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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

#751

Post by nostrebored »

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.

I see it quite commonly, from technical discussions to newspaper article. When people say "the average income in the US" they are almost never talking about the mean.

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

#752

Post by x0x0 »

afterburner wrote: post #702
x0x0 wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm senior enough that if I rate two people strong hire, I'm capable of getting more budget. This has in fact happened recently -- we couldn't decide between two great candidates, so we offered and hired both.

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

#753

Post by TheTruestKyle »

React developer here with 10 years of Javascript experience. And by experience, I mean personal projects because I have completely given up on attempting to get a job in tech. I'm not liberal enough, I don't lie and pretend to be someone I am not, and I typically hate being around people.

I wish that I knew skill had nothing to do with getting a job so I wouldn't have to become an indentured servant because I wanted an education. I would have never bothered trying in life.

Now I am a baker. I would have loved this baker life if I didn't go to college and try to become an engineer...

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

#755

Post by xenihn »

Judgmentality wrote: post #187
commandlinefan wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure he's advocating for it, just pointing out that it's true.

> My takeaway, I guess—parents, make your kids do debate! He's encouraging parents to make their kids learn this skillset. He is absolutely advocating for it.

That is absolutely not the same thing. You have to play the game by the rules, that user is just telling you how to win.

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

#756

Post by steve76 »

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…

>reversed an odd macro email-phishing virus we got

yikes.

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

#757

Post by hinkley »

loktarogar wrote: post #69

A company flew me out to San Francisco to interview once. On my way into the building in the morning I was mugged (almost right outside). I told my interviewer, they took me to the lunch room to sit down and compose myself. "Take as long as you like", they said. 2 minutes later they came to collect me for my interview. I was a wreck. Worst interview of my life. Didn't get the job. I am pretty sure I would have if I w…

That is seriously fucked up. Who goes to the trouble to suggest you take your time and then takes it away? That sounds like something a bully would do.

If they behave like that outside of work, I wonder how many breakups they've been through. Few people would put up with that kind of behavior and those people are probably wrong.

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

#758

Post by Stratoscope »

pmiller2 wrote: post #736
erichurkman wrote: post #724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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&ch…

Maybe I should start saying (as a candidate): > I understand you want to test my programming ability, and in order to do that, we should do it under conditions as close to real world as possible. Because I don't know every algorithm in existence, I'm going to use the internet like I do normally to look stuff up. And, I'm going to use my own laptop that I've brought here. Is that cool? Not really, of course, but I'd l…

Yes, you should be saying exactly that.

Just do it ahead of time instead of on the spot. You're probably emailing back and forth with a recruiter. Send them the exact comment you posted here, and ask that they make sure that your interviewers know about it.

It's amazing how little things can throw you off your game. I had a couple where they handed me a MacBook set up for "traditional" touchpad scrolling (where it works like a scrollbar instead of like a touchscreen).

Every time I tried to scroll it went the wrong direction!

Of course in an interview we aim to please, so I lived with it for a few minutes, but finally asked "Do you mind if I change your touchpad settings?" Of course that led to a brief discussion on the virtues of traditional scrolling.

This was not only precious time wasted, but a minor blow to my self-confidence. Imagine you tried to drive a car or fly an airplane and they had sneakily reversed the steering wheel or yoke and pedals! You would be lucky to survive.

In fact this is why the preflight checklist for a light plane always includes "controls free and correct".

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

#759

Post by mark-r »

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #444
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…

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…

I once brought a laptop to an interview. Completely bombed it, because when asked to connect it to a projector I couldn't do it - I'd never used the video output on that laptop before and it was hidden behind a flip-down door that I didn't know about.

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

#760

Post by marcosdumay »

derefr wrote: post #697
ccajas wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-c…

Unfortunately, nobody has cracked up the problem of how to do credentials without creating a conflict of interest in favor of one of the parties (ok, maybe only in favor of the candidate). Or at least, nobody has created a way to communicate that lack of conflict of interest widely.
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