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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

#691

Post by polysaturate »

rsweeney21 wrote: post #468
chc wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you offering insurance to every C2H prospect? Otherwise, this seems like it basically works for healthy people without families.

We provide business insurance coverage for anyone on contract through Facet. For health insurance, we recommend people just use COBRA to keep the insurance they had at their last company. You have to pay for it out of your own pocket, but you just build that in to your hourly rate that you charge.

So a normal scenario would be `hourly_rate + (monthly_cobra_cost / 160)?`

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

#692

Post by ccajas »

Sivart13 wrote: post #521
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…

"Take home" questions are heavily biased in favor of the employer because they're not required to put anything on the line. An asynchronous test is definitely more flexible for all parties, but it also means the employer can more forward with far more interviews than they would be able to do in person. Leading to more candidates wasting their time doing nonsense work when they have proportionally less of a chance of…

>"Take home" questions are heavily biased in favor of the employer because they're not required to put anything on the line.

Not to mention it doesn't test the collaboration aspects of real work. Imagine doing your job but you're not allowed to talk to your teammates in case of a blocker. How are we doing our jobs here?

But when it comes down to actually starting them, I will always pass if they come before any interviewing round. You don't yet have a stake in the process.

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

#693

Post by txcwpalpha »

powerset wrote: post #661
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…

This corroborates my experience interviewing at Amazon. Fortunately the recruiter prepped me well on what to expect and the LPs I should study. I was happy to "study for the test", and the interview went well. They even allowed me to bring a "cheat sheet" with notes about the stories I planned to tell, and I made myself a little index mapping stories -> LPs and vice versa. It was great practice and I carried those te…

>They even allowed me to bring a "cheat sheet" with notes about the stories I planned to tell

Is this unusual in your experience? I don't think I've ever been to a job interview where I didn't bring along a notepad where I had prewritten talking points, and also used it to take notes during the interview. I thought this was standard.

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

#694

Post by derefr »

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…

> He also got hired - apparently the committee agreed that "can't think when hungry" is not really that important a flaw.

I hope you suggested that this employee get tested for hypoglycemia. It'd probably greatly improve their quality-of-life to go from "my brain isn't working and I don't know why" to "my brain isn't working and I know exactly why; I need to drink some fruit juice."

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

#695

Post by samatman »

opus132 wrote: post #408
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…

> Couldn't tell an average from a median Without meaning to attack you personally (especially in the context of the rest of your comment), a comment like this annoys me a bit. I presume by "average" you mean arithmetic mean, but the median is also an average, and depending on the context the median might be a far more useful statistic than the mean. Confusing the mean and the median is one thing, and perhaps you actu…

All you're pointing out here is that a candidate should be able to differentiate between average, mean, median, and mode, and should be able to swiftly correct "what's the difference between average and median" to "do you mean mean and median? because a median is a type of average".

Given that, showing more charity to the comment you're responding to would have been the correct course of action.

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

#696

Post by hackermailman »

The strangest thing about jumping through big tech corp take home projects and multiple interviews is they then place you in their internal training boot camp and you realize why didn't you just stick me in here in the first place then rank my results when we finished training instead of wasting money for a week shopping me around departments so highly paid senior employees could all stop what they were doing just to have a go at me with the whiteboard and multiple on site lunches.

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

#697

Post by derefr »

ccajas wrote: post #678
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…

> 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 tec…

> Programmers largely oppose industry-wide regulation

...of programming (because the regulation would never be able to catch up to the state of the art), sure. Of HR practices? I don't think I've ever heard an engineering lead lament that their company's restrictive HR practices prevent them from testing candidates the way they want.

> and it's not something that a single company alone can fix

Sure they can: micro-credentials. Someone needs to be the CompTIA of tiny programming challenges, where you prove once-and-for-all (in a proctored situation) that you can solve FizzBuzz or whatever, and get that fact recorded in some database.

Hopefully, candidates could then put their MicroCredentialsCorp username on their resumes or into companies' application forms or what-have-you; and then first-stage HR automation (the same kind that matches resumes to keywords) could run through a bunch of RESTful predicate-endpoints checks like https://api.example.com/u/derefr/knows/fizzbuzz (which would return either a signed+timestamped blob of credential JSON, or a 404.)

Hopefully also, allow anyone to create a test (maybe have the end of that HTTP route just represent the username+repo of a GitHub repo where an executable test for the micro-skill lives?), such that these micro-credentials can live or die not by central supply, but rather by market demand.

(I think someone suggested doing this with a blockchain once, but there's really no need for that.)

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

#698

Post by google234123 »

jconley wrote: post #591
google234123 wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you imagine working with a senior software engineer that couldn't write FizzBuzz? Anyway, I feel your approach may end up selecting for prestige and be more venerable to implicit bias. A recent engineering graduate from Cornell will probably have a much nicer looking resume than someone from some random state university even if they both have strong technical skills.

No but I can imagine a senior software engineer that couldn't write FizzBuzz during an interview. I would probably stumble on it myself. I prefer to look at what people have done and not their credentials. I don't hire people that haven't shipped something.

To clarify, by a senior engineer I don't mean a manager, I meant someone that is going to contribute technically in a meaningful way to a project (by writing code). I feel like it's a big red sign if the candidate doesn't know how to write a for loop. People will lie about experiment when they are desperate for work. Moreover, there are some people that are just great at talking...

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

#699

Post by xapata »

cactus2093 wrote: post #622
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This has actually not been my experience. I generally agree with your reasoning and have tried to run coding interviews this way, thinking that it is most similar to doing real work. Candidates can use their own computer, their own editor and plugins, whatever framework and language they prefer, can google anything they need, etc. It causes a surprising number of problems. A lot of candidates come in with their envir…

I use repl.it for interviews. I preconfigure the environment and sometimes fix typos if I think they're getting stuck.

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

#700

Post by afterburner »

samatman wrote: post #695
opus132 wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Couldn't tell an average from a median Without meaning to attack you personally (especially in the context of the rest of your comment), a comment like this annoys me a bit. I presume by "average" you mean arithmetic mean, but the median is also an average, and depending on the context the median might be a far more useful statistic than the mean. Confusing the mean and the median is one thing, and perhaps you actu…

All you're pointing out here is that a candidate should be able to differentiate between average, mean, median, and mode, and should be able to swiftly correct "what's the difference between average and median" to "do you mean mean and median? because a median is a type of average". Given that, showing more charity to the comment you're responding to would have been the correct course of action.

Yeah but will embarrassing the interviewer work well as a strategy to get hired?

Depends on the interviewer.

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