Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study • Hacker News Board

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

#731

Post by fuzzythinker » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 12:51 AM UTC

arp242 wrote: post #722

fuzzythinker wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An upvote is warranted for a life long gift to kids to be able to communicate confidently. A downvote is warranted for giving a bad advice on gaming a system and giving both parties in an interview process a poor indication of what is expected in possibly years to come. Thus, no vote given. I think given what I read about debate teams -- on podcasts and here in HN, I am on the fence on suggesting that to my kids. The…

I'm not from a country that really does "debate teams", but as I understand them a lot seems to be about "winning the argument", which doesn't strike me as especially great. On the other hand, it probably makes people better at spotting a bad/fallacious arguments, and gain appreciation that complex topics tend to have multiple reasonable opinions on it – two things we desperately need more of.

True, "winning the argument" is one of the main drawbacks I fear. The main benefits for me is to foster (often quick) logical thinking and reasoning and the ability to articulate it. It is difficult to build this skill without a "debate team" setting. More so if your kids are more on the shyness scale.

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

#732

Post by pmiller2 » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 12:56 AM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #703

StavrosK wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bomb on technical interviews the same way because my mind just freezes and can't get through even simple problems. I had the same question you mention. "This is a problem a paper was written on, are you expecting me to derive a whole paper from first principles in half an hour, or are you expecting me to have seen it before? If it's the latter, why not let me Google, as I normally would?" I feel that saying "I woul…

> I had the same question you mention. "This is a problem a paper was written on, are you expecting me to derive a whole paper from first principles in half an hour, or are you expecting me to have seen it before? If it's the latter, why not let me Google, as I normally would?" > I feel that saying "I would solve this problem with " should be good enough, and if I'm asked to implement it, I should be able to copy pas…

I had that exact same experience with milo.com. Small world.

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

#733

Post by ipnon » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 12:57 AM UTC

tropdrop wrote: post #714

This was interesting: For example, in our study, all of the women who took the public interview failed, while all of the women who took the private interview passed. That is an amazing statistic! From 100% failure to 100% success!

Yes, I don't think a company can continue with whiteboard interviews anymore and consider themselves to be treating women fairly in the hiring process.

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

#734

Post by decafninja » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 12:57 AM UTC

redisman wrote: post #292

klipklop wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Connections at best let me skip the phone screen and do the onsite leetcode at FAANG. Maybe I just don't have friends at the >= VP level?

It's very different at smaller companies where the whole interview might be waived (or just no leetcode) if you worked with one of the technical leaders or founders before.

One of my ex-coworkers/now-friend is what I call a master networker. His network casts wide across the tech departments of a huge number of small hedge funds in NYC. If he wants a job, he can just call up any of his friends/ex-colleagues at these places and odds are several of them will simply just give him a job at their firm. If an opening doesn't exist, sometimes they'll literally create an opening for him.

The downside is that he has to be very un-picky on what the role entails whether it be working with some super unsexy legacy technology (Excel VBA! Legacy ASP.NET webforms!) or doing devops or even helpdesk duty too. Hedge funds being hedge funds, small as they are, they all pay pretty well, though not at the level of a top tech company.

It's a combination of these places being pretty small shops and having friends there in high places. Including, from what I hear, a billionaire hedge fund exec or two.

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

#735

Post by laurieg » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 1:03 AM UTC

Occasionally I work as a speaking examiner, assessing people's foreign language level.

The test is rigorous and well designed. Few minutes of questions are designed to be so easy any can answer them. "How do you spell your name?" etc. This is by design as people can be extremely nervous when taking a foreign language exam.

If you are interviewing people, do what you can to put them at ease at first.

