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

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

#871

Post by bananaface » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 10:44 AM UTC

perl4ever wrote: post #818

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…

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 trus…

I mean, every other company having a giant hole in hiring policy is not a good reason for them to have it. But them not letting you use tech you're comfortable with is a stupid way to verify.

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

#872

Post by bananaface » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 10:47 AM UTC

dcow wrote: post #449

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…

>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 tests are stupid because they instantly filter out anybody with options. If I'm being hit up by recruiters, I might come for an interview with you, but I'm not going to waste time with your test. You're going to end up with monkeys.

But even beyond that, it's so dumb to re-demonstrate coding chops to every single employer, especially when I have no idea what my chances are to begin with. Are you interviewing 100 candidates, or 2? Go look at my GitHub.

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

#873

Post by tikwidd » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 10:49 AM UTC

bananaface wrote: post #865

OliverJones wrote: post #551

Earlier 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…

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…

Performance matters when it matters. Part of the job is knowing when it matters and adjusting the approach accordingly.

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

#874

Post by bananaface » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 10:58 AM UTC

quadrifoliate wrote: post #494

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…

> 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…

I like this solution a lot, but if they asked you to contribute to a public codebase, you'd be able to tell who the other interviewees were, and how many of them you were up against.

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

#875

Post by brooklyn_ashey » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 10:59 AM UTC

fractionalhare wrote: post #568

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...I always learned in grade school math class that "average" = "mean", very specifically. I'm pretty sure there would have been test questions that required this knowledge. It's very possible my schooling was wrong, but presumably I'm not the only one.

I have a graduate education in probability and statistics; in the technical literature, an "average" is an estimator which, subject to some bias, predicts the value a sequence tends to. My professor was fond of saying, "the function f(x) = 15 is an average, but since it's a constant function it will almost always be a terrible one" to drill this into our minds. The arithmetic mean is colloquially called the average a…

Thank you for articulating this. This issue has many manifestations in the interview process. It can be so frustrating.

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

#876

Post by joelbluminator » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 11:05 AM UTC

mark-r wrote: post #759

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…

I once brought a laptop to an interview. Completely bombed it, because when asked to connect it to a projector I couldn't do it - I'd never used the video output on that laptop before and it was hidden behind a flip-down door that I didn't know about.

And that's it? Interviewer saw that as reason enough for you to fail the interview? Be glad you didn't get in!

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

#877

Post by swyx » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 11:06 AM UTC

bananaface wrote: post #865

OliverJones wrote: post #551

Earlier 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…

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…

just here to say that vscode works plenty fine on electron and has handily beat out other IDE's you might consider better software. it's always possible to use a tool badly but it's not always the fault of the tool.

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

#878

Post by bananaface » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 11:07 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #694

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…

> He also got hired - apparently the committee agreed that "can't think when hungry" is not really that important a flaw. I hope you suggested that this employee get tested for hypoglycemia. It'd probably greatly improve their quality-of-life to go from "my brain isn't working and I don't know why" to "my brain isn't working and I know exactly why; I need to drink some fruit juice."

Hah. "Did a tech interview, found out I had diabetes."

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

#879

Post by bananaface » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 11:10 AM UTC

roldie wrote: post #258

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…

The same is true for design/ux jobs interviews. Well, at least for me. I got laid off a couple of months ago, and have been interviewing pretty steadily since then. I have yet to receive an offer. I already know where my strengths and weaknesses are. I'm fine with 1 on 1s and all that, but when it comes to the technical part of the interview process like a take-home design project or a live design challenge, I usuall…

Do you have a (substantial) GitHub? Why not mass-apply for positions and refer people to that instead of accepting laborious technical tests?

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

#880

Post by bananaface » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 11:13 AM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #338

monksy wrote: post #305

Earlier 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…

I bomb on technical interviews the same way because my mind just freezes and can't get through even simple problems. 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 woul…

You're misunderstanding what they're trying to test. They're testing your raw ability to manipulate algorithmic structure in your head. It's important that you have to visualise the data structures and manipulate them without being able to look it up. It's an brainpower test, not a workflow test.