Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ncsu.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

911–920 of 1001 posts

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

#911

Post by goatinaboat »

BeetleB wrote: post #824
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…

I'm pretty sick of Amazon recruiters. They often initiate contact. I respond. And they don't respond back. Even worse is when they do. Several times in the past year I had a back and forth with some recruiters, did an online and/or phone screen, and they said "OK, you've passed all the screens, and we're ready to schedule you for an on-site. You'll get a call to schedule it." I never get the call and the recruiter st…

I never get the call and the recruiter stops responding.

I expect Amazon has a high turnover of recruiters too.

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

#912

Post by bananaface »

ghostofdarwin09 wrote: post #709
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…

Have done over 1,000 interviews for a FAANG competitor that IPO'ed in the past 10 years. Completion time (in minutes) of a coding puzzle is essentially the only objective measurement taken during these coding puzzles, and is sadly the primary datapoint fed into the hiring manager's decision. The hiring managers usually adjust the cutoff based upon whatever quota they want and/or if they're expecting people to leave.…

Occam's razor is: algorithm tests are specialised IQ tests, and that version of IQ is actually a very reliable indicator of performance (compared to the other signals available).

I'm not exactly sure I buy it, but it seems like the simplest explanation.

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

#913

Post by michaelt »

joelbluminator wrote: post #876
mark-r wrote: post #759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

More likely it's a time issue: Every minute spent fiddling with your laptop is a minute not spent on the coding problem that's being used to evaluate you.

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

#914

Post by bananaface »

tchaffee wrote: post #823
xwolfi wrote: post #799

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What some of us do now is at home exercises with no deadline and setup the interview to do a code review of it after it's given back. It gives so many advantages: - people will have some fun trying to solve a real issue / build a little software - they will show how good they are at stack overflow, general methodology, cleanliness, test coverage, deployment and even git (how many we see who can't even gitignore their…

I recently did one of these where I was paid at half the hourly rate of the job offer. There was an initial unpaid assignment that was difficult but totally related to most engineers' day to day work. That took less than 30 minutes. Anyone who passed that got the paid assignment which took a few hours.

If I had options I wouldn't even do a 30-minute assignment. I'd just go with someone else. I'm reading about employers giving assignments a lot in this thread, but what do you do about the fact that the people you really want just don't have a reason to waste that time?

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

#915

Post by yahyaheee »

bananaface wrote: post #872
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…

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 interviewin…

Yes, if an employer doesn’t understand how to look at my GitHub then they aren’t worth my time.

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

#916

Post by Kneecaps07 »

jcadam wrote: post #6

Huh, the only successful interviews I have are the ones where I'm burned out after a long, fruitless, frustrating job search. And so I walk in assuming the interview will be a waste of time and just not caring anymore. That's when I get an offer.

I'll sometimes go on interviews when I'm NOT looking for a job. It's good practice and keeps you informed of what's out there.

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

#918

Post by ryder9 »

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…

you're an arrogant prick

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

#919

Post by h0l0cube »

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…

> Electron runs like shit

Does it? I've seen some electron apps that run like dogs, and others that seem perfectly performant. So, I'm curious... in what way does the framework run like shit? In what way could it be improved?

> How many interviewers dock marks for iterating over columns, instead of rows? Because that matters, a huge amount.

I think you mean the difference between SoA and AoS. I'm not sure that one is inherently better than the other, except the former scales well for large homogenous datasets.

I doubt optimising for DSPs/SIMD/big-data to maximize throughput and reduce cache-misses, is something the typical FAANG employee needs to know about. Could be wrong.

> "Don't you know Big N complexity is the only thing that really matters if you're looking for speed?"

It does, even if you cache-align and pool your data. And you can optimise your in-memory data-structures (and database IO) later, if profiling finds them to be a bottleneck.

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

#920

Post by notacoward »

triceratops wrote: post #186
leafboi wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've been arrogant for years and you know what? So have I. I and many, many people in this industry have been doing this for years. What's different from you and many other people is that you admit and face your bias rather than justify it. I'm seriously curious what google interview board members have to say about this study. People like Gayle Laakmaan have been saying things to justify the whole process for years…

Gayle Laakman specifically has a business empire dedicated to help people get through the process. Regardless of the actual merits of the process her opinion is going to be biased.

Quite a racket, being part of setting up this gauntlet and then selling books on how to get through it. Some might call that a conflict of interest, but there's no such thing as ethics for the nobility so to hell with what the peasants think.
Post reply on HN