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

#736

Post by pmiller2 » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 1:04 AM UTC

erichurkman wrote: post #724

koheripbal wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One trend I've noticed that is markedly different from when I started programming in 1998, is how dependent we've become to program via Google/StackExchange searches. I'm not sure I know how to write anything from scratch anymore, because I just search/read/alter/test. The breadth of what I work on is 100x wider than it used to be, and so I've become absolutely dependent on quickly reading docs, copying code found on…

I have a standard preface to start a live coding or technical session with a candidate to account for this. I look up stuff all the time, and expecting candidates to not do so is cruel. > We're going to go through a few technical exercises together. It's open book, open documentation, use whatever resources you would normally use — though please do not copy and paste complete solutions from StackOverflow and guess&ch…

Maybe I should start saying (as a candidate):

> I understand you want to test my programming ability, and in order to do that, we should do it under conditions as close to real world as possible. Because I don't know every algorithm in existence, I'm going to use the internet like I do normally to look stuff up. And, I'm going to use my own laptop that I've brought here. Is that cool?

Not really, of course, but I'd like to.

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

#737

Post by bryanrasmussen » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 1:05 AM UTC

drdrey wrote: post #631

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just you :) A much more realistic way to test people is to tell them to bring their laptop, point to a problem on the whiteboard and say "here, solve it, and use whatever resources you need." I'm somewhat like you; I do a wide variety of tasks every day and simply can't keep all the different rules and syntaxes in my head. I'm terrible at tests anyway and would probably bomb a FAANG interview badly because o…

I don't even have a personal laptop, seems like bringing the employer provided laptop to interviews is not the most sensible.

one time I went to an interview and they had a laptop ready with something for me to do. This guy had some insanely powerful glasses to have the font so small on his computer (considering he was also quite old) and a few other things combined with it being a Windows machine and I'd been off of windows for a couple years made it almost impossible to make it work.

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

#738

Post by pmiller2 » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 1:10 AM UTC

Sivart13 wrote: post #521

dcow wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 impo…

"Take home" questions are heavily biased in favor of the employer because they're not required to put anything on the line. An asynchronous test is definitely more flexible for all parties, but it also means the employer can more forward with far more interviews than they would be able to do in person. Leading to more candidates wasting their time doing nonsense work when they have proportionally less of a chance of…

Speaking of Instacart, I scheduled an interview with them via interviewing.io, which I was told was a "technical chat," designed to get to know a little about me, and to answer any questions I might have. I had qualified for the interview by scoring well enough on phone screens on interviewing.io, so, this technical chat was supposed to be followed by a real, actual coding interview.

Guess what? It wasn't. They rejected me as soon as I de-anonymized to allow them to see my resume.

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

#739

Post by dcow » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 1:11 AM UTC

triztian wrote: post #680

nend wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't like take homes for two reasons: 1) It's less time spent talking with potential coworkers. Which for me, coworkers (and how we work together/get along) determine about 90% of how satisfied I am with my job (assuming pay/benefits are standard). 2) You're still going to require me to take a day off and stand up in front of a whiteboard anyway eventually. Every take home I've done is an early stage filter. The f…

Oh man I can relate, I once took a home project which took around 6hrs and then was subsequently invited for a full day of white-boarding with 10 different people throughout the day. Didn't hit it off with the last interviewer so it was a no-go. If a take-home is required I'd at least expect a code review over it and focus the rest of the interview process on soft skills rather than trivia questions that are answered…

This is exactly the solution I'm imagining. You do a take home after the initial soft screen(s) but prior to coming on-site. Onsite the focus is on the work you did for the take home--discussion like "why did you model X that way?", "if a new requirement Y was added, how would it impact the design", etc. And of course all the normal soft talk and cultural stuff. Just don't put them in front of a board and ask them to solve something under pressure, please.

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

#740

Post by pmiller2 » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 1:11 AM UTC

voltagex_ wrote: post #715

Sivart13 wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Take home" questions are heavily biased in favor of the employer because they're not required to put anything on the line. An asynchronous test is definitely more flexible for all parties, but it also means the employer can more forward with far more interviews than they would be able to do in person. Leading to more candidates wasting their time doing nonsense work when they have proportionally less of a chance of…

The "easy" fix for this is to pay the candidate for the time spent on the take-home.

That has the down side of some potentially sticky legal issues. For instance, people on visas can't do paid work for any company other than the one sponsoring them. It introduces a small annoyance at tax time, as well.