I sincerely appreciated that the technical portion of the interview for my current employer consisted of pair programming with their developers to improve on the pre-screening "take home" assignment I completed. It actually gave me a chance to explain my thought process and work through problems in a similar way to how it happens on the job. It was infinite preferable to white board algorithm questions.
Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
311–320 of 1001 posts
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#312This 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.
I would wager the opposite. That many people looking for a job are open to a (paid) trial week, when the alternative is countless grueling interviews that lead nowhere.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#313Earlier 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'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'…
Yeah, sometimes you may not be thinking straight, a have a little sleep hangover/anxiety Induced brain fog on the day of, and you can say bye bye to the job.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#314The root problem isn't the interviews themselves, but the belief that--despite a stunning lack of evidence--interviews are somehow useful measures of future job performance.
And I believe this applies to most job interviews, not just in tech.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It means you're someone willing to spend two to three months on your life sucking a little dick for a chance to work at FAANG... the companies so good they've recommended 15 vacuum cleaners after purchasing one. How many hands do they think I actually have.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#316I 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…
There are more alternatives than "look the part" and "leetcode". If I'm hiring a software engineer, I'm not hiring for how they look - the compiler doesn't care. And I'm (probably) not hiring for the ability to solve leetcode problems, either - of the work I would assign to someone I'm hiring, almost zero of it looks like leetcode problems. What I need is a way that tells whether the person I'm interviewing can actua…
> What I need is a way that tells whether the person I'm interviewing can actually do the work that I'm hiring them to do. Maybe I should ask them about that. Maybe I should give them some problems similar to the actual work.
Would you mind sharing with us how to draw the rest of the owl?
Look, I don't even want to defend leetcode here, but it is a struggle to find questions that are:
1) Correlated with the actual work performance
2) Neat enough to be explained and solved in the course of an interview
3) Have objective enough answers so that it's possible to overcome likability bias in interviewers
4) Have objective enough answers to be able to meaningfully compare different candidates
5) Demonstrate that candidates can actually go from hearing a description of the problem to producing code that solves the problem
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#317The 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?
Data Scientist, but would be easy to adapt.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#318Interesting. I usually do pretty well in interviews and I've always attributed that to my four years on the debate team in high school. This tells me it might be even more true than I previously thought. Even when I'm nervous as hell, when you put me in front of a judge (interviewer), I click into "performance mode" where I project confidence even if I know what I'm saying is BS, let alone just a bit unsure. This is…
> That and debate gave me the ability to just start a sentence without knowing where it will end and then talk my way to a conclusion that sounds like it makes sense That sounds like a good skill to have in marketing, sales or politics. It sounds like a bad skill to have for engineering.
And an interview is very much marketing and sales of your skills :)
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
However, high rates of employees getting fired is bad for culture. People are always anxious about their jobs - if they see a few colleagues fired for nonperformance, a number of them will be driven to anxiety. (I am one of these people, and being anxious about job security ironically makes me much worse at my job)
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#320It 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…
I've always thought the SAT is basically gauging the same skill: can you study for a test and do well? The grades you get in college are mostly determined by how well you can study for tests. In the process, hopefully you learn the subject, but that always felt like a side goal.
I think tech interviewing is somewhat similar: are you focused and dedicated enough to learn something arbitrary and produce code for it?