I feel like sometimes big tech companies give technical interviews when they're not actually hiring, that it's a sort of formality. Can't really confirm it, but thinking this way makes me feel better about not passing to the next stage.
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
#762Earlier 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…
> 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…
Interesting. I think we're getting into the implementation of take homes. My proposal is (1) that a take home technical challenge entirely replace any in-person spontaneous white board drills, and (2) that it only be issued to candidates who you're prepared to bring on-site or otherwise schedule to meet the team if they present you a working solution. I'm not advocating for them to be used as a low-pass filter and spammed to all candidates without some mutual engagement first. The expectation of the onsite is that everyone has reviewed your solution and people can discuss why you made certain decisions or how the introduction of new requirements might impact the design. Or you can talk about why you hate kubernetes or the mini pineboard cluster you built.
I disagree that the goal of an interview experience should be to necessarily give the candidate a new portfolio accomplishment. It's cool if it works out that way, for sure, but that can't be the expectation. I'm mostly interested in incrementally improving the status quo which also isn't focused around an interview day that bolsters your portfolio as an engineer.
I will say my favorite and most memorable interview experience was a phone screen followed by a take home to implement bottles and kegs (a fizz-buzz game) in javascript, a language I was/am not proficient in. Come onsite day, we worked though a ux design problem and a database design problem, we pair debugged some ruby code, and then we wrote a multiplayer back-end for my fizz-buzz client, something I'd also never done before. It definitely ticked the "add something to your portfolio" box but also wasn't stressful in the same way flash 1-hr whiteboard sessions are because I was bringing something to the table that we expanded on during the day-long session.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#763Earlier 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…
The worst experience I've had with a take home problem was when the interviewer did not even run the program I submitted. As I explained the solution it became clear that the interviewer had not even looked at or run the program. It would have been easy, it was in Python.
To top it off the interviewer then sprung a surprise leetcode problem on me that had to work and was required to be written in a language ill-suited to the task. I bombed it and the interview ended. No one ever even ran my submitted program.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#764Earlier 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…
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 su…
Very intriguing idea. I’m thinking about how logistically this could actually work. It would build a sense of camaraderie as well.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#765I have basically been doing a second job sending out applications and interviewing hard core for about a year now. There is so much time I have accumulated in take home projects. Anxiety is a big issue for me interviews(Yes, I am a woman) and even in ones that go well I am still clearly minorly affected by it. There was one back in November that I got to the stage of being flown out to their office. At the end of the interview during small chit chat I was nervously talking about the stickers on my personal laptop.(My plane had been delayed to weather and I was basically interviewing with them a couple hours after everyone would normally stop working.)
My count on applications is well past fifty and I have done so many phone screens(HR and technical) that all of them seem like a blur to me. At this point I wish I could throw a portfolio of my work at a company and get a job. From a Reddit thread about "unrealistic car mods" shows my overall skill set in my ability to get the job done. https://www.reddit.com/r/cars/comments/hdrgv1/car_people_of_...
My current job I got because I found a major vulnerability in the company's authentication system and recovered the private key for the client to server encryption.(I didn't make much money at the time and didn't want to pay the subscription cost for the premium service.)
I have interviewed/hired nearly every person on my current team. One of them was almost denied by a senior manager because the candidate wore a backwards baseball hat during the interview.(Lack of professional attire, etcetera.) The rest of the interviewers over ruled the manager saying that was a dumb reason. Turns out this candidate was super conscious of a balding spot on his head and he wore hats to hide it. He turned out to be an amazing coder and great at solving problems that came up.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#766Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
Take home interviews should be paid, like 200$ and not require more than 4 hrs.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#767I feel like sometimes big tech companies give technical interviews when they're not actually hiring, that it's a sort of formality. Can't really confirm it, but thinking this way makes me feel better about not passing to the next stage.
Correct. In many of these companies, part of your evaluation is how many interviews did you give. This means: the game is to do as many as these interviews, typically once a week, such that you are not penalized for doing too few interviews.
I was once penalized for giving too few interviews but there weren't enough candidates at that time! While I cared about giving every candidate a good chance for success, I can say confidently that not many did care. They only cared about getting credit for doing the interview.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#768Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I like this quote, but I think the point comes across better if you rephrase it: > Never _intentionally_ memorize something that you can look up. I guess you can't quote Einstein, then.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#769Interesting. 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…
I concur. I did BP for only 1 semester in college but the experience proved to be valuable down the line. It forces you to articulate yourself "on the fly", streaming out ideas as they are formed (from core principles / bullet points you have in your mind).
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#770I'm a ex-FANG dev that started a recruiting company, so I am VERY familiar with the arbitrary tech interview process. I'm a huge proponent of contract-to-hire. Even started a company* to make it easier for companies to offer contract-to-hire. Now before you dismiss the idea because you are "too good" to do C2H hear me out. Everyone knows that actually working with someone on the job is the only way to get an accurate…
> because you are "too good" to do C2H hear me out No I dont want to quit my current role until I have a secure job. I'm not going to c2h to be told six weeks later I'm on the street.
Right.
For a very good (but not exceptional) developer, I wonder if ending up "out on the street" would be a reasonable expectation if something like this became truly widespread.
If companies like Google were no longer able to filter false positives __at Google scale__ using their current hiring practice, I wonder how long it would take to decide that the next best thing is to contract some tunable number of N contractors for K positions where N >> K and only keep the best M (K So, even if you're pretty good - if you aren't better than the bottom x% of your cohort (or some other aggregate measure) - you're out. Stack ranking for C2H, basically.