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

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

#701

Post by hinkley » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 11:59 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…

Why would I trust my memory on how a utility works with an empty set when I can just look it up?

So many languages, frameworks, and libraries copy the same functionality and every single one does it differently.

The cost of looking it up is a little bit of humility. The cost of not doing so is a small chance of spectacularly breaking something for my entire team. Suck it up, apply the Precautionary Principle, and most importantly, get over yourself.

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

#702

Post by afterburner » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 12:02 AM UTC

x0x0 wrote: post #421

harryh wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A pro tip for anyone reading this who ever ends up in a similar situation: just postpone the interview. I promise you that everyone will understand. Everyone gets that these things are a little goofy[1] and wants to set people up for success and not doom them to failure. 1. Yes, there is a larger and more complicated discussion to be had about making the whole system better. But that isn't gonna happen in the short t…

It's worth emphasizing, as a hiring manager: By the time you're in an interview, I want to hire you. I'm sitting there hoping to write "Strong hire" on my feedback form.

Uh, unless you saw a better candidate earlier in the day/week.

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

#703

Post by thaumasiotes » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 12:03 AM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #338

monksy wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty angry with the person that you were. I'm frustrated with the people who look up a question, see the exact solution and walk through and then expect the candidate seeing the problem statement for the first time to walk through it in the same way. There are questions being asked that full academic papers have been written on. What's even worse is typically I get interviewers that are not experienced+prepared…

I bomb on technical interviews the same way because my mind just freezes and can't get through even simple problems. I had the same question you mention. "This is a problem a paper was written on, are you expecting me to derive a whole paper from first principles in half an hour, or are you expecting me to have seen it before? If it's the latter, why not let me Google, as I normally would?" I feel that saying "I woul…

> I had the same question you mention. "This is a problem a paper was written on, are you expecting me to derive a whole paper from first principles in half an hour, or are you expecting me to have seen it before? If it's the latter, why not let me Google, as I normally would?"

> I feel that saying "I would solve this problem with " should be good enough, and if I'm asked to implement it, I should be able to copy paste the Wikipedia pseudocode and start converting.

Long ago, milo.com posted a challenge to codeeval.com (both websites now dead) which turned out to be an example of the "assignment problem". That is, given a set X, another set Y, and a payoff function f(x,y), assign each element y in Y to exactly one element x in X such that the total payoff from all assignments is maximized.

I tried to solve it, realized I didn't know how, and was eventually able to look up the solution in a couple of papers. There is an algorithm called "the Hungarian algorithm" which will do it.

So I wrote up the Hungarian algorithm and sent it in. This was good enough to get a phone interview with the company.

I tried to prepare for the screen by going over the Hungarian algorithm to the point that I could myself give the proof that it correctly solved the problem. This was fun. But in the phone interview, it was barely mentioned at all. According to the interviewer, I passed that step by just mentioning the name "Hungarian algorithm".

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

#704

Post by shitgoose » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 12:06 AM UTC

willcipriano wrote: post #520

roldie wrote: post #258

Earlier 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…

>I panic and put too much effort into trying to figure out what they want to see My approach for take home challenges is this. Often I complete them and never even get any feedback from the firm beyond a form rejection letter. If that is going to be the case anyway I might as well make something I'm proud to have in my portfolio, even if it doesn't line up with exactly what they are asking for. That transforms the wo…

This made me think, what if we post take home assignments on github. Along with company name and status - accepted/rejected. This is a testimony of your work as well as of hiring company - if code is good and you are still rejected, that is the red flag to developers.

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

#705

Post by StavrosK » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 12:09 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #703

StavrosK wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bomb on technical interviews the same way because my mind just freezes and can't get through even simple problems. I had the same question you mention. "This is a problem a paper was written on, are you expecting me to derive a whole paper from first principles in half an hour, or are you expecting me to have seen it before? If it's the latter, why not let me Google, as I normally would?" I feel that saying "I woul…

> I had the same question you mention. "This is a problem a paper was written on, are you expecting me to derive a whole paper from first principles in half an hour, or are you expecting me to have seen it before? If it's the latter, why not let me Google, as I normally would?" > I feel that saying "I would solve this problem with " should be good enough, and if I'm asked to implement it, I should be able to copy pas…

That's better than asking you to come up with the complete solution, but it's still a bit of a trivia question. On one hand, it's good to be able to recognize algorithms so you can look up their solutions instead of wasting your time on trying to reinvent them, on the other hand, how often are problems this algorithmic?

Maybe I've had a particularly depressing career, but 99% of it consisted of various ways of interacting with a database.

