Well that sounds good to me. Sofware work can be pretty anxiety inducing.
Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
601–610 of 1001 posts
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#602Earlier 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. 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.
Boy, am I the only one who thinks working at FAANG is pretty great and worth the time practicing the interview?
The compensation is much better. The management is much better. The work life balance is much better.
I moved from SEA. Everything is worse there.
I read this and feel like people have unrealistic standard. FAANG isn't good enough? Working there for a year probably put your wealth of life at 0.1% of the world. That's not good enough?
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#603Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?.. ;)
Hah, that's a good rebuttal. Well it would be an excellent estimator if it was unbiased (or at least had very little bias). But if f is an estimator for the true average of a function F where E[F] = 100 (for example), it's very clearly not unbiased.
It is a bit tongue in cheek.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#604Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 on…
It's not just you :) A much more realistic way to test people is to tell them to bring their laptop, point to a problem on the whiteboard and say "here, solve it, and use whatever resources you need." I'm somewhat like you; I do a wide variety of tasks every day and simply can't keep all the different rules and syntaxes in my head. I'm terrible at tests anyway and would probably bomb a FAANG interview badly because o…
I see a lot of people impose constraints on themselves that aren’t there.
I’ve said, at multiple interviews, “there’s a library function something like this — normally I’d google it” and made up some syntax.
The point is to write something while being pleasant to work with — not memorize a bunch of syntax.
My experience is that candidates would be better served by practicing being personable over coffee than leetcode — but that could be sampling bias or whatever.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#605People 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…
Interestingly, there's a famous study showing those doing the judging "can't think when hungry" either. (Or, at least can't think unbiasedly).[1] [1] https://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889
That study turned out to be quite flawed, because the cases were ordered [1].
In particular, cases were grouped by prison and within each prison, prisoners without an attorney went last. As the well-known saying goes, "the man who represents himself has a fool for a client": the pro se prisoners fare far worse than those with a lawyer. Judges tried to complete an entire prison before taking a meal break, and therefore ended one session with the statistically weakest cases and began the next with stronger set, thereby guaranteeing the result.
If you look at the original data, some other oddities pop out. A physiological process, like becoming hungry, should depend more on the wallclock time than the number of cases heard. However "However, note that in an analysis that included both the cumulative minutes variable and the ordinal position counter, only the latter was significant."
[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/108/42/E833?ijkey=21207497c684f...
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#606Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know nothing about GP, but note that it is possible that English is not his first language, and the subtleties of the story and vocabulary might be lost in translation. In my native language (French), as you describe it, there is no word for "average" (the technical and the common terms "moyenne" are exactly the same). Until your comment, in English, I assumed you could use "average" and "mean" interchangeably.
French and English are strictly equivalent. moyenne is mean or average. The formal name is "arithmetic mean" and "moyenne arithmétique". median is médiane. people frequently use any word but median in both languages when they want to talk about the median. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_mean https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moyenne_arithm%C3%A9tique
Almost correct.
The mean, median, and mode are three types of averages. None is 'the average'; though if you asked someone random on the street they'd probably give you the mean average.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#607Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 on…
>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. I'm a huge fan of giving people tasks that somewhat resemble a real world problem they'd likely encounter or at least aligns categorically with their proclaimed resume feats and more impo…
I don't like take homes for two reasons:
1) It's less time spent talking with potential coworkers. Which for me, coworkers (and how we work together/get along) determine about 90% of how satisfied I am with my job (assuming pay/benefits are standard).
2) You're still going to require me to take a day off and stand up in front of a whiteboard anyway eventually. Every take home I've done is an early stage filter. The final round is still a whiteboard panel.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#608Will anything change in the near term (~2 years), I would bet not. I sure hope the way interviews are conducted changes. After all, most of us aren't trying to spend many hours on sites like leetcode.com. I find those sort of problems to be fun and enjoyable on my free time, but they can be VERY challenging under pressure.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#609Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same is true for design/ux jobs interviews. Well, at least for me. I got laid off a couple of months ago, and have been interviewing pretty steadily since then. I have yet to receive an offer. I already know where my strengths and weaknesses are. I'm fine with 1 on 1s and all that, but when it comes to the technical part of the interview process like a take-home design project or a live design challenge, I usuall…
Hang in there dude, I think the coronavirus and remote working really messed with the traditional hiring process. The fact that you are getting steady interviews speaks for itself that you have the design chops and experience. I think people don't know how to interview design candidates well as is, removing the physical cues you get from an in-person interview makes it even harder to assess a designer. Also, it could…
Thanks, I appreciate the words of encouragement!
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#610Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?.. ;)
It is a very precise function, I'll give it that.