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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

#721

Post by heavyset_go »

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…

> Possibly I'm just bitter because of the time I spent 4 hours on a take-home only for the company to ghost me (name-and-shame: Instacart).

Arthena, a Y Combinator funded company, did this to me. It truly was a waste of time.

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

#722

Post by arp242 »

fuzzythinker wrote: post #584
twicetwice wrote: post #46

Interesting. I usually do pretty well in interviews and I've always attributed that to my four years on the debate team in high school. This tells me it might be even more true than I previously thought. Even when I'm nervous as hell, when you put me in front of a judge (interviewer), I click into "performance mode" where I project confidence even if I know what I'm saying is BS, let alone just a bit unsure. This is…

An upvote is warranted for a life long gift to kids to be able to communicate confidently. A downvote is warranted for giving a bad advice on gaming a system and giving both parties in an interview process a poor indication of what is expected in possibly years to come. Thus, no vote given. I think given what I read about debate teams -- on podcasts and here in HN, I am on the fence on suggesting that to my kids. The…

I'm not from a country that really does "debate teams", but as I understand them a lot seems to be about "winning the argument", which doesn't strike me as especially great.

On the other hand, it probably makes people better at spotting a bad/fallacious arguments, and gain appreciation that complex topics tend to have multiple reasonable opinions on it – two things we desperately need more of.

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

#723

Post by Nacraile »

tropdrop wrote: post #714

This was interesting: For example, in our study, all of the women who took the public interview failed, while all of the women who took the private interview passed. That is an amazing statistic! From 100% failure to 100% success!

It's important to bear in mind the small sample size: 4 women took the private interview, and 6 took the public.

Still a compelling result, but not quite as incredible as it sounds in the article. I'm not sure what the p-value would be.

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

#724

Post by erichurkman »

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…

I have a standard preface to start a live coding or technical session with a candidate to account for this. I look up stuff all the time, and expecting candidates to not do so is cruel.

> We're going to go through a few technical exercises together. It's open book, open documentation, use whatever resources you would normally use — though please do not copy and paste complete solutions from StackOverflow and guess&check to reach our solution. It's open language, so please select whatever you're strongest in. If it is a language I am not familiar with, I will ask questions. Some of those questions may be naive. Use whatever editor and environment you're most comfortable in. Please ask questions of me. There is no specifically correct answer, though your solutions should hit a level of baseline correctness. These problems are designed to mirror some typical day-to-day problems you might face on the job; we're not looking to test rote memorization of _Hacking the Coding Interview_. We want working code, but some aspects or edge cases may remain in pseudocode as we iterate on these problems together. There are no designed 'gotcha' moments in these exercises, and if you feel there may be a 'gotcha' moment, ask clarifying questions. I would rather you ask questions than struggle through a solution.

It works well for modern development.

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

#725

Post by holidayacct »

black3r wrote: post #93
holidayacct wrote: post #29

If you get anxiety during a job interview it is because you don't have enough experience, you have a massive ego or you were raised improperly. I've never met anyone who gets crippling anxiety from a job interview when they've done what they say they have done and they are humble enough to just admit when they don't know something.

as an introvert i get anxiety just from talking to a person I don't know for the first time...

90% of ppl have ridiculously short memories. There's nothing to be afraid of.

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

#726

Post by zoomablemind »

monksy wrote: post #305
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…

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…

Wouldn't it be a more balanced approach if the technical problem were presented on the spot to __all__ interview participants, not just the candidate?

It's a technical job, it must be a collaborative effort in finding solutions! Aren't we looking for a team member, not a lone-ninja.

Sure, the candidate has to be more vested in advancing the process, but the fact that there's no known-ahead answer would potentially surface not only technical skills, but also personal ones, and ... at both ends of the table.

Not to mention, the "house-experts" could find such sessions stimulating, to say the least... Imagine, you get back to your desk after interviewing a candidate, and your team mates ask you "so what was the tech problem this time?", "could you crack it?", "did he/she crack it?".

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

#727

Post by BurningFrog »

I want to push back on this a bit.

Writing working code well and fast is important.

But so is communicating with your coworkers!

Being able to talk about your code is not a weird thing you only do in interviews. It's an essential part of your everyday work, and the programmers who don't do this well are in a sense underperforming.

So just removing the talking part, as this study did, removes an important part of the interviewing. When I interview people, I value their ability to talk about the problem and how they think about it more than coming up with great code quickly. I need people who can talk to me, not just the compiler.

That said, talking through your whiteboard programming task might not be the ideal way to measure this skill either.

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

#728

Post by IggleSniggle »

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.

This really depends on context. When evaluating a likelihood (prediction), "average" is generally colloquial for "expected median."

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

#729

Post by hinkley »

andrewflnr wrote: post #671
thephyber wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I used to 'sit in' on interviews, and basically say very little except to answer questions about working here or to serve as the 'linter' to get them unstuck.

You hear something very different than the person who asked the question. And in one case I discovered that my coworker had been asking a question that he thought he knew the answer to and did not; a deep clone implementation (where he never asked about cyclic graphs).

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

#730

Post by dripton »

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…

Amazon does not really have centralized hiring. Each team hires for itself, though there are bar raisers from outside the team designed to be a counterweight to desperate hiring managers.
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