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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

#991

Post by mav3rick »

annoyingnoob wrote: post #330
sosilkj wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This is why I stopped writing code." would be interesting to hear about what career you transitioned to, if you're willing to share.

I have a background in IT. I basically moved back to IT. I still write some code but its not the majority of my work. The code I write now relates to automation and integration and not so much building a product from the ground up. I have to build for reliability but I don't need to build for Internet scale. Edit: I should say that the interviewing experience that put my over the edge was actually not a whiteboard bu…

So you gave up on everything because of 1 experience ?

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

#992

Post by mav3rick »

4dahalibut wrote: post #532

This is only true at FAANG, guys, stop working at FAANG its not doing the world very much good and there are tons of companies around looking to hire you that are. The future is starting now and FAANG engineers won't be a part of it.

Lol right. You're building the future on so many open source libs from FAANG.

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

#993

Post by mav3rick »

collyw wrote: post #910

As the interview process seems so crap and few people have any suggestions, here is mine. I got asked to bring in my laptop with some code of my own we could discuss. I had a side project at the time so wasn't a problem. I got asked some questions, asked to add a simple feature. It was pleasant. I knew the code, so I was relaxed and didn't need to look up stuff. I think the interviewer learned some stuff as well. The…

Now you want someone else to go through your code ? Without any idea about the mess you have written

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

#994

Post by quadrifoliate »

heavyset_go wrote: post #712
quadrifoliate wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, I'm usually instantly met with the "oh well we don't want to expect too much of our interview candidates" mentality as if asking them to do a "take home" (rather than telling them to figure out how to take a day off of work for an onsite panel) is somehow grotesquely disrespecting their time and would make the company look bad if the broader community even got a whiff that it had been considered. I'm so co…

> Honestly, as a candidate, I would be 100% satisfied with a bitesize fix to an open source library that your company maintains, or even a bitesize fix to a closed source library under contract. Or pair the candidate with an employee who is working on a real, minor task at your company, and let the candidate "drive". Give me something real to do, not some contrived situation about an ordering system or building the n…

> It can take relative ages to become familiar with a code base, especially a large one, such that you can easily hop in and commit fixes that actually work. I'm not going to spend hours trying to gain context for the code, or deploying and testing it.

If none of their codebases are easy to jump into, then that might be a red flag in of itself. One thing I suppose I have been lucky about is that I have worked for companies that have some (albeit very minor) open source presence. I'm not talking new features. IMO a small fix to an existing codebase can be as minor as adding a new CLI flag, or lightly modifying some existing behavior. In many cases, it's what you'd give a new intern as their first fix.

> if your fix does work, you just did free work that benefits the company for little to no gain for yourself.

Well the gain is that you learned to work with a real-life codebase. The thesis of my comment is that take-home projects do not often approximate a real life codebase well.

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

#995

Post by jawilson2 »

reagent_finder wrote: post #893
tchaffee wrote: post #817

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 measu…

> 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.

To play devil's advocate, someone with the word Senior in their title would probably have command of recognizing Big O issues, and skip the "this is taking too long" step, and code it efficiently the first time. This is industry dependent, as well, obviously. I've been doing low-latency C++ for 15+ years, and it's not really something you can compromise on.

The mistake, I think, is skipping otherwise good candidates because they don't immediately see these issues. We should put more emphasis on identifying these weaknesses and finding the right mentors to teach them up. We should be hiring more junior and mid level engineers, with the assumption that they will learn and be up to speed in a few years. This has been my approach to interviewing, but I'm often vetoed by other team members.

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

#996

Post by mastayoda »

How many years took them to realize this?... As someone who spend like 6 months job hunting and doing more than 20 interviews(including Google, Microsoft, etc), this was pretty evident. Yeah, I forgot to code that weird problem which implies the use of dynamic programming in a white board, but hey... what about all those years of experience and evident code skills. It is ridiculous.

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

#997

Post by theflyinghorse »

erentz wrote: post #34
whatever1 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having multiple respectable people that can vouch for you is a much better performance predictor than a 1-day interview. Same reason that recommendation letters are more important than GRE tests for the ones seeking PhD studies.

It does suck that it’s like this in an industry where you have a lot of non-neurotypical people though. People who are very good and capable but on the spectrum, or shy and reclusive, who really can’t do the networking and conference scene thing, etc. Wish there was a better answer than to tell them they just have to be wired differently.

> conference scene thing

Who can? Conferences are so expansive!

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

#998

Post by annoyingnoob »

mav3rick wrote: post #991
annoyingnoob wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a background in IT. I basically moved back to IT. I still write some code but its not the majority of my work. The code I write now relates to automation and integration and not so much building a product from the ground up. I have to build for reliability but I don't need to build for Internet scale. Edit: I should say that the interviewing experience that put my over the edge was actually not a whiteboard bu…

So you gave up on everything because of 1 experience ?

No that was the last in a long line of uncomfortable interviews. It wasn't worth the effort to me to become a walking algorithm encyclopedia, most of which I'm never going to use. Why would I continue with a process that appears designed to exclude me?

Honestly, its their loss. I've done great work and continue to do so. For better or worse, may name is on patents from more than one job and from different industries. My work experience and history of accomplishments says something about the kind of candidate I am. Hounding me at the whiteboard or calling my take-home work crap seems unnecessary - if that is what the job is like then I don't want it.

And I didn't 'give up everything'. I make the same money in IT without the hamster wheel feel of always 'sprinting'. Marathon runners do not sprint the entire race.

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

#999

Post by joann56 »

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

#1000

Post by borramakot »

spideymans wrote: post #507

>. For example, in our study, all of the women who took the public interview failed, while all of the women who took the private interview passed Talk about buying the lede. If there's any justification for abolishing this practice, that's it right there.

I agree that's a really striking and suggestive result, but keep in mind the sub-sample size there is four passing on the private side and six failing on the public side. My guess is there's a real and meaningful effect there, but it may not be to the degree that sentence without context would suggest.
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