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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

#891

Post by reagent_finder »

legopiece wrote: post #393
yamazaki wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I think take-home exercises are a much better way to evaluate candidates. Give them the exercise and enough time and you will figure out: 1) How good they are 2) How much they actually care about the job offer -- the more detail and the more passion they put in the exercise, the more into the job they are.

Totally agreed. I've been in the position to evaluate several take-home exercises during the years and they always produced good results

Could you provide a bit more info? How long were the exercises? Were the applicants evaluated more based on their results or possible writeups? How much did their CV weigh compared to the take-home exercises?

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

#892

Post by bregma »

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…

No company should trust their employees. The risk of a type II error is too great. To certain kinds of people a type II error is the worst kind of error you can make.

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

#893

Post by reagent_finder »

tchaffee wrote: post #817
marta_morena_25 wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 progra…

"N^2 is bad, except when it isn't" is my take on it.

In uni I maybe had one week of doing O-evaluations, it never came up and I never got interested. I've seen 20,000-word debates on Reddit on whether something is n, n2 or logn... and to my knowledge nobody ever learned anything from those.

In the workplace I've several times ran into the problem of "This is taking way too long," developing tools and methods to measure and drill down, then figure out if it can be improved upon or should be left as-is for now.

Honestly discussions and articles like this leave me absolutely terrified of interviews. My first and only technical interview was my future boss leaving me alone for 30 minutes in a room with a laptop "Code something you like yourself."

That man was brilliant.

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

#894

Post by fennecfoxen »

kamaal wrote: post #798
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…

>>This business of high stakes quiz questions serves just one purpose: feeding the ego of the interviewer. "We have high standards!" It's scary how true this is. I know one manager who routinely rejects perfectly good candidates for making negligible mistakes in the interview. All on the grounds of "We have high standards!"

It sounds like the process works! … at preserving the candidate from your organization. :)

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

#895

Post by bananaface »

swyx wrote: post #877
bananaface wrote: post #865

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As someone who uses Emacs (which is a terrible piece of software in its own right), looking at the top feature requests for VS Code is like looking into the twilight zone. It lacks absurdly basic functionality.

Granted, they made Electron run fast enough to be usable but I wouldn't call it good software.

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

#896

Post by LockAndLol »

So what are we going to do about it? Nothing. Absolutely nothing, that's what.

This happens all the time. People complain and complain, something comes out proving them right (or at least confirming their opinion) and all that happens is people relate. Politics, jobs, healthcare, interviewing practices, work conditions...

If programmers actually joined a union and organized themselves to make a db of companies with shitty interviewing techniques, bad business practices, etc. maybe something would change, but hey, complaining is easier, right?

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

#897

Post by bananaface »

tikwidd wrote: post #873
bananaface wrote: post #865

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Efficiency automatically matters for something like Electron because if it's not well-engineered, it will produce monstrosities like Slack.

If Slack was written in Qt with the same budget it would just be fast. Even with effort we don't have Qt apps that behave like Slack.

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

#898

Post by vsareto »

koheripbal wrote: post #416
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…

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…

> Today, for example, I updated our firewall rules, updated some Java business logic, tweaked some javascipt and PHP on the site, reversed an odd macro email-phishing virus we got, configured a new RDS server VM for clients, and updated some network GPOs. 20 years ago, I would have never worked on ALL of those things in the same week - let alone the same day.

If you're happy, then awesome, but the reason you would have never worked on all of those things before is because companies are loading up more responsibilities onto technical people to cut down on costs.

You carry the skills of 3 roles from 10 years ago: Sysadmin, developer, and reverse engineer, and yet you're likely only being paid for one.

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

#899

Post by Aeolun »

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…

> Knowing how to maximally exploit a CPU is way more important than knowing eight different Javascript frameworks if good software is your objective

Which is why 90% of all software is very profitable crap.

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

#900

Post by pintxo »

afterburner wrote: post #700
samatman wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All you're pointing out here is that a candidate should be able to differentiate between average, mean, median, and mode, and should be able to swiftly correct "what's the difference between average and median" to "do you mean mean and median? because a median is a type of average". Given that, showing more charity to the comment you're responding to would have been the correct course of action.

Yeah but will embarrassing the interviewer work well as a strategy to get hired? Depends on the interviewer.

Do you want to work at a place where you cannot event define the words used before solving a problem?
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