People bomb, including good people. That is sadly part of the system. Once I had this candidate. Damn, I know my questions are deceptively simple on purpose, but he literally couldn't do anything. Not even a trivial brute force. Not even any related simple knowledge questions. Couldn't tell an average from a median. The only good thing I could write in the feedback was "seems to know some basic syntax". It was quite…
Interestingly, there's a famous study showing those doing the judging "can't think when hungry" either. (Or, at least can't think unbiasedly).[1] [1] https://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889
Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
571–580 of 1001 posts
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#572I 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…
That's why I think take-home exercises are a much better way to evaluate candidates. Give them the exercise and enough time and you will figure out: 1) How good they are 2) How much they actually care about the job offer -- the more detail and the more passion they put in the exercise, the more into the job they are.
Give 20 candidates take home exercises, they're all passionate and put a lot of work into it, then you'll reject 19 of them.
The input required for this type of interview is heavily skewed in favor of the company. No thanks.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#573Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'd be surprised. In an industry rife with impostor syndrome, and the perception that it takes intelligence to pass a FANG algorithm interview (it does, but hard work and discipline beats raw intelligence), there's a strong disincentive to admit that "hey, I studied really hard, for months in order to get this job" when there's an expectation that your coworkers and peers will look down on you after this comes to l…
You would think that if the interview process was filtering on anxiety levels it would lead these companies to be full of people with high confidence which would mean imposter syndrome would not be a widespread issue.
Filtering on anxiety levels doesn't mean you're selecting for confidence generally, it means you are selecting for people who are not anxious in the interview. If you practice for 1-4 hours per day for a month or more (as I did last time I was on the market) on a particular skill (like tech interviews), you become more confident at that thing. Grinding tech interview practice works, which is not great, for either side, because it's mostly orthogonal to actual job performance.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#574Earlier quoted context omitted.
...I always learned in grade school math class that "average" = "mean", very specifically. I'm pretty sure there would have been test questions that required this knowledge. It's very possible my schooling was wrong, but presumably I'm not the only one.
I have a graduate education in probability and statistics; in the technical literature, an "average" is an estimator which, subject to some bias, predicts the value a sequence tends to. My professor was fond of saying, "the function f(x) = 15 is an average, but since it's a constant function it will almost always be a terrible one" to drill this into our minds. The arithmetic mean is colloquially called the average a…
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Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#575All: please don't miss that there are multiple pages of comments. The top few subthreads have become so large that they fill out this first page entirely. You have to click 'More' at the bottom to see the rest (there are over 700 at this point).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23848039&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23848039&p=3
We're working on performance improvements that will hopefully allow us to go back to HN's original style of one big page per thread (not infinite scroll, don't worry). In the meantime please look for those 'More' links when the total number of comments is over 250 or so.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#576Have you ever read Coders at Work?
One of the things that terrified me when I read it was Ken Thompson's description of his interviewing process.
Paraphrasing: He would ask about a project the interviewee was proud of, then drill them with critical questions about it.
I actually like the general idea. But the social pressure of this situation seems to be quite intense.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#577Earlier quoted context omitted.
why does it have to happen in a high pressure situation with only 45 minutes though? there's no analog to that in professional coding.
HBO's Silicon Valley is dramatized, but I can't be the only one who's coded from the the convention hall floor/hotel, or had to setup servers "live". Every time a site gets unexpectedly popular (/. effect; HN hug of death) and dies, and comes back, there's someone at the other end who's probably close to tears trying to get their site back up ASAP. That doesn't indict the fact that's the exception and that software p…
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Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#578Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean this would apply to going on a first date as well. First impression is what matters and once the impression has been ruined, all bets are off. It is not specific to the interview process.
Rescheduling a date or an interview at the last minute doesn’t make a great first impression either.
I would LOVE to get my 2 hours back in a day because of a last minute interview cancelation. The only person who would be truly irritated is the recruiter, who's job depends on meeting candidate quotas. Even then, they want you to be successful.
Trust me anyone reading this, if you are not feeling well, or something is distracting you, please, please, do feel free to reschedule your interview, even last minute.
Once you go through the process, and it's a no-hire, that is recorded in the system and you won't be allowed to try again for some extended period of time. At my company, it's 1 year.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#579Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think people are naive, they just don't have a better solution. Most established professionals are not interested in a 10 week trial period after which they might be back on the job market.
I don't see how internships help. I get the point that at the end you know if they're a hire but you still had to filter who to intern in the first place so you're still back to interview people to be interns which is the same problem you had. Also, training a new employee or intern in your systems, code, company procedures etc takes a bunch of time and investment so it's not like you can intern some higher multiple…
I think it's effective for college candidates. You pay them much less, they often work on greenfield projects where learning existing code/process is less important, and the company gets to try out more candidates than they end up hiring. All of that while still doing right by the candidates.
Re: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study
#580Multiple discussions about this on HN today, that's good. Maybe it will lead to the pendulum swinging back a bit. Interviewers need to do their due diligence. Coding tests can have their place when interviewing for certain kinds of positions, especially for new grads and entry level positions. In the end nothing can replace checking references and looking into a person's work experience. There is no algorithms and da…
Your last paragraph sums what why everyone on HN is so upset about the interview process. That is, the process is tailored for new grads, and what is being tested is not at all related to the job. 5 years of schooling, and 10 years of experience is not enough if you can't implement depth first search using double linked lists, hashes - and ultimately graph theory - within 45 mins. Heck, new grads can't even do so.
Well, yes, if you looked at my comments you'd see I'm part of that "everybody" set.
But to moderate it a bit; in my interview training at Google it was clear: the interviewee doesn't have to get the answer correct. The point is to see how they think.
I mean, I think it's still insulting, but there is that.