I will not do a tech interview • Hacker News Board

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#211

Post by PencilAndPaper » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 6:19 PM UTC

10098 wrote: post #123

btilly wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that interviews are high stress affairs. Stress produces adrenaline. One of adrenaline's known effects is to prepare us for "fight or flight", meaning that higher order logic is shut off, digestion is shut off, our senses sharpen, reactions improve. This is great when you've got to climb a tree to get away from a tiger. This is horrible if you are trying to demonstrate your ability to function mentally…

Well, jobs are high stress affairs too. We often have to maintain production systems that fail in cryptic ways at the most inconvenient times. I postulate that such situations are more stressful than solving some binary search tree problem on a whiteboard.

Im no neuroscientist or psychologist, but the stress of being sized up by other monkeys based on superficial first impressions that you know you dont happen to be very good at making, is WAY different than the stress that gets produced when a "cryptic" system needs fixing.

For me the former situation leads to lots of bad feelings including irritation and incredible anxiety. I have often considered the latter type of situation fun times. For a lot of programmers difficult puzzle solving stress is good stress.

From what I have witnessed from current in-the-box hiring practices is a lot of extroverts get hired who are good at spin and presentation. Quite a few managers never detect that they are actually not great programmers because they are brilliant at sucking up and putting on a show. Those skills dont always hurt, but they shouldnt be considered a deal breaker for a programmer who actually gets good work done.

Best practice I have ever encountered is when interviewers give out interview questions in advance to allow to the interviewee a while to think about the problem in quiet.

I love the idea of short term contracts for both parties to suss each other out.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#212

Post by macspoofing » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 6:20 PM UTC

tyree732 wrote: post #190

Fishkins wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, the interview has always been way more stressful than anything I've had to do on the job. I think lots of people feel the same way (partially based on what I've seen performing interviews myself).

I'm sorry to hear about how stressed you get during interviews, but unfortunately the stress you demonstrate during technical interviews is a useful heuristic when determining whether or not a candidate would be a good fit for a company. Is a good signal all of the time? No. Is it a good signal most of the time? Probably.

>Is it a good signal most of the time?

No.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#213

Post by brenfrow » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 6:20 PM UTC

j_baker wrote: post #126

crazygringo wrote: post #62

Granted, there are a lot of bad tech interviews out there (asking about algorithms that nobody ever uses) ... but I do not understand this. Imagine someone's being hired for a front-end position, and we don't have months to get them up to speed. I'm going to ask them to explain how a closure works. How they deal with AJAX. What they think about "!important". Things to be careful about with floats. How CSS precedence/…

Truthfully, I'm not certain I'd trust someone who can go through an interview without freezing up or having any similar problems. Confidence is a valuable thing, but only in moderation.

Ever heard of empathy?

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#214

Post by AznHisoka » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 6:21 PM UTC

tmoertel wrote: post #200

baddox wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Interview situations are very, very different than the others. How exactly? Freezing up in a meeting can get you fired just like freezing up in an interview can get you turned down for the job. Sure, you'll get comfortable with your coworkers, and they'll get more forgiving of temporarily lapses, but I think most interviewers (for non-terrible jobs especially) purposefully give some extra leeway to interviewees, si…

The primary way in which interviews are different from after-the-hire social interactions is that interviews are high-stakes events, and the candidates know it. For some people, that knowledge is enough to put them into a self-reinforcing mental death spiral. Their fight-or-flight response takes over and they literally stop thinking as their bodies switch into survival mode. That's why, when you're interviewing candi…

I highly agree. In an interview, it's 3-4 times harder to focus. Stuff that takes 1 min long to get takes 5 mins long in an interview.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#215

Post by enraged_camel » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 6:23 PM UTC

chollida1 wrote: post #22

> I politely suggest that a short contract job might be the best option for a company to evaluate a senior developer I like the twist of doing the contract off site on the developers own time. Every time I see someone on hacker news saying, "we've solved the interview problem. We just require every new hire to give up their old job and contract with us for a week to see if they are a good fit", I often wonder about t…

What do you think will be the quality of work produced by someone who works all day at their regular job, and then after putting the kids to bed at 10pm, works for another 2-3 hours on the contract project you assign them as part of the interview process, and does this for a week straight?

Personally, my brain is completely fried by the time I get home in the evening.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#216

Post by chris_mahan » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 6:23 PM UTC

Fishkins wrote: post #176

imsofuture wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but a negative reinforcement cycle of tensing up in a medium stress situation is exactly the kind of characteristic that I'm trying to screen out in an interview. Stressful situations happen a lot more than never in the real world (and sometimes they even involve talking to people, like customers) -- I don't want to have coworkers who can't handle that.

For me, the interview has always been way more stressful than anything I've had to do on the job. I think lots of people feel the same way (partially based on what I've seen performing interviews myself).

Same here. I'd rather do a full week of work at work than spend an hour in an interview.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#217

Post by brenfrow » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 6:24 PM UTC

We're all wired differently. Some people just naturally have more anxiety than others. I think what's needed is a proper amount of empathy for people who may not be able to hold up to the nerve racking process of an interview. Given that developers are not always the most empathic towards emotional/psychological issues, I'm glad someone has voiced this and that its getting so high on hacker news.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#218

Post by hfsktr » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 6:25 PM UTC

Reading through here and seeing how many people are saying "You don't know x? You're an idiot, you're out!" makes me feel glad that I was able to get a job at all. Apparently I don't know any of the 'easy' questions so I must not know anything.

It definitely doesn't help with my confidence going into an interview and not knowing if I admit I am not an encyclopedia is going to get me disqualified right then and there.

I am sure that it has to do with the jobs and the locations and the companies but definitely freaks me out about my future.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#219

Post by dragonwriter » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 6:27 PM UTC

RyanZAG wrote: post #209

dragonwriter wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you really saying that your developer meetings are as high-stakes as job interviews? Most certainly aren't, but some are potentially higher stakes ( especially with smaller companies), since you and coworkers losing jobs you have -- which can be the price of getting things wrong -- is a bigger stake than you not getting a job that you currently don't have.

Woah hold on - you're firing people for getting things wrong in meetings? Most people would be unemployed. Seriously though - if you're creating a high stress meeting like that in a company where people are at risk of getting fired then your culture is going to be terrible with people backstabbing each other so they look good at the next meeting. A company is a team - it's everyone's job to make sure the team is work…

> Woah hold on - you're firing people for getting things wrong in meetings?

Wrong outcomes for meetings have business consequences, which can include people losing their jobs. That's not necessarily "people getting fired for getting things wrong in meetings" -- indeed it generally shouldn't be that except in rather extreme cases of "getting things wrong" -- but it still means that people's jobs are on the line in the meeting and that there is extreme pressure not to make mistakes. Not because your boss will fire you because they don't like your answer, but because the market will punish your company -- potentially cost you and your coworkers their jobs -- if the market doesn't like the outcome of the meeting.

Re: I will not do a tech interview

#220

Post by gregors » Wed, Aug 21, 2013, 6:27 PM UTC

mlashcorp wrote: post #33

mscottmcbee wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never understood the fascination with asking an applicant about minutia of data structures and algorithms. Isn't that the domain of reference material? I gain much more insight into a person by asking them to describe a large system they've designed, what choices they made, the effects those choices had, ect. How did their initial assumptions hold up through the course of the project? How did they adapt to changing…

I get your point, but knowing the differences between http, udp and tcp isn't minutia ... it's cornerstone knowledge for anyone working with distributed systems.

I'd tell you a joke about udp but you might not get it.