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

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

#861

Post by C1sc0cat » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 9:52 AM UTC

cactus2093 wrote: post #622

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…

This has actually not been my experience. I generally agree with your reasoning and have tried to run coding interviews this way, thinking that it is most similar to doing real work. Candidates can use their own computer, their own editor and plugins, whatever framework and language they prefer, can google anything they need, etc. It causes a surprising number of problems. A lot of candidates come in with their envir…

A lot of developers wont use their personal computer to develop on but as a terminal.

Its actually bad practice in a lot of peoples opinion you should develop and test on an identical system hw/sw to the system you will deploy on.

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

#862

Post by henrygrew » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 9:55 AM UTC

stbtrax wrote: post #323

benburleson wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon is the king of assessing how much you want to work for the company. The recruiter will place a huge emphasis on nailing their Leadership Principles, and coming up with stories from your work to demonstrate you embody the Principles. They will even tell you that specific interviewers have specific LPs they will probe on, but in the actual interview they ask very veiled questions and you're supposed to know that…

is there a centralized place with information like this but for other companies as well?

glassdoor has a very good anonymous feedback system for interview experience

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

#863

Post by arethuza » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 9:59 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…

I learned this lesson a few years back when I interviewed for the CTO role of a educational software company - the main part of the interview was preparing a presentation on how to launch a new product which I had to prepare and present to the management team.

That went very well and I was feeling pretty good.

Then the CEO had a quick chat and happened to ask me a very simple technical question and my brain would not work - I completely failed to do it even though it was trivial.

I think that's how I discovered that mental context switching is a real thing - I had spent a few hours preparing and giving a presentation and then when asked a simple technical question those parts of my brain were completely offline. I think the shock of not being able to do it had a big effect on me and I went to bits (possibly the first time I've ever done that).

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

#864

Post by gmtx725 » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 10:00 AM UTC

danans wrote: post #149

RivieraKid wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would definitely not want to work for you, I think there's something deeply ineffective when most of the job is explaining your code. I say that as someone who cares a lot about writing easy to read code and has no problem explaining it. Also, I'm very bad at solving a problem while being required to think out loud.

The skill of explaining your work is a very important one in practically any creative problem solving field. This only increases as the technical complexity of the problems faced increases. Sometimes this explaining happens in textual format, like code reviews and design specifications, but often it happens verbally. Absent an explanation, it's hard to build consensus among the parties involved (co-workers, users, ma…

explanation is important but its unreasonable to expect someone to do it on the spot in a time-pressured environment. Often you have to go away and think about it alone in order to come up with a good way of explaining things to others.

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

#865

Post by bananaface » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 10:15 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…

I honestly don't agree with this. The worst programs are written by people who know how to plug a million and one things together, but can't drill down and analyse the algorithmic implications of what they're doing. Electron runs like shit and inhales RAM is because it was programmed by people who don't have solid understanding of fundamentals. They understand a huge number of horizontal abstractions but they have no concept of how it looks vertically.

Knowing how to maximally exploit a CPU is way more important than knowing eight different Javascript frameworks if good software is your objective. And frankly, learning Node is way easier than figuring out how to structure basic, bare-bones Javascript so that it leverages your L1 cache.

And therein lies the problem. How many interviewers dock marks for iterating over columns, instead of rows? Because that matters, a huge amount. How many interviewers would give credit for "how can you speed this up?" if the interviewee said, "write it in C, and simplify the datastructures you want me to use so we maximise sequential lookups over basic arrays, to maximise cache usage." They'll look at you like you have three heads.

"Don't you know Big N complexity is the only thing that really matters if you're looking for speed?" - then you get Electron.

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

#866

Post by thedufer » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 10:18 AM UTC

rsweeney21 wrote: post #647

pclmulqdq wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C2H is terrible for the employee and you should know that, as a professional headhunter. Negotiating your salary upfront is likely going to give you the best deal you can get. Don't kid yourself into thinking that you can "show your value" to improve your negotiating position. Your first few months on the job are usually when you are at your lowest performance, since you are learning the company's processes. That is…

That's not what we've seen. For example, one of our customers raised salary bands across their entire software division to accommodate the salary demands of the contractors they wanted to convert to salaried. In most cases companies have a ball park salary in mind for the position, so when it comes time to convert there is some room for negotiation, but no surprises. Companies are so desperate for good software engin…

Sorry, your pitch to clients is "throw away all of your leverage (existing job, unemployment qualification, health insurance, etc) to contract for a few months and then you'll get a great fulltime offer"? That's...deeply implausible.

I'm almost willing to believe this works for people who absolutely are unable to pass any sort of interview, but in that case aren't they still in trouble? How does a company decide who to bring on for the contract? Surely you can't replace the interview process with this.

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

#867

Post by blunte » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 10:21 AM UTC

I failed the third phase of the Toptal interview process (where you have to solve two coding challenges, each within 20 minutes, while screen-sharing with a human observer). The event was nerve wracking.

On the first challenge, I only completing coding and did a first run of my solution with 90 seconds to spare. It didn't give the correct answer, and I had only about one minute to debug and try again. In that case, I felt immense anxiety and nearly gave up. But somehow I managed to keep it together long enough to spot a misplaced array index [ ] reference and produce a correct result.

On the second challenge, on my first run at about 17 minutes in I discovered that my entire approach was not general enough to meet all the possible cases. As I recall, while the rules of the problem are stated, you are not able to see test cases until you run. With three minutes left and the understanding that my approach was fundamentally flawed, I just gave up.

The experience was demoralizing. On the plus side, when I did live coding challenges for job interviews after that, I found them all comparatively easy and relaxed.

What would be better, in my opinion, is an overnight problem to solve, followed by a detailed walk-through of the solution the next day. That presented walk-through can prove to the interviewer that the candidate did not simply copy a solution (without understanding it) from elsewhere on the internet. Of course, if the solution was copied by understood, that should be positively accepted in many cases. There's a reason we use trusted libraries instead of writing our own code where possible.

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

#868

Post by PopeDotNinja » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 10:23 AM UTC

rsweeney21 wrote: post #448

I'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'm not gonna quit a good job to take a C2H job no matter how good it is, especially in the crazy times.

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

#869

Post by dkarp » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 10:32 AM UTC

blunte wrote: post #867

I failed the third phase of the Toptal interview process (where you have to solve two coding challenges, each within 20 minutes, while screen-sharing with a human observer). The event was nerve wracking. On the first challenge, I only completing coding and did a first run of my solution with 90 seconds to spare. It didn't give the correct answer, and I had only about one minute to debug and try again. In that case, I…

I had a very similar experience with Toptal and going down the wrong avenue when solving the problem.

The interviewer muted themself and went non-responsive while I was working on the problem. So I was asking questions and heard nothing back at all until the time was coming to an end. At that point the interviewer came back to assess what I had done.

I remember it being a really terrible experience

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

#870

Post by bananaface » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 10:33 AM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #855

drdrey wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't even have a personal laptop, seems like bringing the employer provided laptop to interviews is not the most sensible.

I'm glad my (former) employer has a scheme where after two years you can take over your "old" laptop for just €200. I'm at my new job right now with a 2017 MBP, which their current laptop budget just wouldn't even come near to. Oh and I got it revised just before leaving, the speakers were broken but there was a recall / extended warranty about that problem, it got the whole top replaced.

Wait, your employer makes you pay to get a new work laptop, or they have a scheme where you can buy your old work laptop for $200? If they make you pay to work on up-to-date hardware, that's insane.