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

At the start of my third year as a student, I biked through a record-worthy rainfall to my first interview with a small local games studio. Showed up completely soaked, but sat down relaxed and feeling reasonably confident. (I had done a handful of unity and opengl projects.)

The interview started with a bit of small talk, I chatted with one of the guys about Brood War and Starcraft 2. Later during the technical interview they asked me about the difference between private, protected, and public and said I was the only student they had interviewed who had answered correctly which was wild and honestly stunned me for a moment.

They liked how in one of my examples of scripting something I had written some fun dialog and I mentioned I did writing as a hobby which seemed like a plus. I talked about which classes I enjoyed the most and how they were challenging/interesting.

I did not get a job offer and learned from a friend that I had come off as "depressed and disinterested" (I don't think they realized he was going to relay that info to me...) All I can do is guess that it's a combination from showing up completely drenched and sharing how I enjoyed those "challenging" classes made it seem like I would get quickly bored of scripting...

After that, I bombed an interview for a QA role because I went into it completely unprepared for just how much it would differ from a programming interview.

Point being those first two experiences got in my head and I basically had anxiety over anything job-hunt related for the next 2.5 years.

When I did get a job, I was extremely happy with the interview process (even though I felt I did poorly on it). Here's more or less how it was structured (TL;DR):

  - Office tour/chat with a programmer who had referred me
  - quick 5 minute introduction to senior programmers in charge of the technical interview  
  - 1 hour alone in a meeting room with a laptop and 4 written questions (a generous amount of time)  
  - ~15 minutes reviewing my answers with the senior programmers  
    - importantly, they gave me a chance to talk about my answers and when I got something wrong they would simply state that it had an error and see if I could spot it  
  - 15 minutes on C++/memory/performance/behavior quirks (important stuff in AAA games)  
  - ~30 minutes talking about stuff I had worked on  
    - occasionally they would mention something related I hadn't heard about and explain it while gauging how well I could follow along

Basically, based on my own interview experience/anxiety if I had to choose an interview method, it would be very similar to what I just mentioned. Seeing a familiar face and the introduction followed by the alone time did a lot to ease my anxiety. The time where I felt most comfortable was talking about the stuff I had done because I was very familiar with all of it/it was easy to talk about.

The process seemed less focused on where I had gaps in my knowledge and more focused if I had a decent amount of knowledge in general and if I had the ability to recognize and correct the gaps in my knowledge.

Sorry if it's a bit of an info dump, but it's something I think back to a lot.

Don't forget, not only are they looking for someone who already just knows the answer, they frequently aren't hesitant to penalize someone who says "Fair warning: I've already seen this problem."

I know nothing about GP, but note that it is possible that English is not his first language, and the subtleties of the story and vocabulary might be lost in translation.

In my native language (French), as you describe it, there is no word for "average" (the technical and the common terms "moyenne" are exactly the same). Until your comment, in English, I assumed you could use "average" and "mean" interchangeably.

Nothing will change.

I think the problem often lies with the interviewers’s ego that results in this strange paradox where they’re trying to demonstrate their competence to the interviewee by way of technically “outwitting” them.

That way, in the event the interviewee is personable enough to get hired, the working dynamic is that much closer to being formed between the two, and chances are reduced that the interviewer is hiring a potential rival.

>Maybe we should interview with small take-home tasks to be submitted with some write-ups to test how people research, reason, and write-up problems, rather than writing code on the spot on a whiteboard. ...but maybe that's just me.

I'm a huge fan of giving people tasks that somewhat resemble a real world problem they'd likely encounter or at least aligns categorically with their proclaimed resume feats and more importantly on top of that giving them the same environment they're comfortable working in on a daily basis which might be on a laptop in a quiet room from 6am to 10am in the morning.

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 confused. People easily identify that white-boarding interviews suck for more than just the interviewee. And yet any time a solution is proposed that involves doing something other than putting the candidate in a room in front of a whiteboard for an hour, it's shot down.

I've concluded it's a generational thing and the problem won't be fixed until we get a wave of hiring managers that weren't schooled on the Google interview process. But, also note it's a self perpetuating issue too so :shrug:.