Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study • Hacker News Board

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

#961

Post by benburleson » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 4:52 PM UTC

euix wrote: post #411

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…

Remind me not to interview for that (those) team(s). I am really the type of person that dislike drinking corporate koolaid, or any type of slogans or political line that government or media otherwise pushes. That basically sounds like half way to a cult.

To be honest, it does feel cult-ish from the outside. But as some other commenters have pointed out, they have their reasons, ideally to remove bias from hiring process.

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

#962

Post by cactus2093 » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 4:55 PM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #931

cactus2093 wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Isn't that a useful way to filter out candidates that you don't want to hire? Presumably they know in advance what kind of code you're going to…

Yeah, you could argue that this means these people aren't that serious about us, and we should be looking for people who are dying to work for our company specifically. Those people will surely spend hours preparing specifically for our interview, and triple-check they have followed all of our preparation instructions.

The reality is that for the past few years at least in SF, hiring engineers has just gotten more and more competitive. Most people who pass our interview will have multiple other offers, often some from companies with a bigger name brand than our own. At least in my opinion, most companies in this environment can't afford to have such strict purity tests. It's supply and demand.

This balance may be changing now given the current recession, it seems even in tech things have cooled off a bit the past few months.

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

#963

Post by tchaffee » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 5:06 PM UTC

bananaface wrote: post #914

tchaffee wrote: post #823

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There was no interview. Not even a phone call. After I submitted the 3 hour paid assignment they hired me by giving me access to Slack and we just started working together. One of the smoothest and easiest "interviews" I've ever done and I got paid for everything except for a 30 minute challenge that helped solidify my understanding of git.

> people you really want just don't have a reason to waste that time

I'm "really wanted". In the past week I have had to say no to two clients calling me for follow up work. Where do you think I wasted my time?

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

#964

Post by bananaface » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 5:09 PM UTC

tchaffee wrote: post #963

bananaface wrote: post #914

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There was no interview. Not even a phone call. After I submitted the 3 hour paid assignment they hired me by giving me access to Slack and we just started working together. One of the smoothest and easiest "interviews" I've ever done and I got paid for everything except for a 30 minute challenge that helped solidify my understanding of git. > people you really want just don't have a reason to waste that time I'm "rea…

This seems like a very nice process.

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

#965

Post by Whatanacc123 » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 5:14 PM UTC

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…

[flagged]

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

#966

Post by ekuep » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 5:17 PM UTC

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…

This makes me very nervous - I agree it is technically possible to do that volume of change in a short amount of time now, but I don't think it is possible while still accounting for QA / testing and documentation. That is a massive amount of change in a small time without any team oversight

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

#967

Post by dang » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 5:34 PM UTC

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…

(This subthread was originally a child of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23848916)

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

#968

Post by dang » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 5:37 PM UTC

ryder9 wrote: post #918

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

We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. Please don't create accounts to do that with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#969

Post by bearish » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 6:50 PM UTC

heavyset_go wrote: post #721

Sivart13 wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> Possibly I'm just bitter because of the time I spent 4 hours on a take-home only for the company to ghost me (name-and-shame: Instacart). Arthena, a Y Combinator funded company, did this to me. It truly was a waste of time.

You got lucky. Arthena is a mess. Super disorganized and doesn't treat their people well.

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

#970

Post by justinlloyd » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 7:15 PM UTC

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…

For three years or so I taught week long corporate training classes at Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, eBay, PayPal, Cisco and Intel. Every week, week after week, real rocket-science level Android and iOS deep-dive in to the guts of the operating system classes dealing with firmware and device drivers and file systems. In the classes we didn't build apps, we built operating system components. Small to large classes, thousands of software engineers from senior and up, over the course of those three years.

I would stand up in front of 80 or more engineers, go in to esoteric aresa of the operating and talk eloquently and at length about the structures and code found there, and live code on a projector, answering questions about the code and debugging the code of everyone in my class as they followed along. Day-after-day. 40+ hours a week. It was intense. I became an independent advisor to teams and a consultant for some of the groups on how to bring up Android on new devices, create device drivers, and so forth.

Some of those classes, I wondered how some of the people I was teaching was actually able to hold down their job.

Months later, after I stopped teaching, I interviewed at Intel and PayPal and Cisco. I bombed every interview. I was, by all accounts, unable to program my way out of a wet paper bag.

Everyone has off days.