Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study • Hacker News Board

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

#411

Post by euix » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 7:48 PM UTC

benburleson wrote: post #280

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…

Remind me not to interview for that (those) team(s). I am really the type of person that dislike drinking corporate koolaid, or any type of slogans or political line that government or media otherwise pushes. That basically sounds like half way to a cult.

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

#412

Post by canada_dry » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 7:48 PM UTC

twicetwice wrote: post #46

Interesting. 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…

> project confidence even if I know what I'm saying is BS

One of my very worst bosses had this quality. Perversely, it was about the only thing I admired about him.

The guy could walk into a meeting of NASA flight engineers and engage in conversation without uttering a single fact that would betray his total lack of any knowledge/qualifications.

n.b. He was fired not long after I left the company.

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

#413

Post by thephyber » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 7:49 PM UTC

lrem wrote: post #377

People bomb, including good people. That is sadly part of the system. Once I had this candidate. Damn, I know my questions are deceptively simple on purpose, but he literally couldn't do anything. Not even a trivial brute force. Not even any related simple knowledge questions. Couldn't tell an average from a median. The only good thing I could write in the feedback was "seems to know some basic syntax". It was quite…

> People bomb, including good people. That is sadly part of the system.

It seems like there's probably some value in a "MoneyBall" company that identifies a way to interview without most of the anxiety. Perhaps hiring a few people with remarkably high EQ who customize the interview setting who review the inteviewees' work and watch them program over a few days in their own computer and IDE.

I know I've interviewed people that have frozen up, but for whatever reason I didn't pause the interview and address the anxiety, but rather I tried to adjust the questions (which generally didn't work).

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

#414

Post by DeonPenny » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 7:49 PM UTC

But did they see if being neurotic is a net positive or negative for doing the job. Skill isn't the only variable in being good at a job.

If you skilled but you neuroticism makes you less productive even compared to someone less skilled who cares about skill level.

You could end up with a skilled team that folder under low amounts of stress.

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

#415

Post by linkpuff » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 7:49 PM UTC

300bps wrote: post #381

fermienrico wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean this would apply to going on a first date as well. First impression is what matters and once the impression has been ruined, all bets are off. It is not specific to the interview process.

Rescheduling a date or an interview at the last minute doesn’t make a great first impression either.

It doesn't give a good first impression, but failing miserably is somehow even worse...

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

#416

Post by koheripbal » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 7:50 PM UTC

lrem wrote: post #377

People bomb, including good people. That is sadly part of the system. Once I had this candidate. Damn, I know my questions are deceptively simple on purpose, but he literally couldn't do anything. Not even a trivial brute force. Not even any related simple knowledge questions. Couldn't tell an average from a median. The only good thing I could write in the feedback was "seems to know some basic syntax". It was quite…

One trend I've noticed that is markedly different from when I started programming in 1998, is how dependent we've become to program via Google/StackExchange searches.

I'm not sure I know how to write anything from scratch anymore, because I just search/read/alter/test. The breadth of what I work on is 100x wider than it used to be, and so I've become absolutely dependent on quickly reading docs, copying code found online, and then deep diving into testing and rolling it out the door.

I deliver a TON more, but I'm convinced I'd bomb literally every interview I go to today. Today, for example, I updated our firewall rules, updated some Java business logic, tweaked some javascipt and PHP on the site, reversed an odd macro email-phishing virus we got, configured a new RDS server VM for clients, and updated some network GPOs. 20 years ago, I would have never worked on ALL of those things in the same week - let alone the same day.

Maybe we should interview with small take-home tasks to be submitted with some write-ups to test how people research, reason, and write-up problems, rather than writing code on the spot on a whiteboard. ...but maybe that's just me.

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

#417

Post by eagsalazar2 » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 7:50 PM UTC

Traditional tech interviews (live coding challenges, algorithms, brain teasers, etc) have so little value and cause so much suffering in candidates, they are borderline sadistic IMO and in the end you are just as likely to make a bad hire, then not be organizationally prepared to deal with that so you end up with a broken team and bad outcomes. Why?

There are still challenges with contract to hire but overall I've had great success with it. First of all, we get a realistic deep look at candidate capabilities before we commit and they get a look at what it's like to work with us. Then we're very prepared to part ways because that is the entire point of the contract to hire. If feels 10x more successful in hiring great people than any other approach I've personally seen and, very critically, it is more humane and respectful.

There is a hypothetical concern that highly pursued candidates won't wait around for that but we've found exactly the opposite is true. The best developers are happy to see we have a more sound hiring process and are psyched because we have a credible case that our teams are really high quality and free from the random bad apple that spoils the work experience at most other companies. Great devs aren't worried about being hired today or in two weeks, they know they can get a job anytime they want. What makes great devs great is usually their passion for great craft, process, culture - if we can credibly promise that, they overwhelmingly are happy to do contract to hire.

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

#418

Post by rainyMammoth » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 7:51 PM UTC

The only thing that interviewing assess is how good at interviewing the candidate is.

I swear that for 90% of the typical software interview loops, someone with some minimal understanding of computer science that spent 2 month studying the typical Leetcode problems would probably have been fine and do way better than a software engineer coming out with 10 years of experience that didn't take the time to review his leetcode problems.

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

#419

Post by wolco » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 7:51 PM UTC

northern-lights wrote: post #179

robgibbons wrote: post #82

Bad interviews make for bad hires. Bad hires can cost a company more than not hiring at all. Whenever I've conducted interviews in the past, I've gone out of my way to help the candidates relax. Need to use Google? Go ahead, I do literally all the time. Need some advice, something explained? Just ask, that's why we have peers. Nobody writes code on a whiteboard, with no docs, with three people watching, silently taki…

>Bad interviews make for bad hires. Bad hires can cost a company more than not hiring at all. But is that really true? There are plenty of companies who take a Fire Better approach (Amazon, Netflix to name a few) who seem to be doing just fine.

Not being able to tell if it's a bad hire is the core problem for the rest.

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

#420

Post by redisman » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 7:52 PM UTC

romanows wrote: post #92

helen___keller wrote: post #9

The methodology: > For this study, researchers conducted technical interviews of 48 computer science undergraduates and graduate students. Half of the study participants were given a conventional technical interview, with an interviewer looking on. The other half of the participants were asked to solve their problem on a whiteboard in a private room. The private interviews did not require study participants to explai…

The point of a whiteboard interview for me isn't about accuracy and efficiency. It's about seeing whether the person can code and can talk to me about coding.

Everyone says this but has anyone been hired if they can’t come up with working code in the session?