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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

#921

Post by conradev »

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 and inhales RAM is because it was programmed by people who don't have solid understanding of fundamentals.

I feel like this is a huge oversimplification. I’d argue that for sufficiently large projects (say, Chromium) every single programmer who works on it could have a strong understanding of performance fundamentals but the product itself could still have performance problems because there are necessary levels of abstraction involved and no one person has the entire codebase in their head. Performance problems could come from emergent behavior that could not have been predicted by the original engineers.

But, as for implementing an app on top of Electron. Say I need to write a cross-platform app with a consistent style and fluid animations. I know how to write a NEON implementation for ChaCha20 for fun, or write a zero-copy binary property list parser that’s faster than anything I’ve found. I have a decent understanding of performance. That doesn’t help me write this cross-platform app. I don’t have to time to write a novel native UI toolkit that allows me to share code while maintaining platform consistency and native performance. I don’t have time to fix the memory consumption of Chromium. I’m going to write my Electron app in JavaScript, carefully, and hope the performance will be acceptable (but not great). I don’t see how that can reflect on any individual programmer poorly.

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

#922

Post by raducu »

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…

I only used clever algorithms maybe, MAYBE a dozen times in 12 years as a java developer.

I know I can, in university I implemented huffman compression(I know there is nothing special about it algorithm-wise) in java and I got the best run-time in 2 series of ~100 students, and by that I mean orders of magnitude better; my runtime was on par with the best C++ programs I could find, and my program could work on arbitrary file size, the fastest C++ program I could find at that time (20 years ago?) loaded everything in-memory. I wrote all the data structures from scratch, using java structures consumed a lot of memory and was way slower.

But the jobs I got in my country as a J2EE developer were much better paying, at that time at least, than any C++/algorithms stuff.

If I was younger, with the same singlemindedness I used to have, I'd absolutely spend 1-2 years tuning my algorithms skills so I could get those sweet FANG job.

Or if I had the ego of my ex submediocre-redneck boss who thought Spring Framework was bullshit, without actually knowing it, and got into programming competitions(only to be butthurt by his results because he did not put in the effort to actually practice algorithms and data structures), again, I'd study hard on algorithms and datastructures.

Or if that was my hobbie -- algorithms and datastructures is 100% a valid hobbie -- but it is simply not my hobbie.

Sure, if I encounter a hard problem, I can look up the best algorithms, copy&paste, modify, optimize and optimize untill I'm satisfied with the result, but there simply is no payoff for me to be an algorithms grand master.

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

#923

Post by dev_on_earth »

Last year, I went to both Amazon, FB on-site interview at Seattle and Vancouver office, and completely bombed it (not quite, I solved 50% of the programming questions). I felt like a fraud when try to answer the LP questions. Anyway, is there any companies other than FAANG that can support relocation (to US or Canada)

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

#924

Post by wellpast »

First thing I'll say is that I'm not an advocate for how industry often interviews today, whiteboard and puzzle problems and all, and their efficacy is worthy of discussion. It's a hard, hard problem and there are major deficiencies. But this academic "study" seems highly suspect.

48 subjects and we can make a generalization? People's stress reactions seem intimately tied to enormous number of contextual factors. Looking at the abstract it seems the "goal" of this study is "to make problem-solving assessment more equitable and inclusive". A noble and worthy goal but this does not sound like academics or science. It sounds like its conclusion was sought for.

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

#925

Post by rikroots »

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.

I completely bombed an interview because they gave me a laptop but refused to supply a mouse. Plus the laptop touchpad scrolled in the opposite direction to what I was used to. I felt quite sorry for the interviewers who had to sit silent for ten minutes watching me try to copy a function from one file to another.

