141–150 of 432 posts
Lastly, I don't want to have to guess what we should talk about so that you can feel you know I can do the job.
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> Life's too short to be stuck with mediocre employers. Billboard worthy quote right there.
At the risk of sounding cynical it sounds exactly like a slogan that would appear on billboards for one of those low-rent employment agencies.
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I wonder how much "interviewing" is really testing the kind of performance anxiety that people without other good offers yet have. I experience this too as I not just as I progressed in my career, but even within one batch of interviewing. I've always tried to batch as many interviews as I can. By the third interview I am feeling much less anxious and just perform much better and by the fourth or fifth I am nailing t…
This is a really important point. Many of the best programmers I've worked with are extremely conscientious people, and I think interview anxiety goes naturally with that. When I'm interviewing people, I work very hard to put them at their ease and discount interview anxiety when I see it. Too many interview processes are tuned for confidence, not actual skill.
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> So, just lie. I think this is bad advice. I have never lied in an interview. I've also never had a job not offered to me if I made it to the in person interview part. This isn't to say that I have magical job-getting powers, but only that not lying has not hurt my chances. In one job I applied for, I didn't have a lot of domain knowledge, but I had knowledge in an adjacent domain and wanted to to jump over to this…
Think about it like this. The goals are attain employment and maximize compensation. That’s it. That said you are probably best off training machine learning to do this for you. It won’t suffer the nonverbal faults associated with dishonesty, because truth to a machine is how effectively it completes the assigned goal.
Meh, I think devoting 30-40% of your life to something is more than just maximizing compensation. In tech, at least, you normally have quite a few options about where you will work and what you will do. If you feel you need to lie just to get into the door and are convinced that you wont get the job unless you do lie, then consider that this might not be the best job.
On the other hand, if you are too afraid to tell the truth even in the interview, it doesn't bode well for when you need to deal with other people in the corp bureaucracy (which is inevitable once you go past the junior engineer level).
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I wonder how much "interviewing" is really testing the kind of performance anxiety that people without other good offers yet have. I experience this too as I not just as I progressed in my career, but even within one batch of interviewing. I've always tried to batch as many interviews as I can. By the third interview I am feeling much less anxious and just perform much better and by the fourth or fifth I am nailing t…
This is a really important point. Many of the best programmers I've worked with are extremely conscientious people, and I think interview anxiety goes naturally with that. When I'm interviewing people, I work very hard to put them at their ease and discount interview anxiety when I see it. Too many interview processes are tuned for confidence, not actual skill.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a really important point. Many of the best programmers I've worked with are extremely conscientious people, and I think interview anxiety goes naturally with that. When I'm interviewing people, I work very hard to put them at their ease and discount interview anxiety when I see it. Too many interview processes are tuned for confidence, not actual skill.
That's a great approach. I try to do the same thing, maybe try to get them to laugh with a witty joke or light comment to lower the stress level. I don't think it helps anybody to put candidates through stress.
And their strengths are what I care about. Everybody has weaknesses, so finding them in an interview is uninteresting to me unless it's something truly fatal. I want to see them shine, as a) that gives me an idea of their capacity for growth, and b) that's what I'm going to play to when pointing them at work.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a really important point. Many of the best programmers I've worked with are extremely conscientious people, and I think interview anxiety goes naturally with that. When I'm interviewing people, I work very hard to put them at their ease and discount interview anxiety when I see it. Too many interview processes are tuned for confidence, not actual skill.
Thanks for being empathetic. Not everyone is lucky enough to have empathetic interviewers, and it makes it a really tough experience for them.
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Not quite. Confidence is a big part of interviewing, and having someone turn the screw on you on some esoteric topic doesn't really help build your knowledge or your confidence.
That's totally subjective. What someone may perceive as "turning the screw" could simply mean "probing deeper" or "seeing how you handle tough questions". One can get self righteous about that but it may be costing you tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost earnings.
Also, the lost earnings argument doesn't matter much if it comes at the cost of your mental health.
A bit unrelated, but there's an old joke my boss once told me, highlighting how poor interview questions/criteria can be at assessing one's ability for a particular job:
A guy goes for an interview. The interviewer tells him "forget everything you learned in your degree, it won't be useful here". The guy says: "actually, I don't have a degree". The interviewer responds: "in that case, you're not qualified enough for this job"!
I've finally reached a point in my career where I have a great paying job and like it well enough, and really don't give a shit what interviewers think. Paradoxically, I think I interview a lot better. I can steer conversation towards stuff I care about, and if they insist on being annoying, just thank them for their time and leave. Though this might just be a result of being pickier about who I interview with. If no…
This is the proper way to negotiate. Most people don't do it while they have a job, only when they want one, and it puts them at a serious disadvantage.