People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance • Hacker News Board

Re: People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance

#121

Post by majormajor » Fri, Sep 09, 2016, 1:13 AM UTC

dmoy wrote: post #106

boardwaalk wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh gosh, this is totally true. I honestly find it almost disrespectful when you feel some company is putting you through a pipeline. They set up an interview day, line everyone up, grind through them one by one. The other thing is the technical interview which is unreflective of the job itself. In one recently, I was told before going in I had to code on a whiteboard. I ask, "Can I have I use a text editor, not an ID…

On the flip side, as an interviewer I give all candidates the opportunity to use a text editor, and less than 15% of candidates take it. The rest opt for whiteboard.

This was my experience as well (actually, even more extreme). Here's a room with a whiteboard or a laptop+TV. All 10 people I interviewed in that room chose the whiteboard.

One of them mentioned feeling less pressure to have perfect syntax and everything at a whiteboard than in an editor. In retrospect, wish I'd asked more of them about their preference, although at the same time, it wasn't something I judged them on so I wouldn't want them to think I was nitpicking their choice.

I'd probably choose a whiteboard too, honestly, for spatial reasons (able to write up separate things off to the side, easily annotate stuff in a different color to step through the code, etc).

Re: People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance

#122

Post by dogma1138 » Fri, Sep 09, 2016, 1:38 AM UTC

delphinius81 wrote: post #86

Once you have an engineering job, a typical project tasking involves: some team design discussion, some engineering research, some work, some review, more work. The requirements are either known upfront, or determined as a team. I do not understand why interviews are not conducted in this manner. Pick some arbitrary idea and have the candidate work with the interviewer to design something, then let the candidate do a…

That's a good idea but logistically is hard, both requiring the interviewer to spend considerable time on site as well as costing your own employee's time.

It might work well for a small company especially with a small number of candidates but it doesn't really scale, unless you are a really big company (googleish size) that can dedicate so many resources to the interviewing process.

Doing design and research takes time, you can't do it in 30 min, you can't also ask someone to spend 8 hours interviewing, and if you have 10 candidates you can't spend half a man month or more on interviewing them either.

I've seen some companies that "interview" by contracting candidates for 1-3 days of work and paying them for it, but it really only works on positions where you hiring effectively interns/fresh graduates, but as most candidates especially those who end up in the face to face phase are currently employed you can't really do that.

Re: People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance

#123

Post by ACow_Adonis » Fri, Sep 09, 2016, 1:45 AM UTC

morgante wrote: post #112

ACow_Adonis wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fascinating to me. I recently did a resume swap with an American lady I know (I'm Australian). We're both around mid thirties. She's in SF. Her resume was 1 page. It's the first time I've ever seen a 1 page resume in my life except for someone out of highschool with no history or experience. Mine is 4 pages. I've worked really hard to cut it down to that while including relevant things and nice formatting/rea…

Honestly, I'm incredibly skeptical that you need 4 pages. Almost anyone can fit their entire experience onto a single page. You don't need to write an essay for each position—just highlight a few bullet points.

To this and some other comments saying essentially "you can cut it down".

Oh sure! I can cut it down to 1 word if I want: awesome :p

One of my points is, I have literally not seen a 1 page resume before outside of fast food/janitorial work. Before chatting with her, I would have advised her to fix that up, because no one will take her seriously with a dot point resume that looks like it was put together to hit some automated text search and no natural human reading. I admit after some discussion, I fell back to "wow...they're not even pretending they're nothing but a keyword search meat grinder", because I do respect her so I thought she was telling the truth. And now I've got additional corroboration from HN.

I think there are arguments for longer/shorter resumes. In my, and my jobs/culture defence, I need to see you can write in plain English, have some sense of aesthetics, prioritisation, presentation. By that age I expect you've worked in several jobs (about which your summary might be my first impression/knowledge) and dot points aren't going to cut it, because your job titles, product names and keywords are meaningless noise to me: I joke my grandmother is an entrepreneur/CEO and has worked with everything. Your dot point resume looks like an indian from mechanical Turk put it together by amalgamation of keywords from job ads and pop culture. I want personal details, but summaries, on your projects, products, papers, in plain communicable error free English. 1 page screams kid/unprofessional to me. 2 - 4 pages unless you're 50 - 60 and have written 100 books, done something truly remarkable.

Now I'm not saying its right, I'm just saying that's my world.

Re: People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance

#124

Post by vonmoltke » Fri, Sep 09, 2016, 1:56 AM UTC

morgante wrote: post #116

rifung wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that I disagree with you, but sadly, most companies don't seem to want to train people anymore. They rather push that responsibility to either universities or the applicants themselves. In fairness, I do think that someone who is very comfortable with a language or framework will be able to do things much faster than someone who isn't. Considering how quickly people change jobs nowadays, I can also see how compan…

What do you define as "training?" Personally I don't think companies should be paying for specific training because as a developer you can learn anything you need online. On the other hand, my experience is that many/most companies are willing to hire a senior developer even if they don't have experience with the company's specific stack. They rightly assume that any developer can pick up a new stack quickly enough.