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

#926

Post by collyw »

deeg wrote: post #231
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…

I'm not a googler (but I've interviewed there) and I disagree somewhat with the original premise. I think whiteboarding does filter out bad candidates but also filters out good candidates who fail the anxiety test. Google, with their massive pipeline, probably doesn't care about the false negatives enough to change; they still find enough people to hire. It's the companies with smaller pipelines that need to scoop up…

I used to be reasonably good at algorithmic stuff in university 20 years ago. Since then I hardly ever practice. It's not that I am bad at them, now, but its just so hit and miss whether an answer will come to me in time, you might as well toss a coin. If I was doing algorithmic stuff every day I have no doubt I would be better. Usually what happens is I get out of an interview and a an answer (or a better answer than I gave) pops into my head. Like I say, might as well toss a coin.

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

#927

Post by bananaface »

h0l0cube wrote: post #919
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…

> 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…

>I've seen some electron apps that run like dogs

And almost no Qt apps run like that. "As long as I don't notice it most of the time, it's not slow." No, sorry, I don't agree. Frameworks should be fast. Slack is unforgivably slow.

>I think you mean the difference between SoA and AoS.

I mean literally in the interview when they do a nested for loop over primitives. Do they lose marks for going row-first? Why isn't that considered a basic rule? It's not complicated. Most interviewers don't even realise there's a difference (!!).

>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.

Twitter is so bad it crashes my browser. It's 90% text! The only ram-hogs are auto-playing videos that dissapear after you scroll past them. These engineers are paid half a million per year. Half the time the website doesn't even load (!!!). That's insane.

>And you can optimise your in-memory data-structures (and database IO) later

Ehh, skeptical. Unless your data & algorithms are structured as contiguous arrays of primitives to begin with you're going to have trouble refactoring the abstraction.

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

#928

Post by mikelevins »

dpc_pw wrote: post #793
mikelevins wrote: post #747

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I can communicate and explain things reasonably well to a room full of people. I ran a side business doing that for about seven or eight years. And I can ship products. I've done that a bunch of times--in several cases I've written most or all of the code in the shipping product. I can't interview all that well, though, and I'm absolutely terrible at whiteboard coding, or pretty much any kind of problem-solving…

I'm sorry to hear that. Every situation is different. If I were in your shoes I'd try to be open about it with recruiters and figure out / propose some alternative that work better for you - whatever that might be. Also keeping good portfolio of Open Source projects, blogposts etc. might help convince potential employers that you're worth considering and that your 'condition' (for a lack of a better word) is real and…

No need for sorrow. Everyone is dealt some advantages and some disadvantages. We work with what we have. I seem to have done all right. My resume is long and I have good stories to tell. I can't complain.

I was responding to another poster who said that "If devs can't muster up the courage to answer interview questions... maybe that means that they should work on themselves a little bit?"

I mean, maybe. Maybe sometimes. Then again, maybe not.

Maybe "working on themselves a little" isn't necessarily the answer. There isn't a known way to "work on myself" to affect my trait neuroticism in any significant way, for example.

Maybe it's not necessarily about "courage". I mean, courage is doing something that frightens you because it needs to be done. I know what that's like. Technical interviews don't even rate. But that doesn't solve the brainteaser on the whiteboard when a stranger's watching me.

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

#929

Post by ativzzz »

lbrito wrote: post #380
chpmrc wrote: post #138

It seems pretty obvious to me that this kind of interviews are simply there to assess how much you want to work for a certain company. As in: would you be willing to study for months, go through mock interviews, read books, test your skills etc. to have a shot at working for us? Even though the majority of that stuff will likely have zero impact on your day to day work? That's all there is, really. I've had no proble…

I had this one interview some time ago where instead of having the HR person talk about what the company does and prod me to see if I was curious/interested in what it is they do, the opposite was expected to happen. That obviously didn't go well. After the usual "tell me about yourself" stuff, the HR rep asked me what I knew about the company and was noticeably disappointed when I said I had only accessed the homepa…

Yea I remember in college when I was applying for my first jobs I would read through their mission statements so I knew what words to prioritize saying in the interviews. It's all part of the game.

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

#930

Post by touristtam »

arethuza wrote: post #863
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…

> I think that's how I discovered that mental context switching is a real thing

You had to go to that level to understand that? I am glad you did realize it, but I am surprised it was that late in your career.

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