Tech interviews are kind of like a lot of games in life: do something difficult and boring in order to survive, and make it look easy and enjoyable while you're at it.
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
#942Earlier 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" questions are heavily biased in favor of the employer because they're not required to put anything on the line. An asynchronous test is definitely more flexible for all parties, but it also means the employer can more forward with far more interviews than they would be able to do in person. Leading to more candidates wasting their time doing nonsense work when they have proportionally less of a chance of…
Worst for me was for Rakuten when they asked to basically implement a complete ETL pipeline to populate a mini-datawarehouse. It was easily more than a week's worth of 2 hours per day work that was supposed to be done within a week and worse, they didn't even bother to provide feedback.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#943Earlier 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…
> 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 ha…
Unless they're getting 120 hours of productivity out of him, then no - they're just more in need of fewer generalists than many specialists. Specialization is great, but only if all of the other necessities get covered.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#944What are people doing as alternatives to these kinds of interviews? The research is quite clear that technical interviews are worse than useless (literally -- they will select for the wrong traits in your candidate pool), yet they still seem to be the dominant hiring practice.
My current company does a few rounds of low-key chatting, some about technical stuff, then a 1 to 2 month trial period with the understanding that there is no guarantee of a job at the end, it only becomes permanent if it's a good fit on both ends. Obviously this is time consuming and expensive, but it works because we're a small and very stable company, which I realize is very much _not_ the norm. This does work great, though. They've managed to build a team of excellent, autonomous, highly skilled developers who stick around for the long haul. Wow, that sounds a bit self-aggrandizing -- I'm really thinking of my co-workers, I hardly count myself in that category. Maybe someday.
Anyway, I'm genuinely curious what other models you all use that work well. By "work" I guess I mean result in high quality and long lasting additions to a team.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#945This is why internships are so important. Sometimes it’s still hard to tell after 10 weeks. It’s very naive to think we will know after a 30 minute interview.
I downvoted you for two reasons.
First, expecting someone to commit to only working for a short time period is discriminatory. Only certain people could commit to such a thing, such as those with a low cost of living (no family) or those who are already independently wealthy. No regular professional with obligations is going to commit to that.
Second, if you can't tell whether or not a person is a good employee after 10 weeks then you're not a good manager.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#946I shared this article with my company. It was amazing how fast our leadership (particularly those involved in interviewing) came back with critiques about sample size or if they properly accounted for student performance in the study. Perhaps fair critiques, but it's not like this effect is unknown by software engineers (unless your head is really stuck in the head). Ego defense at its finest.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#947What are people doing as alternatives to these kinds of interviews? The research is quite clear that technical interviews are worse than useless (literally -- they will select for the wrong traits in your candidate pool), yet they still seem to be the dominant hiring practice. My current company does a few rounds of low-key chatting, some about technical stuff, then a 1 to 2 month trial period with the understanding…
I like that model your company is using. Though there is a major drawback: your sapping the momentum of your candidates in their job search. If they sign on for the 2 month trial and it doesn't work out, contacts in their job search will have moved on, and they'll effectively have to start over from the beginning. Ultimately, a contract-to-hire strategy overwhelmingly favors the employer's interest.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#948Earlier 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…
This has actually not been my experience. I generally agree with your reasoning and have tried to run coding interviews this way, thinking that it is most similar to doing real work. Candidates can use their own computer, their own editor and plugins, whatever framework and language they prefer, can google anything they need, etc. It causes a surprising number of problems. A lot of candidates come in with their envir…
> A lot of candidates come in with their environments just very poorly configured, run into weird dependency errors, mismatched installed versions, no linting or syntax highlighting set up in their editor because they don't actually ever code on their personal computer, etc. It's not uncommon to spend half the interview watching someone debug their dev environment, or struggle to remember the basic syntax of their favorite framework since they aren't working on the same codebase that they're used to.
Now THAT reflects the actual daily experience of working programmers.
All the maddening little configuration options to get things working correctly, and seem to take up far more time than actually writing code to solve customers problems.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#949It seems like loads of comments consider "someone good at coding" as the only benchmark of a good employee. Even the report implies that "people who took the test in private passed". Passed what?
I am looking for people who can handle pressure, who can communicate clearly, who can handle the unfamiliarness of the experience, who can handle time pressure even though most of the time they wouldn't face that at work. If an experienced engineer cannot split a string in less than a minute on a test then they don't figure as a valuable emplyee to me. Why? Because anyone can Google something or apply deep thought in a private room but good employees imho can work with noise around them, with distractions, with changing priorities etc. in other words the interview is a poor representation of a real environment.
Sure, it means you might lose out on someone who just needed a few hours to calm down but how are you supposed to know that? Maybe they needed another few hours, days, weeks? Maybe the test you gave them was hard but if you asked them about something else, they would have done better.
It's no different than someone turning up late. It very likely wasn't their fault but you use it as an indicator anyway because you don't know them and don't have much else to go on.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#950It seems like loads of comments consider "someone good at coding" as the only benchmark of a good employee. Even the report implies that "people who took the test in private passed". Passed what? I am looking for people who can handle pressure, who can communicate clearly, who can handle the unfamiliarness of the experience, who can handle time pressure even though most of the time they wouldn't face that at work. If…
'but good employees imho can work with noise around them, with distractions, with changing priorities etc'
Yes, then they burn out and the cycle continues ...