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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

#881

Post by DasIch »

bumby wrote: post #593
DasIch wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You only need to fill a position with a person that is good enough. If you reject someone who would have been a good fit but still hire someone good eventually, that’s ok. A bad hire is not fun, not for HR, not for the hiring manager, not for the colleagues and ultimately not for the person who got hired. Especially if they had to move for the job, possibly with family. A bad hire has massive negative consequences fo…

I don’t disagree but “good enough” comes with its own risks. That may be fine for an organization that has a lot of inertia and is biased towards the “maintaining” side of the house. However, I think it would make it make things more difficult if the intent was for bold, transformative change.

The bar for "good enough" can of course be quite high.

If you're hiring people at the very top or with rare skillsets, like building browser engines, building databases or people whose skill is at author/contributor level to relevant technology (for the job in question), you're probably not going to go with the usual process anyway as there is less uncertainty.

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

#882

Post by swyx »

Judgmentality wrote: post #187
commandlinefan wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure he's advocating for it, just pointing out that it's true.

> My takeaway, I guess—parents, make your kids do debate! He's encouraging parents to make their kids learn this skillset. He is absolutely advocating for it.

don't hate the player, hate the game. easier to tweak personal actions to address the world as it is than to rant against how the world doesn't work per your ideals. at least this guy is self aware enough to admit there is some amount of bullshit in what he says. I am more concerned with people who refuse to admit this, or worse, genuinely don't believe it.

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

#883

Post by bananaface »

monksy wrote: post #386
StavrosK wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The funny thing about this is: They're not looking for someone that is eager enough to show they're willing to work through it even though they have no idea to proceed. They are looking for someone that got lucky enough to be ready to answer that particular problem, but won't stand up to them that the ask was a bit too much for a reasonable interview that is intended to see if you're a fit for the company and skilled…

I don't think it's that complex. I think they're just cargo-culting. Technical interviews were designed to test certain things (brainpower, grasp of fundamental data structures) and not other things (workflow, ability to write out large volumes of trivial code). I think companies just copy that and don't realise what they're really testing for.

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

#884

Post by bananaface »

StavrosK wrote: post #398
monksy wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funny thing about this is: They're not looking for someone that is eager enough to show they're willing to work through it even though they have no idea to proceed. They are looking for someone that got lucky enough to be ready to answer that particular problem, but won't stand up to them that the ask was a bit too much for a reasonable interview that is intended to see if you're a fit for the company and skilled…

Exactly agreed, and because my inclination is to say "I've never used this in previous jobs and will never use it here", I don't think it's useful for me to be interviewing for jobs. A friend of mine, when asked to implement an AVL tree, actually asked an interviewer when the last time he had to implement an AVL tree on the job was. He wasn't hired.

Asking you to visualise & manipulate a novel data structure you don't have practice with is a feature, not a bug. It's a specialised IQ test.

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

#885

Post by bananaface »

u67583 wrote: post #401
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…

It's not just nerves either. All interviews, but especially FAANG ones, are random. The interview might be racist, sexist, etc. They might have gotten divorced that day. The question they ask you is something you haven't heard of but they spent their PhD on. You can even do everything correctly, but the interviewer doesn't like the way you did it. The leetcode stuff is just masochism. You will spend X months beating…

It's difficult to remove that randomness from the process. As I see it the only reliable approach for both sides, given that structure, is volume - you just do/conduct a lot of interviews and evaluate/get evaluated on the top percentile.

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

#886

Post by reagent_finder »

mirekrusin wrote: post #842
tpxl wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give 20 candidates take home exercises, they're all passionate and put a lot of work into it, then you'll reject 19 of them. The input required for this type of interview is heavily skewed in favor of the company. No thanks.

Why not drastically different approach - ie. instead of active technical interview process on company's side, just put up few dozens of open source projects/libraries that are being used inside company and leave it as technical interview sandbox. Keep brownie points on pull requests to unlock "you gained > badge" a'la stack overflow or do one off evaluation based on contribution when candidate applies. Stack overflow…

Not the worst approach, and as long as it's in the spirit of cooperation might even be good.

UX people could tune or at least comment on the interface, security people could fuzz or pentest the library... however, for a lot of actual problems in actual open source libraries it requires a crapton of internalization -- again, for free. Granted, it's for open source but it could be argued it's even WORSE approach for the company, since they're getting free benefit from expertise and work.

Also, I'm a private person, I have splintered online identities, I'm not going to give my 'hobbyist' github account in a professional context, and I'm also certainly not going to make a github account just for interviews and applications.

