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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

#801

Post by xwolfi »

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…

Heh, another thing is variable salary on a test period. Like how I was recruited out of uni, on a 6 month cheap internship barely paying a rent, with 0 commitment from the company to keep me. Long enough to evaluate me, see me contribute, teach me part of the sytem, not long enough to "exploit" me.

We could scale this to 3 months on 80% salary (whatever the company is comfortable spending on throwaway) with the full salary after the test period, with maybe even back pay and a little ceremony to make it a big deal. That would kick my ass for three months, cost me nothing long term, put a big smile in my face and let any company hire me without 15 interviews.

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

#802

Post by vonseel »

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #784
stormbrew wrote: post #774

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the replies to this are getting at, it's really important that if you do this you don't require the candidate to use their own laptop. You need to provide a laptop or like, a mac mini or something you know you can plug in and has baseline requirements for working on the problem you're giving them. And you need to make sure that the problem isn't complex enough that they can't do it in the allotted time if they str…

Hm, maybe. I was thinking, work in an environment you're familiar with, since that's a more realistic measure. For example, I'm an Emacs kind of guy, so if they hand me a Windows laptop, do I limp along with Notepad? or some IDE that happens to be installed? Generally, as soon as I've settled in at a new job, I've customized my work environment with something as close to Linux and Emacs as possible -- if Windows, I'l…

It sounds like definitely an opportunity at the minimum for the existing online interviewing sites to provide a service which installs a candidate's vim configuration (or emacs, not sure how that one works) from a public Github (or other host) git repository URL. They've already gone through the trouble of sandboxing the runtimes somehow so it can't be that difficult to also sandbox the editor. Not sure how it would work for other IDEs but that should at least support vim, maybe others like VS Code and IntelliJ too.

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

#803

Post by stonecharioteer »

OliverJones wrote: post #551
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…

I've been doing this for a LOOONG time. Early on, the core skill for a programmer was intensive in-depth knowledge of the language being used. We all talked a good game about what we called "reusable software," but yeah. Talk. Now things are TOTALLY different. Doing a good job requires extensive, encyclopedic, knowledge of what's out there, how well it works, and how to integrate it. npm, nuget, maven, anaconda, we a…

Lol @ wouldn't hire Jesus of Nazerath to be a story teller. I'm going to use this phrase.

Also, I love it when people say Jesus of Nazerath. Such a melody to that.

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

#804

Post by jussij »

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.

Shouldn't that be tell a mean from a median?

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

#805

Post by lumost »

mianos wrote: post #777
lumost wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Senior/Principal Engineers at FAANGs may not even code all that much in their day to day. The difficult decision that gets faced when interviewing those folks is whether they could walk into a fresh environment, and stack, and immediately earn the trust of their team. In practice whiteboard interviews assess this pretty well. A new senior engineer must immediately be shipping optimal, tested, and well designed code.…

Any significant system will take months to learn. Your statement is probably only true for some trivial system. A senior engineer comes with years of experience designing and coding systems that took years to develop and run at scale. Given time to learn they should be just as good at solving day to day bugs but if you assign them that you are wasting your time and money on experience. If you don't value experience y…

Learning the ropes of a new company is fair and being slower at first is to be expected, but explaining that code reviews need to be tested to a senior hire isn't as fair. Similarly a new senior hire should be able to hop into a code review and catch problems/suggest improvements early in the process.

These two behaviors aren't as dependent on knowledge of the system as they are on core coding competencies. The whiteboard interview reasonably works to assess these, but it requires a lot of prep and is prone to false negatives.

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

#806

Post by twicetwice »

Judgmentality wrote: post #77
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…

> That and debate gave me the ability to just start a sentence without knowing where it will end and then talk my way to a conclusion that sounds like it makes sense You're effectively advocating for more bullshit. The problem is that this works in the first place - we shouldn't be rewarding it.

You're right, unfortunately that's what it sounds like I'm saying. It's not really what I meant. The idea I was trying to get across is closer to "being able to communicate what I'm thinking about as I'm thinking about it, and verbalizing that as a coherent sentence rather than just fragments." Ironically, I wish I had communicated that better :)

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

#807

Post by closeparen »

marcinzm wrote: post #242
scrozier wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, certainly no interviewers think that they're screening for "ability to study and dedicate yourself to a task." In being on both sides of the table for more than thirty years, I have never heard an interviewer mention that.

Companies encourage you to study for the interview, providing you with links to books, guides and preparation material. They'll delay the interview to give you time to study more. So it seems pretty clear to me that corporate management sees it as a test of study skills even if interviewers don't. edit: I'm talking about large tech companies, not the startups blindly copying their policies with little thought or cons…

Everyone involved in the process wants you to succeed. If not out of the goodness of our hearts, then because we've invested time. Under-preparedness is a stupid and preventable reason to lose a candidate.

When someone comes in and bombs, that is at least valuable information: we don't want to work with this person. When someone comes in and seems smart and capable, but makes hardly any progress on the problem because it's obviously their first time on a whiteboard, it's just regrettable all around.

We're not selecting for preparedness. In fact, we try to select against it: interviewers take pride in designing twists that separate understanding from recall. If you seem to be recalling, we're supposed to pick a different question, or failing that, report a null signal. But we do need you to be prepared enough that your interview skills don't get in the way of your actual skills.

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

#808

Post by twicetwice »

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 don't mean to give advice on gaming the system—I'm sorry if I came across that way. The point I was trying to make was much closer to your first line—that the current interviewing system rewards confidence and communication skills, and that debate helped me build those. Ironically, I wish I had communicated that better :)

Also, I agree that there are drawbacks to doing debate. For one, there's a certain "debate kid" mentality that I picked up and had to unlearn.

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

#809

Post by ab8 »

glenngillen wrote: post #743
txcwpalpha wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed with Amazon and I hated the LP bullshit. I hated it so much I gave a ton of feedback and had a very lengthy and illuminating conversation about the process with a friend of mine who works there. Amazon knows full well what the LP interview experience is like, and it's by design. It's not about "how much you want to work at Amazon", but it's also explicitly, intentionally not about "actually getting to k…

It sucks that you (and numerous others in this thread) have had a bad experience. As an ex-Amazonian that did my fair share of interviewing, I can share additional context on some of the above: * Tardiness and just the general unprofessional handling of someone being interviewed: At least in the area I worked this would have been unacceptable and the interviewer would have had a very uncomfortable conversation with t…

I don’t understand what is wrong with hiring someone the interviewer likes. I can see there may be racism, misogyny etc at play here. But setting that aside for a second, if people like each other, all other problems can be solved much more easily.

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

#810

Post by twicetwice »

gwbas1c wrote: post #104
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…

> That and debate gave me the ability to just start a sentence without knowing where it will end ... it sounds like I've been thinking sensibly about it. I've always structured my interviews to weed that kind of thing out.

Duplicating a comment I made above, the idea I wanted to communicate is closer to "being able to communicate what I'm thinking about as I'm thinking about it" — NOT just rambling my way to a BS answer.
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