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

#706

Post by thaumasiotes » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 12:12 AM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #705

thaumasiotes wrote: post #703

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I had the same question you mention. "This is a problem a paper was written on, are you expecting me to derive a whole paper from first principles in half an hour, or are you expecting me to have seen it before? If it's the latter, why not let me Google, as I normally would?" > I feel that saying "I would solve this problem with " should be good enough, and if I'm asked to implement it, I should be able to copy pas…

That's better than asking you to come up with the complete solution, but it's still a bit of a trivia question. On one hand, it's good to be able to recognize algorithms so you can look up their solutions instead of wasting your time on trying to reinvent them, on the other hand, how often are problems this algorithmic? Maybe I've had a particularly depressing career, but 99% of it consisted of various ways of intera…

> That's better than asking you to come up with the complete solution, but it's still a bit of a trivia question.

How? You have unlimited time to find the answer; it happens before you make any contact with the company at all.

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

#707

Post by newen » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 12:15 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #703

StavrosK wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bomb on technical interviews the same way because my mind just freezes and can't get through even simple problems. I had the same question you mention. "This is a problem a paper was written on, are you expecting me to derive a whole paper from first principles in half an hour, or are you expecting me to have seen it before? If it's the latter, why not let me Google, as I normally would?" I feel that saying "I woul…

> I had the same question you mention. "This is a problem a paper was written on, are you expecting me to derive a whole paper from first principles in half an hour, or are you expecting me to have seen it before? If it's the latter, why not let me Google, as I normally would?" > I feel that saying "I would solve this problem with " should be good enough, and if I'm asked to implement it, I should be able to copy pas…

Yeah, in certain circles the hard part is figuring out the solution is the assignment problem. Then you’re supposed to just know that the most commonly used algorithm for it is the Hungarian algorithm, maybe its complexity and that’s it, because you can find code for it in most languages and so you just need to call the function with appropriate inputs.

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

#708

Post by mikelevins » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 12:17 AM UTC

jorblumesea wrote: post #633

chpmrc wrote: post #138

It seems pretty obvious to me that this kind of interviews are simply there to assess how much you want to work for a certain company. As in: would you be willing to study for months, go through mock interviews, read books, test your skills etc. to have a shot at working for us? Even though the majority of that stuff will likely have zero impact on your day to day work? That's all there is, really. I've had no proble…

It's both. Either you're brilliant and can implement Kahn/KMP/Rabin Karp from memory or just by thinking about the problem, or you've practiced a ton and dedicated lots of work to the grind. For large companies like FB or Goog, if they lose a few people to false negatives, it's fine because there are hundreds more lining up. Either way, from the large company perspective, the system works. Most notably, it's really e…

Ironically, according Google's former head of HR, Laszlo Bock, their system of technical interviews with brainteasers not only was not efficient, it didn't perform any better than random chance. He said that they conducted a pretty large study of the correlation between interview performance and job performance and found no correlation whatsoever. They would have done just as well picking names out of a hat.

As a result, he pushed them to move more in the direction of "behavioral interviewing," asking people, for example, to describe difficult problems and how they had worked to solve them. That way you at least learn a little something about how the candidate thinks and about their style of communicating with a potential colleague about technical problems.

If I recall correctly, the only formal process that has been shown to actually predict job performance well is standardized testing of job-relevant skills. Maybe companies should spend more effort on identifying the more important job-relevant skills and work with testing professionals to come up with appropriate tests? Then they could save interviews for finding out which of the top performers seem like they're going to be pleasant to work with.

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

#709

Post by ghostofdarwin09 » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 12:17 AM 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…

Have done over 1,000 interviews for a FAANG competitor that IPO'ed in the past 10 years. Completion time (in minutes) of a coding puzzle is essentially the only objective measurement taken during these coding puzzles, and is sadly the primary datapoint fed into the hiring manager's decision. The hiring managers usually adjust the cutoff based upon whatever quota they want and/or if they're expecting people to leave. I've worked directly with a VP of Engineering and that's really all he wanted to hear.

The whole process is missing a feedback loop to the evaluators, resulting in the OP's situation. In my own situation, it took several years after that mess of being forced to shotgun candidates to pick apart what in the experience was actually predictive of success and what wasn't. To this day, the most successful hires from my perspective were those who just really wanted the job and wanted to contribute to the product; definitely no strong correlation with "leetcode" ability.

It's not just that the coding quizzes are poorly administered, but that the hiring mangers and leadership industry-wide have been obstructive to getting evaluators feedback (for starters, what did a candidate's other offers look like? where were they 3 months after the interview?) and especially tight-lipped on sharing interview questions. That last bit is particularly obnoxious because people monetize their insider knowledge either through things like Rooftop Slushie or they take a more Gayle Laakmann angle. (Just to be clear: while many questions are "protected under NDA," many questions are also stolen from other companies-- interviewers asking them are already violating their own NDAs when asking them, or potentially when feeding the question bank of their new employer).

What you can do is go to your manager in your 1:1 and ask for interview feedback. Ask what happened to candidates 3-6 months after the interview, even if they were hired (perhaps not just to your team). Start to get feedback, and then work from there. You'll probably do better interviews, and at least curtail some of the information arbitrage culture in the C-suite.

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

#710

Post by afterburner » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 12:20 AM 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.

So you hire good actors/liars?