My experience has been that most companies aren't even willing to talk to me if I don't have experience in their specific stack. That's probably the downside of liking embedded/systems level development much more than webdev.

Re: People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance

#125

Post by morgante » Fri, Sep 09, 2016, 1:58 AM UTC

ACow_Adonis wrote: post #123

morgante wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, I'm incredibly skeptical that you need 4 pages. Almost anyone can fit their entire experience onto a single page. You don't need to write an essay for each position—just highlight a few bullet points.

To this and some other comments saying essentially "you can cut it down". Oh sure! I can cut it down to 1 word if I want: awesome :p One of my points is, I have literally not seen a 1 page resume before outside of fast food/janitorial work. Before chatting with her, I would have advised her to fix that up, because no one will take her seriously with a dot point resume that looks like it was put together to hit some a…

Honestly, your comment is extremely rude and offensive. I'm willing to chalk up your preference for longer resumes to cultural differences, but then you come out with bullshit like this:

> Your dot point resume looks like an indian from mechanical Turk put it together by amalgamation of keywords from job ads and pop culture.

> 1 page screams kid/unprofessional to me.

Your 4-page resume is unprofessional, overlong, self-centered, arrogant, and naive. You apparently are so bad at English that you can't even write concise summaries. A long resume screams that you have an overinflated ego and have no sense of professional decency.

A short resume doesn't imply a lack of aesthetics or English. I certainly paid attention to the design of mine. [0]

[0] https://www.morgante.net/resume.pdf

Re: People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance

#126

Post by jameshart » Fri, Sep 09, 2016, 2:02 AM UTC

red_blobs wrote: post #59

vonmoltke wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I am a business owner, and I need someone to create a website for me to do something, the first thing I will reach for is someone who has already done similar projects and has a track record of getting it done. If that is the case, what you need is a contractor , not an employee , and you should hire accordingly.

I disagree. Aside from an entry level position, you want someone with previous experience. Google wouldn't hire someone to manage their datacenter with no previous experience managing anything like it.

Your challenge there would be finding anything remotely like Google's datacenter.

Re: People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance

#127

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Sep 09, 2016, 2:05 AM UTC

dmoy wrote: post #106

boardwaalk wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh gosh, this is totally true. I honestly find it almost disrespectful when you feel some company is putting you through a pipeline. They set up an interview day, line everyone up, grind through them one by one. The other thing is the technical interview which is unreflective of the job itself. In one recently, I was told before going in I had to code on a whiteboard. I ask, "Can I have I use a text editor, not an ID…

On the flip side, as an interviewer I give all candidates the opportunity to use a text editor, and less than 15% of candidates take it. The rest opt for whiteboard.

[deleted]

Re: People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance

#128

Post by sksnxjis » Fri, Sep 09, 2016, 2:12 AM UTC

fecak wrote: post #42

nsxwolf wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>some portion of interviewees are losing interest in joining your company just because they didn’t think they did well, despite the fact that they actually did. Wait. They think they didn't do well, got an offer, but turned it down because they think they didn't do well on the interview?

Usually, in my experience anyway, it doesn't get that far. The blog post just refers to interviewees saying "I wouldn't want to work with the interviewer" when they mistakenly feel that they did poorly in the interview. Anecdotally from the real world, when I (headhunter) get feedback from a candidate shortly/immediately after an interview, if they feel they did poorly they tend to add that there were things they did…

It blows my mind that any applicant gives negative feedback to the company before finding out of they got an offer. Even if they hated the interview and would never want to work there, an offer is still fodder to get a better offer somewhere else. Being positive is a strictly dominant strategy before an offer is made.

Re: People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance

#129

Post by sigsergv » Fri, Sep 09, 2016, 2:33 AM UTC

dmoy wrote: post #106

boardwaalk wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh gosh, this is totally true. I honestly find it almost disrespectful when you feel some company is putting you through a pipeline. They set up an interview day, line everyone up, grind through them one by one. The other thing is the technical interview which is unreflective of the job itself. In one recently, I was told before going in I had to code on a whiteboard. I ask, "Can I have I use a text editor, not an ID…

On the flip side, as an interviewer I give all candidates the opportunity to use a text editor, and less than 15% of candidates take it. The rest opt for whiteboard.

I think that's because a lot of people are already trained to use whiteboard during interview.

Re: People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance

#130

Post by fecak » Fri, Sep 09, 2016, 3:11 AM UTC

sksnxjis wrote: post #128

fecak wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usually, in my experience anyway, it doesn't get that far. The blog post just refers to interviewees saying "I wouldn't want to work with the interviewer" when they mistakenly feel that they did poorly in the interview. Anecdotally from the real world, when I (headhunter) get feedback from a candidate shortly/immediately after an interview, if they feel they did poorly they tend to add that there were things they did…

It blows my mind that any applicant gives negative feedback to the company before finding out of they got an offer. Even if they hated the interview and would never want to work there, an offer is still fodder to get a better offer somewhere else. Being positive is a strictly dominant strategy before an offer is made.

My comment was as a 3rd party recruiter, and the blog post was based on feedback from anonymous interviewees after anonymous interviews. I don't expect that candidates would give negative feedback to a company directly without having a sense of the employer's opinion.