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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

#671

Post by andrewflnr »

thephyber wrote: post #413
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 pe…

I do think that the people giving the questions and interacting with the applicant should be different from the ones judging their results. This also gives you the opportunity to blind the judging for race, gender, etc. The proctor should be explicitly on the applicant's "side" IMO.

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

#672

Post by mi100hael »

stbtrax wrote: post #323
benburleson wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

is there a centralized place with information like this but for other companies as well?

Blind[0] is a message board with a lot of content focused on FAANG interviewing.

https://www.teamblind.com/

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

#673

Post by grumple »

scott_paul wrote: post #122

When I interview a candidate, I'm explicitly and intentionally looking at how they respond to stress, how (if) they're able to say "I don't know", and how they communicate complicated ideas. I open with soft-balls to put them at ease and get them opened up and talking. Then dive deeper into technical things. All the questions are technical, but the main answer I get is how they communicate, how they relate to people,…

Assessing anxiety is probably illegal since it’s a psychological diagnosis. Just saying, if that’s the goal that’s both messed up and legally questionable.

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

#674

Post by sjg007 »

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…

So is the moral of the story that this hire worked out or not? Was this a good coder?

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

#675

Post by quadrifoliate »

UnFleshedOne wrote: post #612
quadrifoliate wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

I guess portfolio is a better word I might use? Like if you ask me to write an interesting API, I could convert it into a project for future work. If you ask me to write a cool script, I could put it into an existing "interesting scripts" repo I maintain.

I have never seen a take-home project yet that I could do this with. Also they come with scary "You may not show this to anyone else, ever!" disclaimers which are more off-putting.

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

#676

Post by sjg007 »

andrewflnr wrote: post #668
dimtion wrote: post #445

Earlier 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.

In most practical situations, your initial impression is correct. As a native English speaker, I've never heard seen or heard someone use "average" to refer to a statistical summary other than the mean. If it doesn't refer to the mean, it doesn't mean anything formal/technical at all. I read GP as "median is sort of an average in the broad sense", but this is honestly kind of a stretch.

Math definitions only..

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

#677

Post by [deleted] »

thecrumb wrote: post #616
koheripbal wrote: post #416

Earlier 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…

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

[deleted]

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

#678

Post by ccajas »

dcow wrote: post #449
koheripbal wrote: post #416

Earlier 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…

> People easily identify that white-boarding interviews suck for more than just the interviewee. And yet any time a solution is proposed that involves doing something other than putting the candidate in a room in front of a whiteboard for an hour, it's shot down.

Most people take issue with the repetition of similar tests and evaluations for multiple companies. If A, B, and C were considered different stages of a technical interview, candidates are repeating A and B too often, whereas applying A and B once would suffice for several companies.

It's a problem that is realized when opportunity cost is compounded when interviewing multiple companies and it's not something that a single company alone can fix. A more "Docker-ish" solution where using one of "A" to lay the foundation for many company interviews (and not just the ones expecting you to practice Leetcode) might curtail the problem of using more time and resources than necessary.

But more than that, there is also a cognitive dissonance with the beliefs of how to reform a broken system. Programmers largely oppose industry-wide regulation while also expecting the vetting process to be more consistent and make more sense. This is a tough nut to crack because we seemingly want to have it both ways.

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

#679

Post by decafninja »

birdyrooster wrote: post #634
goostavos wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

Stop lumping Apple into FAANG in this way. Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google all have centralized hiring. Apple does not and no two groups interview the same and there is tons of latitude for managers to make this lower toil. There is no cross-organization level setting or job descriptions for any position at Apple outside of an SVP business unit. I know from experience working at two other FAANGs that Apple does…

My understanding is Netflix does not have centralized hiring either?

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

#680

Post by triztian »

nend wrote: post #607
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…

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 f…

Oh man I can relate, I once took a home project which took around 6hrs and then was subsequently invited for a full day of white-boarding with 10 different people throughout the day.

Didn't hit it off with the last interviewer so it was a no-go.

If a take-home is required I'd at least expect a code review over it and focus the rest of the interview process on soft skills rather than trivia questions that are answered essentially by the take-home exercise.

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