men from women to only identify women. One thing I could do is have the candidate walk under a bar that was 5 foot 4.

Most of the people who would get through would be women. But this would not be an efficient screening method. I would still be losing many women to the screening method.

If I am only polling the women who get to the end of the screening to see if they are women, I can't evaluate the efficacy of the screening. Facebook/Google would need to hire some of the failed candidates to compare results.

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

#272

Post by m0zg »

Very true. I suffer from this myself, and I have interviewed for Google twice. When I interviewed the second time I thought I bombed, but I was hired. With the benefit of hindsight, I can rationally tell myself that me getting into some pretty high flying places is not a coincidence, but I'm 1/3rd of a programmer in an interview compared to when I'm not under stress.

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

#273

Post by m4x »

rainyMammoth wrote: post #163
Aunche wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiring primarily based on references almost guarantees bias. White engineers will tend to know more white engineers. Asian engineers will tend to know more Asian engineers.

that is not bias, but rather a lack of diversity

It's still a bias - one that's exacerbated by a lack of diversity

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

#274

Post by tomlagier »

This is likely a source of gender disparity in technology. Men tend to be more confident in math and engineering situations, even when they know as much or less than their female peers (the much-reported "gender confidence gap")[1][2][3]. We are disadvantaging equally capable women by using an interview format they are less likely to do well on.

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1949-8594...

[2] https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED542116

[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/05/the-con...

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

#275

Post by apta »

u67583 wrote: post #264
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…

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. Smar…

> 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.

That's what they keep saying. However, it remains to be proven that regurgitating answers on a whiteboard in 45 minutes implies that the candidate is not a false negative, or even a true positive to begin with.

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

#276

Post by thebean11 »

Frost1x wrote: post #191
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…

>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 fr…

Interesting theory, but does the game theory hold up? If high interviewing standards are only good for scaring employees into staying put, couldn't one of the FAANGs "defect" and lower the bar, gaining a hiring advantage over the others?

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

#277

Post by jedberg »

I've been interviewing SRE candidates for a long time. In theory, being able to make technical decisions under high pressure is integral to the job.

But interview stress is very different than work stress. It doesn't seem to translate well. Some people do fine during the interview and then crack under real pressure, and some people it's the exact opposite.

I've changed my interviewing to involve very little coding. I might do FizzBuzz on the phone screen just to weed out the folks who really can't code anything on the fly, but that's about it.

After that, most of my interview is me explaining some real works tasks that they would have to perform, and then asking them how they would try finding the solution and if they have ever solved a similar problem in the past, and if so, how. I also ask them about difficult problems they've solved, how they solved it, how they found the problem, etc.

My goal is twofold -- try to figure out how they research problems they don't know the answer to, how they investigate issues; and give them lots of examples of what will be expected so that they can bow themselves out of the process if they don't think it's a good fit for them.

This obviously works much better with people who already have a job, and are more likely to take themselves out of the process, but so far it's worked pretty well.

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

#278

Post by UncleOxidant »

mgkimsal wrote: post #217
leafboi wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm a pretty anxious person, so much so that I've pretty much retired instead of doing anymore technical interviews. I had a discussion with a very anxious, but brilliant software developer a few years back and we came to the conclusion that as long as we don't let our anxiety get too far out of hand it's actually kind of a superpower in the job setting. That's because that niggling anxiety you get in the back of your head as you're coding generally makes you more careful about how you're designing and testing your code. You're more careful about security, safety and correctness. Whenever I get anxious while coding I stop and ask myself if maybe it's a message that I need to listen to - maybe it's trying to tell me to tread carefully because I'm entering an area that's potentially problematic.

People without that niggling sense of anxiety always in the background, the folks who are easily going to ace the programming interview because their anxiety levels are so low, those folks, I theorize, are potentially not going to be so careful. Now you could argue that that's a plus in many situations - a startup that needs to get code out the door right away, for example. But it really depends on the domain. For critical systems in applications like healthcare, avionics or robotic control I think the anxious coder is the one you want.

Companies that completely weed out the anxious programmers, as you imply, will have a different culture with perhaps too much emphasis on risky behavior.

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

#279

Post by geogra4 »

ericskiff wrote: post #199

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…

Honestly this seems like the best way to do it

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

#280

Post by benburleson »

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…

Amazon is the king of assessing how much you want to work for the company. The recruiter will place a huge emphasis on nailing their Leadership Principles, and coming up with stories from your work to demonstrate you embody the Principles. They will even tell you that specific interviewers have specific LPs they will probe on, but in the actual interview they ask very veiled questions and you're supposed to know that they're asking about an LP. You're expected to have a story all laid out in the format they expect; it felt very much like a show of how much you're willing to conform to the interview experience they expect, with no interest in actually getting to know you.
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