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

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

#811

Post by twicetwice » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 5:05 AM UTC

canada_dry wrote: post #412

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…

> project confidence even if I know what I'm saying is BS One of my very worst bosses had this quality . Perversely, it was about the only thing I admired about him. The guy could walk into a meeting of NASA flight engineers and engage in conversation without uttering a single fact that would betray his total lack of any knowledge/qualifications. n.b. He was fired not long after I left the company.

To be clear: I don't advocate for doing that, and I don't try to BS my interviewers. That's why I said "let alone if I'm just a bit unsure"—if, during high school debate, I can confidently BS, then now, during an interview, I can confidently talk even if I'm nervous and not fully sure of myself.

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

#812

Post by twicetwice » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 5:09 AM UTC

fuzzythinker wrote: post #731

arp242 wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

True, "winning the argument" is one of the main drawbacks I fear. The main benefits for me is to foster (often quick) logical thinking and reasoning and the ability to articulate it. It is difficult to build this skill without a "debate team" setting. More so if your kids are more on the shyness scale.

I completely agree with all of that.

Interestingly, I was an extremely shy kid growing up—less so now.

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

#813

Post by twicetwice » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 5:12 AM UTC

smilekzs wrote: post #769

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…

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).

Yes, exactly!

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

#814

Post by pmontra » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 5:17 AM UTC

stormbrew wrote: post #774

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Give me a Mac and I'll spend half of the time asking you how to do X on a Mac, keyboard, mouse, touchpad, menus and unfamiliar software.

Do you really have to test for the ability to use tools instead of the ability of reasoning? A whiteboard doesn't seem bad for that. I would like to understand how the candidates reason, how they interact with colleagues and yes, also how they handle stress.

Example from yesterday: I had to fix a problem on a software in production before the end of the day (it must be available today) and before a reasonable hour (I wanted to go out at night.) That means working fast, debug, find solutions, possibly develop workarounds that leave the system working even if the problem is still not fully understood and solved and, most important, don't panic.

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

#815

Post by fuzzythinker » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 5:23 AM UTC

twicetwice wrote: post #808

fuzzythinker wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you for clarifying and confirming my other fear of undesired debate mentality. FYI, it's a good idea to edit your HN profile. When you write good comments, people may check it.

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

#816

Post by ornornor » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 5:27 AM UTC

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…

That is exactly my current employer. Our main office is in a small town, so there aren’t that many candidates to begin with (a job stays open for 6–9 months and we get maybe 15 applicants during that time)

Our software is utter trash because the business is very clannish, fragmented, and the people in charge either never ever wrote code or did it 15 years ago.

And yet we fail 95% of the technical candidates we interview because they don’t meet our “high” standards. We won’t even consider hiring remotely (but within the country because we’re making government software) even though an overwhelming majority of the company and tech team has been working from home 80–100% since March... No, we’re insisting on rejecting the handful of candidates that apply in our small town. Insane.

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

#817

Post by tchaffee » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 5:28 AM UTC

marta_morena_25 wrote: post #531

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 am focusing on the algorithmic part, which is the only thing I can influence in my company's interviews. I wish we would evaluate candidates with some pair programming, but that's never going to happen. > incredibly high stakes algorithm riddles Yeah there you go. This is your problem (Google/Facebook I assume?). It's more than questionable to expect candidates to solves complex algorithmic problems on a whiteboard…

You've just slightly improved upon a very broken way of interviewing engineering candidates. I've been paid by clients happy with the results to do everything from cryptography to writing a compiler / interpreter. Very computer sciencey stuff at times. The devs I work with consistently rate me highly and I often get put in mentoring positions. I couldn't tell you what N^2 is. I learned it in uni. In decades of programming it has come up in many interviews and never once on the job. Maybe in your industry it's important. But if not, please consider re-imagining your interview process. Having hired many developers over my career including at one time for my own business I can assure you there are far better ways at getting high quality signal out of candidates than trying to improve upon what you experienced as a candidate.

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

#818

Post by perl4ever » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 5:32 AM UTC

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 like take home tests. Unfortunately, the one time I applied to a place that gave them, and apparently aced it, they wanted to validate it in the interview, by having me program in an environment and language I'd never used before. I get that everybody cheats at everything, but since some employers (all the ones that have ever hired me) hire without any coding demonstration, why can't you just take the risk and trust that a regular interview is enough?

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

#819

Post by jldugger » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 5:33 AM UTC

tsumnia wrote: post #56

codemonkey-zeta wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate their effort to use science to support the narrative that tech interviews suck, because I do think they suck and need to change, but isn't N=48 a little small? Also, if it was only undergraduates or graduates, who's to say their performance is indicative of the rest of the tech workforce?

The small N is addressed by the authors. To acquire a larger N would mean recruiting more participants, which would require either compensation/extra credit or rely on people volunteering ~1 hour of their time. Likewise, collecting that data would require time and money. It is an time/resource issue with human research. You can require a small N and get some results or require a large N and not have enough funding to…

> Also note, what is a "large N"?

Depends on the size of the effect you wish to measure, and the underlying variance. They got a massive effect, which to me, seems improbable, and I half suspect the randomization is at play.

I think it'd be pretty simple and cheap to replicate the things we care about in this study. All you really need is a whiteboard, some markers, a small room, a few interviewers and a candidate pool. The eyetracking getup really only gets in the way of that and seemed more like a problem in search of a solution.

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

#820

Post by nathanvanfleet » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 5:56 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…

Couple that with 45 five times over! I was flown down for a Facebook interview from the east coast. It was my first tech interview and it was with facebook. I was so exhausted by it, and then the next day I had an interview at Uber. I started that one already pretty tired.