I always find impostor syndrome interesting. When I was in grad school I was ignorant of a lot of things and didn't try to fool anyone. Same thing with job interviews. I figured that the profs and potential employers were the ones that knew things and there was no way I could fool them because I didn't even know what I didn't know.
Fixing impostor syndrome in coding interviews
31–40 of 84 posts
Re: Fixing impostor syndrome in coding interviews
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that many coding interviews don't test on-the-job skills. But pressure-cooker situations do happen on the job, e.g. production outages, major customers being affected by bugs and threatening to cancel, etc. It's not unrealistic to say that people who can't deal with that are unsuitable for many engineering positions.
Well fair enough but I don't see the two qualities as being all that related. "Oh my god, production is down! Quick, someone tell me, from memory, the solution to the N Queens problem!!"
"Production is down. Let's put our heads together to fix the problem!"
vs
(raspy voice) "Wanna play a game? You have 45 minutes to parse this html in assembly using only half a keyboard. Otherwise... you will not be able to feed your family. From us, at least."
I would absolutely watch SAW: The Software Interview
Re: Fixing impostor syndrome in coding interviews
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Questions are often under specified for exactly this reason: to test ability to ask questions when necessary. Unless you deviate from the script the [incompetent] interviewer expect, in which case, you are toasted.
If you can't make yourself understood to the average engineer at a company, I think it's fair to say there's not a good fit between you and the company.
s/engineers/managers/... Who probably ended up there to limit their collateral damage to the company, ie. followed the Peter principle.
Re: Fixing impostor syndrome in coding interviews
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well fair enough but I don't see the two qualities as being all that related. "Oh my god, production is down! Quick, someone tell me, from memory, the solution to the N Queens problem!!"
"Production is down. Let's put our heads together to fix the problem!" vs (raspy voice) "Wanna play a game? You have 45 minutes to parse this html in assembly using only half a keyboard. Otherwise... you will not be able to feed your family. From us, at least." I would absolutely watch SAW: The Software Interview
> (raspy voice) "Wanna play a game? You have 45 minutes to parse this html in assembly using only half a keyboard. Otherwise... you will not be able to feed your family. From us, at least."
Don't forget about interrupting the candidate every 5 minutes to ask about the color of a blue moon, effectively preventing him to "get in the zone".
Re: Fixing impostor syndrome in coding interviews
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well fair enough but I don't see the two qualities as being all that related. "Oh my god, production is down! Quick, someone tell me, from memory, the solution to the N Queens problem!!"
"Production is down. Let's put our heads together to fix the problem!" vs (raspy voice) "Wanna play a game? You have 45 minutes to parse this html in assembly using only half a keyboard. Otherwise... you will not be able to feed your family. From us, at least." I would absolutely watch SAW: The Software Interview
And if production is down, and you're the one under the most pressure, it's probably because you're the one who knows "production" the best.
Re: Fixing impostor syndrome in coding interviews
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that many coding interviews don't test on-the-job skills. But pressure-cooker situations do happen on the job, e.g. production outages, major customers being affected by bugs and threatening to cancel, etc. It's not unrealistic to say that people who can't deal with that are unsuitable for many engineering positions.
"Pressure cooker situations" are different than being asked to be an expert in IGBT transformer, have state of the art metallurgy knowledges, and have the flexibility of an olympic gymnast... for a welder position.
What questions are asked that are as divorced from being a software dev as olympic level flexibility is from being a welder? Or is this just a straw man argument?
Re: Fixing impostor syndrome in coding interviews
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
And it's ridiculous IMO. Any interview question that can be answered completely with 20 seconds of googling is useless. I've encountered a couple of these "obscure programming trivia" type questions before and each time I wanted to quiz the interviewer back with random shit I happen to know pretty well that I'm 100% certain he or she couldn't answer either. A good developer doesn't optimise for a specific problem or…
It wasn't really 'trivia'. It was several hours of difficult problem solving without reference material, given access only to a whiteboard and a judge. The studying that would have led to a success: * Memorizing a significant amount of the interview's programming language. Since there is no reference material, you really need to know it. No standard library reference to help you out. * Solving enough algorithms and d…
OK, agreed that's not the trivia I was talking about. Although honestly it sounds like you dodged a bullet, if anything your experience is even more ridiculous. Does this company make a habit of writing programs on whiteboards without any references?
It, uh, probably does help to know the language you're being interviewed for, although a good programmer in any language can almost certainly start being productive in another one within a month. A good hiring process knows this, too.
Re: Fixing impostor syndrome in coding interviews
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well fair enough but I don't see the two qualities as being all that related. "Oh my god, production is down! Quick, someone tell me, from memory, the solution to the N Queens problem!!"
"Production is down. Let's put our heads together to fix the problem!" vs (raspy voice) "Wanna play a game? You have 45 minutes to parse this html in assembly using only half a keyboard. Otherwise... you will not be able to feed your family. From us, at least." I would absolutely watch SAW: The Software Interview
What tech company do I sign up for to get an interview like the one in Swordfish?
Re: Fixing impostor syndrome in coding interviews
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
It wasn't really 'trivia'. It was several hours of difficult problem solving without reference material, given access only to a whiteboard and a judge. The studying that would have led to a success: * Memorizing a significant amount of the interview's programming language. Since there is no reference material, you really need to know it. No standard library reference to help you out. * Solving enough algorithms and d…
> It wasn't really 'trivia'. It was several hours of difficult problem solving without reference material, given access only to a whiteboard and a judge Even more irrelevant with today's access to Google, StackOverflow and alike. I've done my share of learning by heart pages of demonstration for some obscure quantum physic model, puking it the day of the test, and then forgetting about it. It the company is looking f…
> But are you any good at analyzing a combination of problems never encountered before ?
Haven't won a Nobel Prize yet, otherwise most work is done by first examining what I know vs. what I don't, and then using the appropriate tools (search, reference -> think -> implement/test -> discuss, as necessary) to accomplish the next steps.
Regardless of what I think and what I know, or even of my abilities to solve novel problems, the industry has decided upon its entrance exams.
Many times the problems vary on the surface, but the core concepts do not, and so the iterations and combinations thereof are solvable by polling previously encountered experience (study & practice).
Re: Fixing impostor syndrome in coding interviews
#40"For me, it was seeing the back end code wizard on my team—the one that always made me feel like an impostor—spend an hour trying to center an image on a webpage." To be fair, before flexbox this was also true of front-end wizards...