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

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

#611

Post by pb7 » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 9:23 PM UTC

tornato7 wrote: post #442

SwiftyBug wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been told to reject a candidate because "he didn't seem that excited to work here"

I have rejected candidates for that. When you're hiring for a startup it's absolutely vital to have people who believe in the mission and the product and not just doing the bare minimum for a paycheck. If that's all you want, go work for the government, or Facebook.

>it's absolutely vital to have people who believe in the mission and the product and not just doing the bare minimum for a paycheck

Allow me to translate: work indiscriminately long hours in their prime years to make someone else rich from a product or service that will close up shop as soon as the VC money dries up.

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

#612

Post by UnFleshedOne » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 9:24 PM UTC

quadrifoliate wrote: post #494

dcow wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> However, I'm usually instantly met with the "oh well we don't want to expect too much of our interview candidates" mentality as if asking them to do a "take home" (rather than telling them to figure out how to take a day off of work for an onsite panel) is somehow grotesquely disrespecting their time and would make the company look bad if the broader community even got a whiff that it had been considered. I'm so co…

A number of small tasks one can do in a few hours _and_ add to one's resume is probably approaching zero...

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

#613

Post by username90 » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 9:27 PM UTC

Managing your own emotions is a part of EQ. Why should we hire people with low EQ to a job as collaborative as software engineering?

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

#614

Post by aprdm » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 9:27 PM UTC

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #400

apta wrote: post #275

Earlier 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.

I've seen people say it's like a form of IQ test and I agree with that. Generally speaking, I think more intelligent people will have an easier time learning the patterns in algorithms. It's not the best filter, but it's easy to see why it's an attractive option for companies.

intelligence is multi dimensional. Even more so at a working environment. I can't believe algorithm intelligence is a relevant skillset for 99% of the projects. Including projects inside google.

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

#615

Post by mattkrause » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 9:28 PM UTC

rsweeney21 wrote: post #448

I'm a ex-FANG dev that started a recruiting company, so I am VERY familiar with the arbitrary tech interview process. I'm a huge proponent of contract-to-hire. Even started a company* to make it easier for companies to offer contract-to-hire. Now before you dismiss the idea because you are "too good" to do C2H hear me out. Everyone knows that actually working with someone on the job is the only way to get an accurate…

How does this work with non-local applicants?

I would certainly move, even internationally, for the right job, but I'm not going to relocate for a shot at a job.

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

#616

Post by thecrumb » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 9:31 PM UTC

koheripbal wrote: post #416

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 on…

This. Last interview I bombed because no one would ever remember what they were asking for in the interview test. I said I'd just google it and then dropped "Never memorize something that you can look up." ― Albert Einstein

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

#617

Post by nend » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 9:31 PM UTC

rc-1140 wrote: post #482

rsweeney21 wrote: post #448

I'm a ex-FANG dev that started a recruiting company, so I am VERY familiar with the arbitrary tech interview process. I'm a huge proponent of contract-to-hire. Even started a company* to make it easier for companies to offer contract-to-hire. Now before you dismiss the idea because you are "too good" to do C2H hear me out. Everyone knows that actually working with someone on the job is the only way to get an accurate…

Sorry, but C2H sounds like a great idea to you because you have the luxury of having already earned FAANG money on your side. You'd have to pay me considerable money for me to consider taking a C2H role so I could cover health insurance across the usual suspects (general health, dental, vision, specialists just in case). Like many people outside of this website (and enough here), I don't have the luxury of FAANG mone…

Not just health care, most people don't want to leave a steady paycheck for the possibility of no paycheck.

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

#618

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 9:34 PM UTC

mjevans wrote: post #606

user5994461 wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#619

Post by markandrewj » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 9:39 PM UTC

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…

It's also sort of ironic how studies repeatedly show high preforming teams, are cognitively diverse teams. Even though research shows this, the hiring strategy of most technology companies, is hiring new employees with the same skills, and traits, as current employees.

https://hbr.org/2017/03/teams-solve-problems-faster-when-the...

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

#620

Post by gwbas1c » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 9:40 PM UTC

lostcolony wrote: post #171

gwbas1c wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That and debate gave me the ability to just start a sentence without knowing where it will end ... it sounds like I've been thinking sensibly about it. I've always structured my interviews to weed that kind of thing out.

Why is it a bad thing? It's off the cuff, and likely less filtered than a prepared statement. If they end up somewhere sensible, then your interview process actually worked; you found someone who when confronted with a new problem, is able to think sensibly about it, even in an interview situation.

Because if you're talking without knowing what you're going to say, you're not thinking about the problem at hand.

The right thing to do is to narrate what you're thinking about. It's very different than starting a sentence without knowing what you're going to say.