Just curious does anyone knows or has created a list of companies that gives you take home tests
I would love to find out
Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
831–840 of 1001 posts
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#832Earlier quoted context omitted.
The best advice I ever got about interviews is to figure out ways to prove yourself wrong about what you think about the candidate. Although it's good advice for a candidate who seems too perfect, this advice really shines when someone is bombing.
That advice seems like unnecessary mental gymnastics. Just take an unseen technical problem, solve it for the very first time in front of a colleague, then double your time as the expected time for candidates in an interview. When you're under time-pressure, you actually spend more time thinking about how much time you have left, rather than thinking about how to solve the problem.
It's not mental gymnastics. The point is to challenge yourself as an interviewer to reveal a diamond in the rough. Some people suck at interviews and are great at coding. I've hired a lot of them and we've made a lot of money together. I've never had to fire anyone either so I'm not getting false positives either.
> Just take an unseen technical problem, solve it for the very first time in front of a colleague, then double your time as the expected time for candidates in an interview.
That gives very poor signal in my experience due to the time pressure. Your process is now selecting for people who are good at taking tests instead of selecting for good engineers.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#833"Technical interviews are feared and hated in the industry, and it turns out that these interview techniques may also be hurting the industry’s ability to find and hire skilled software engineers." It doesn't hurt "the industry", there's a competitive edge to hiring otherwise superior engineers that are passed up by poor hiring practices at certain companies. Not everybody needs to work at FAANG, or worse, companies…
I just went through a job search and this is what I landed on. Every CRUD webapp startup thinks they need FAANG-like hiring processes and fucking suck at it. I ended up taking a job that was mostly a no-interview process. Two calls to talk about the fit. They looked at my job history (gasp!) talked to some references (double gasp!) verified my ability to code with my github contributes (omfg I can't breathe!) and off…
Will love to know the company name !
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#834A lot of it relates to how much the interviewer can create rapport and comfort. The interviewer having the upper hand in the power balance, they should go the extra mile to set the stage correctly. Many good engineers are terrible at interviewing. In the wake of the interview they boldly set forth their assessment while being largely ignorant of their own negative impact on what just happened.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#835Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I had the same question you mention. "This is a problem a paper was written on, are you expecting me to derive a whole paper from first principles in half an hour, or are you expecting me to have seen it before? If it's the latter, why not let me Google, as I normally would?" > I feel that saying "I would solve this problem with " should be good enough, and if I'm asked to implement it, I should be able to copy pas…
I had that exact same experience with milo.com. Small world.
Well, I found their challenge because they posted it to HN.
Everyone inside Milo seemed to think that their hiring process was hugely better than what happened elsewhere, including by producing better hires. But the approach -- set a difficult challenge instead of an easy challenge, such that, if someone passes the challenge, you will almost certainly hire them -- still seems to be vanishingly rare.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#836I'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…
I can’t imagine how anyone would give up their employer-provided health care (which is all we have in the US) during a pandemic to go into a contract-to-hire scheme. That might have made sense last year but it definitely does not now.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#837Earlier 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.
On an average day?
Mode: On a typical day Mean: On a day that is in the calculated middle (for some variance) Median: On a day that is the middle for all the possible days <<-- nobody thinks of this, but they think this is what the mean is.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#838Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>Doing a good job requires extensive, encyclopedic, knowledge of what's out there I wouldn't say that. What I feel like I've accumulated in knowledge over time is I can look at a new problem and without having the solution/encyclopedic knowledge, I can know in my gut that (a) there is a solution, and (b) the solution I'm looking at is not the solution. Merely being able to look up things on the internet without these…
I describe this as known-unknown vs unknown-unknown (credit to Donald Rumsfeld)
Unknown unknowns: The things that you don't know are possible and thus don't even know how to start solving. You will accidentally reinvent the wheel, most likely very badly. Or give up right away.
Known unknowns: An experienced developer most likely unconsciously knows (has read on HN/Reddit/Book/Blog some time in the last 20 years) that a thing they encounter has been solved already, at least partially.
This allows them to start searching for the answer with a few key words, because they know it's possible but don't know how it can be done.
Same comes with having a network of people who know different things, I know the bare minimum about professional pentesting, but I know a few people who I are absolute pros in the field.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#839People 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?
It should. There is a sibling thread about this ;)
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#840People 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…
So is the moral of the story that this hire worked out or not? Was this a good coder?
That's another downside of the system: learning that is too much effort, unless they land in your team. But knowing how we hire only obviously overqualified people, I trust he did well.