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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

#581

Post by anon84598 »

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.

For a small company it matters, but for a FAANG interview the person rescheduling your interview is completely disconnected from the people making the hiring decision so it would literally not make a difference.

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

#582

Post by p0llard »

fractionalhare wrote: post #568
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...I always learned in grade school math class that "average" = "mean", very specifically. I'm pretty sure there would have been test questions that required this knowledge. It's very possible my schooling was wrong, but presumably I'm not the only one.

I have a graduate education in probability and statistics; in the technical literature, an "average" is an estimator which, subject to some bias, predicts the value a sequence tends to. My professor was fond of saying, "the function f(x) = 15 is an average, but since it's a constant function it will almost always be a terrible one" to drill this into our minds. The arithmetic mean is colloquially called the average a…

> "the function f(x) = 15 is an average, but since it's a constant function it will almost always be a terrible one"

It has minimum variance, how can it be a terrible estimator?.. ;)

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

#583

Post by tluyben2 »

decafninja wrote: post #41
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…

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…

Not sure if that is FAANG or US but nah; I recommend people and people recommend me to large corps and the interview is pleasant banter and nothing else. If I see a whiteboard I would walk out anyway; what is this, grade school? If my resume and references do not help then I have no interest working for you.

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

#584

Post by fuzzythinker »

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…

An upvote is warranted for a life long gift to kids to be able to communicate confidently.

A downvote is warranted for giving a bad advice on gaming a system and giving both parties in an interview process a poor indication of what is expected in possibly years to come.

Thus, no vote given.

I think given what I read about debate teams -- on podcasts and here in HN, I am on the fence on suggesting that to my kids. There are certainly great benefits, but not too certain if those out weights the drawbacks.

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

#586

Post by DasIch »

bumby wrote: post #405
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…

I've heard HR optimizes processes that limit Type I errors (false positive) at the expense of Type II errors (false negative). I've often wondered if this is because, from the HR perspective, false positives are much more costly. I.e., Those who would be helped by limiting the false negatives are project managers who are too downstream in the process for HR to care.

You only need to fill a position with a person that is good enough.

If you reject someone who would have been a good fit but still hire someone good eventually, that’s ok.

A bad hire is not fun, not for HR, not for the hiring manager, not for the colleagues and ultimately not for the person who got hired. Especially if they had to move for the job, possibly with family.

A bad hire has massive negative consequences for many people. Of course you want to avoid that, if that comes at the cost of not hiring someone who would have been great occasionally, that’s unfortunate but acceptable.

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

#587

Post by pmiller2 »

taurath wrote: post #523
ritchiea wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think the idea of C2H is instead of having an intense interview you have a performance review and talk about how you work together. If you still have to pass a high pressure interview attempt to filter you out after working with a team for 3 months there’s no advantage to C2H.

If you /didn't/ have to pass through the same meatgrinder that every other employee did there's a reasonable argument that it could be seen as an opportunity for favoritism. But that sort of ignores that if an interviewer wants an interview to go well (because they feel more empathy for one interviewee over another for instance...) it tends to go better. We like to pretend that "a question is a question" but we're ju…

Who cares about favoritism vis-à-vis "the meat grinder," if you're just trying to hire good employees?

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

#588

Post by XCSme »

Interviews are a joke and are as useless as randomly selecting people.

I did 14 interviews at Google (two applications, first one after being contacted by them, for second one I contacted them to try again). As far as I could tell, I passed most of them, and for some of them I even provided new, unique solutions that the interviewers were amazed by. That being said, both times I got reject in the last step before the offer without being given any reason why. The only think they told me was that I should learn less from programming books and have more experience actually building things. I have never read a programming book, only learned by doing and had many projects to showcase. Some interviewers were not even paying attention to what I was saying, seemingly working on something else on their laptops. My recruiter was both times so certain that I would get the job (based on the very positive feedback she received from some of the interviewers) that she started telling me about the relocation process.

Today, 4 years later, I am not mad about it as I got to work in a very cool gaming startup for 2 years and now I run own company where I have created a product used by thousands of webmasters. I am honestly just confused about the process, as I know that I am a top-tier programmer and, based on what others said, a nice person to work with. I guess that ultimately it was their loss, but it's just a machine so no one really cares if X gets the job or not.

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

#589

Post by DenisM »

DenisM wrote: post #585

Ok, so what can I as an interviewer do to reduce stress for the candidate? Let's make good use of this discussion and compile a list of practical suggestions.

I'll start:

- Offering candidates their choice of whiteboard vs take-home. I've found that different people have different preferences, and they liven up when they are told they have a choice in the matter.

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

#590

Post by woeirua »

starpilot wrote: post #103

Current SWE interviews seem extraordinarily effective. They've produced corporations that dominate our lives, with systems that have unimaginable capabilities. Their profits currently dwarf other companies such that the S&P500 is basically a tech company index. More companies will adopt hiring practices like these as the applicants become more competitive. SpaceX has grueling all-day multiround tech-like interviews l…

I'm about 99% certain that the actual cause for the disparity between the two is that Boeing is a publicly traded company while SpaceX is a privately held firm, which completely eliminates the need for management to focus on short-term profitability. When you look at stupid practices inside of a company, and cultural erosion, you can almost always trace it back to decisions that management is making to maximize profit. I'd go so far as to say, this is the ONLY reason why smaller companies are able to outmaneuver larger ones.
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