I'm lucky enough to have connections that will probably keep me employed as long as I like, and the tales of interviews and free work that's required to put up just to get a chance seems insane.

4 hours... okay, I can sort of see that, I might set myself a limit of 1 hour and tell them this was my approach, this was how far I got. I've heard of 30-60 hour workloads given to applicants to 'top five' companies and it's just ridiculous. As are the stories of interviewers who have no technical skills themselves and are just looking for a canned response (Google, looking at you).

I was going to say that the best approach I've seen are companies that put up interesting puzzles and security challenges on their website. The technical skills required aren't _that_ high, but certainly require an amount of ingenuity, persistence and just plain being interested in tinkering that they feel suits their company profile. The applicants can solve or try to solve these challenges, do writeups and probably get interviews just based on those.

Granted, I can also understand someone looking at 50 companies all giving them 4-10 hour workloads to MAYBE get an interview might feel frustrated and overloaded. It's a classic egg-and-chicken problem. If I were to start looking for a job from scratch I'd probably solve a bunch of code wars challenges and security CTFs, make a blog and just link my writeups and blog to applications.

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

#887

Post by bananaface »

bumby wrote: post #405
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've heard HR optimizes processes that limit Type I errors (false positive) at the expense of Type II errors (false negative). I've often wondered if this is because, from the HR perspective, false positives are much more costly. I.e., Those who would be helped by limiting the false negatives are project managers who are too downstream in the process for HR to care.

Understanding this is the most important part of interview process, in my opinion. Large companies want to minimise bad hires, small companies are more open to odd CVs and novel approaches. Market yourself appropriately.

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

#888

Post by bananaface »

foolmeonce wrote: post #456
bumby wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard HR optimizes processes that limit Type I errors (false positive) at the expense of Type II errors (false negative). I've often wondered if this is because, from the HR perspective, false positives are much more costly. I.e., Those who would be helped by limiting the false negatives are project managers who are too downstream in the process for HR to care.

I think the problem is HR itself. Few companies should be large enough to warrant full time HR, but even small companies need many.. HR are specialist in expanding the disconnect between people the company thinks it needs and people who are willing to work for it.

You say that, but look through this thread. HR has a solid understanding of what a given company's large-scale objectives are when hiring. As evidenced by most replies in this thread, technicians on the ground do not.

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

#889

Post by bananaface »

DasIch wrote: post #881
bumby wrote: post #593

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t disagree but “good enough” comes with its own risks. That may be fine for an organization that has a lot of inertia and is biased towards the “maintaining” side of the house. However, I think it would make it make things more difficult if the intent was for bold, transformative change.

The bar for "good enough" can of course be quite high. If you're hiring people at the very top or with rare skillsets, like building browser engines, building databases or people whose skill is at author/contributor level to relevant technology (for the job in question), you're probably not going to go with the usual process anyway as there is less uncertainty.

Fun fact: Google & other tech giants have poached a lot of game engine designers to optimise datacenters at truly obnoxious salaries, because their fundamental skill is making complex systems of interacting entities run as efficiently as possible. It's causing problems in the games industry because they can't compete.

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

#890

Post by reagent_finder »

eNTi wrote: post #847
mirekrusin wrote: post #842

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not drastically different approach - ie. instead of active technical interview process on company's side, just put up few dozens of open source projects/libraries that are being used inside company and leave it as technical interview sandbox. Keep brownie points on pull requests to unlock "you gained > badge" a'la stack overflow or do one off evaluation based on contribution when candidate applies. Stack overflow…

Unless you are looking for a "senior developer with x years of experience". I have a live, hobbies and family. I don't care to spend most of my free time fixing code in some obscure library I'm not ever going to use only to stand a chance to get a different job in the future. How in the world did current developers EVER get ANY job? Who gives developers the chance to grow these days?

It's a "foot in" problem, I feel. Shit companies have shit interviews and give out shit workloads to MAYBE get a foot in the door.

You can follow along or be proactive, for instance start a new github account just for interviews, do code wars challenges, write a blog and just link your writeups, github and blog to applications. Along with your CV with major projects etc. of course.

Most people I know who work at big firms got calls from friends or friends of friends to interviews, so spending time socializing the local hacker circles is probably going to be worthwhile as well.

If you have life, hobbies and family, you should still be able to schedule 1-4 hours a week to job hunting, much more if you don't have a job of course.

It's not pretty or much fun, but it's certainly doable.

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