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Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
451–460 of 1001 posts
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#452It seems pretty obvious to me that this kind of interviews are simply there to assess how much you want to work for a certain company. As in: would you be willing to study for months, go through mock interviews, read books, test your skills etc. to have a shot at working for us? Even though the majority of that stuff will likely have zero impact on your day to day work? That's all there is, really. I've had no proble…
You're missing the quality they're actually testing for: ability to study and dedicate yourself to a task. Or in other words work ethic. The algorithms don't matter but the fact that you can spend months learning them is an important skill. Intelligence is less important for success than work ethic which is why work ethic is tested for so much. Specifically, work ethic and ability to learn in a related domain as, for…
> You're missing the quality they're actually testing for: ability to study and dedicate yourself to a task. Or in other words work ethic
TIL I've been "hacking" all their "tests" :D acing them just by curiosity & interest in computers in general, a bit of intelligence and a lot of laziness!
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#453Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What I need is a way that tells whether the person I'm interviewing can actually do the work that I'm hiring them to do. Maybe I should ask them about that. Maybe I should give them some problems similar to the actual work. Would you mind sharing with us how to draw the rest of the owl? Look, I don't even want to defend leetcode here, but it is a struggle to find questions that are: 1) Correlated with the actual wo…
The best I've ever seen is the way my current boss does it. We do a two-hour interview (they've already passed a phone interview before we bring them in). We spend the first half hour just talking to them personally. Then we give them a piece of code on paper. It's fairly simple - half a page. The function name is foo(). It's written in C#, but we don't expect them to actually know any C# details. The function takes…
Thanks for the answer.
> Then we ask them to write some code on the whiteboard. We give them a simple problem
Can you share what kind of problem?
This actually sounds pretty close to what we did at my previous company, except that candidates were given a computer (nothing had to compile, it's just that we don't expect anyone to be able to write code on whiteboard) and two coding problems.
First one was pretty simple, such as printing a folder structure with nice indentation (given some predefined input data structure). The second one was harder, although we hired plenty who did not manage to completely solve that one, but if they did it was a plus.
Also had some design questions after that. Some people still complained that the interview was abstract algorithmic nonsense without relevance to real life.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#454Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon is the king of assessing how much you want to work for the company. The recruiter will place a huge emphasis on nailing their Leadership Principles, and coming up with stories from your work to demonstrate you embody the Principles. They will even tell you that specific interviewers have specific LPs they will probe on, but in the actual interview they ask very veiled questions and you're supposed to know that…
I personally know many people who conduct interviews, provide interview feedback, and make hiring decisions at Amazon. None of them operate the way you're describing. There's no "gotcha" as far as making you guess what LP they are trying to get at, or conforming to the Amazon borg. They are simply evaluating you based on your work accomplishments and aptitude, as demonstrated by the projects and experiences you choos…
A counterpoint: I work with a lot of ex-Amazon employees who continue to conduct interviews exactly in this way. Even my own interview, if I hadn't prepped a story for each of the LPs, I would've bombed.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#455I'm a ex-FANG dev that started a recruiting company, so I am VERY familiar with the arbitrary tech interview process. I'm a huge proponent of contract-to-hire. Even started a company* to make it easier for companies to offer contract-to-hire. Now before you dismiss the idea because you are "too good" to do C2H hear me out. Everyone knows that actually working with someone on the job is the only way to get an accurate…
Employers abuse contract-to-hire to get temporary employees with no intention of hiring.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#456I conducted a couple hundred interviews for my first FAANG employer, and I was constantly amazed at the percentage of candidates with years of Microsoft or Facebook experience on the resumes who apparently did not know how to program. I always thought, 'huh, guess I know why they quit after 3 years, amazing that they all lasted this long." Then I interviewed for another company and utterly bombed. It became suddenly…
I've heard HR optimizes processes that limit Type I errors (false positive) at the expense of Type II errors (false negative). I've often wondered if this is because, from the HR perspective, false positives are much more costly. I.e., Those who would be helped by limiting the false negatives are project managers who are too downstream in the process for HR to care.
I think the problem is HR itself. Few companies should be large enough to warrant full time HR, but even small companies need many.. HR are specialist in expanding the disconnect between people the company thinks it needs and people who are willing to work for it.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#457This makes sense if you’re at a FAANG organization you shouldn’t need to make breakneck code changes with people breathing down your neck.
At a lean startup or smaller team though this isn’t unheard of. I’ve had to debug and code up multiple things while everything was on fire around me.
Mistakes are guaranteed to happen no matter how many precautions are in place. You can reduce the probability of a mistake happening but when it does whoever is fixing it needs to understand how to stay calm and work well under pressure.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#458I'm a ex-FANG dev that started a recruiting company, so I am VERY familiar with the arbitrary tech interview process. I'm a huge proponent of contract-to-hire. Even started a company* to make it easier for companies to offer contract-to-hire. Now before you dismiss the idea because you are "too good" to do C2H hear me out. Everyone knows that actually working with someone on the job is the only way to get an accurate…
Are you offering insurance to every C2H prospect? Otherwise, this seems like it basically works for healthy people without families.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#459I can attest to this. A number of years ago, after fifteen years as an engineer getting jobs through my reputation, I went into my first white board coding interview, with one of the FAANGs. It was a Boggle like problem to find possible words. While at the board my back was killing me, and I had a horrible time thinking due to anxiety. I knew that I wanted a trie, but I blanked on how to implement it properly. A couple hours later at home I remembered all of it.
That said, it did filter out people who had trouble handling the new stress of a whiteboarding interview and people who did not practice whiteboarding. If I ever interview for a FAANG again I'll make sure to do a lot more preparation.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#460I conducted a couple hundred interviews for my first FAANG employer, and I was constantly amazed at the percentage of candidates with years of Microsoft or Facebook experience on the resumes who apparently did not know how to program. I always thought, 'huh, guess I know why they quit after 3 years, amazing that they all lasted this long." Then I interviewed for another company and utterly bombed. It became suddenly…
You've been arrogant for years and you know what? So have I. I and many, many people in this industry have been doing this for years. What's different from you and many other people is that you admit and face your bias rather than justify it. I'm seriously curious what google interview board members have to say about this study. People like Gayle Laakmaan have been saying things to justify the whole process for years…
I've trained for interviewing twice at Google. I don't volunteer to give the interviews, though, because the interview I was trained to give, I would never pass.
And sadly, this is common and recognized at Google, was mentioned in interview training, and is just said to be part of the fact that the bar gets higher, or something, mumble mumble.
I find this disturbing.