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

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

#841

Post by fendy3002 » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 7:36 AM UTC

perl4ever wrote: post #818

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 like take home tests. Unfortunately, the one time I applied to a place that gave them, and apparently aced it, they wanted to validate it in the interview, by having me program in an environment and language I'd never used before. I get that everybody cheats at everything, but since some employers (all the ones that have ever hired me) hire without any coding demonstration, why can't you just take the risk and trus…

It feels like that the company is lacking a programmer who is decent at communication.

It can be easily solved by asking what is a parts of code do, or how it works and why.

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

#842

Post by mirekrusin » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 7:43 AM UTC

tpxl wrote: post #572

yamazaki wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why not drastically different approach - ie. instead of active technical interview process on company's side, just put up few dozens of open source projects/libraries that are being used inside company and leave it as technical interview sandbox.

Keep brownie points on pull requests to unlock "you gained > badge" a'la stack overflow or do one off evaluation based on contribution when candidate applies. Stack overflow contributions can be equally taken under account to gain points and arguably they have badge system that does the job for you already.

Github could introduce something similar and wipe out "anxiety interview" completely, if they wanted to.

There is really no reason to do technical interview when you can inspect open source work. For people who don't have contributions yet, open source libraries/projects by the company should be made available.

Seems like win-win for everybody.

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

#843

Post by hef19898 » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 7:52 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #771

hef19898 wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This approach also works realy good when interviewing with other companies. I used the STAR [0] principle everytime after Amazon, it almost always worked. Having interviewed a couple of people at Amazon myself definetly helped. [0] Situation - Task - Action - result, basically your story tellling format for Amazon interviews. Back the day it was even covered on their interview prep page.

STAR is not just for Amazon. It's a great way to answer "behavioral questions" at any company. On the other side of the table, as an interviewer, I can recognize the STAR format instantly and am very appreciative that the candidate has taken the time to structure his or her answer in this easy-to-digest way. Also, and I don't know if there is a nice acronym for it, but I like the formula where you: 1. Say what you're…

Like that one, too!

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

#844

Post by astannard » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 7:53 AM UTC

One of the best hires I had made had a car crash interview. They could hardly speak they were so nervous. I could see from their CV that they had some good personal projects and thought lets give them a chance, that's what prohbation periods are for. On the job they were amazing. It was great to see them grown in confidence and they were a key figure at the company after a couple of years.

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

#845

Post by Cthulhu_ » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 8:00 AM UTC

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #115

I 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 much preferred our style of (technical) interviews (I took on a few dozen over the years). First there's a review of the CV, Linkedin, and github, if that looks good, a first interview - just get to know the person, very casual. If that clicks, second interview is the technical interview - we did that by giving the candidate homework, 4-8 hours worth of tasks that are close to their day-to-day work, usually something with a REST API, some basic math/arithmetic, and a front-end / forms, and plenty of room for the candidate to play with.

It was received pretty positively; especially early on (2012-2015) we had a lot of candidates indicate they had never done anything with JSON or REST before. (later on they mentioned having done nothing with XML before, lol).

And we got to see some interesting solutions and creativity; one guy we hired did it all in J2EE, while we were a Spring fanclub. But the code was sound, he showed that he understood how it worked, etc.

The conversation during the technical interviews were entertaining as well.

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

#846

Post by adrianN » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 8:02 AM UTC

schreiaj wrote: post #339

harryh wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A pro tip for anyone reading this who ever ends up in a similar situation: just postpone the interview. I promise you that everyone will understand. Everyone gets that these things are a little goofy[1] and wants to set people up for success and not doom them to failure. 1. Yes, there is a larger and more complicated discussion to be had about making the whole system better. But that isn't gonna happen in the short t…

Yeah I didn’t realize how distracted I was until I was there and just blanked. I also have real problems with traveling to interviews since my other half has issues being alone at home hence doing the interview while we were visiting her family. Even then me being gone was highly stressful for her. Google was willing to let me interview with folks local to us which really helped. I’m curious if more companies will co…

So far I managed to avoid traveling for interviews by just telling them that I prefer doing it over the internet.

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

#847

Post by eNTi » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 8:06 AM UTC

mirekrusin wrote: post #842

tpxl wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why not drastically different approach - ie. instead of active technical interview process on company's side, just put up few dozens of open source projects/libraries that are being used inside company and leave it as technical interview sandbox. Keep brownie points on pull requests to unlock "you gained > badge" a'la stack overflow or do one off evaluation based on contribution when candidate applies. Stack overflow…

Unless you are looking for a "senior developer with x years of experience". I have a live, hobbies and family. I don't care to spend most of my free time fixing code in some obscure library I'm not ever going to use only to stand a chance to get a different job in the future.

How in the world did current developers EVER get ANY job? Who gives developers the chance to grow these days?

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

#848

Post by eNTi » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 8:12 AM UTC

legopiece wrote: post #393

yamazaki wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Totally agreed. I've been in the position to evaluate several take-home exercises during the years and they always produced good results

Doesn't that tell you that the method of hiring is flawed in the first place?

If you care to weed out bad candiates, what help are 100% perfectly fine take-home exercises? The only thing that tells you is, that all of your candidates are viable in the first place. Just go into an interview with THAT assumption and ask the right questions.

Why do so many companies assume that people who try to get hired for a certain job don't meet the basic requirements? That gotta be the rule not the exception? That's just a bad faith assumption.

Just make sure your hire fits into your culture and give them sufficient probation time to grow into your codebase.

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

#849

Post by cheesecracker » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 8:34 AM UTC

Maybe some people (how many?) fail because of anxiety, but on the other hand, anybody who doesn't fail certainly has proven some minimal coding skills?

I usually took it as a positive if companies did some basic coding skill test, showing they at least cared that people can code.

Also, the people who fail because of anxiety, how will they fare in the normal job situation when they are supposed to discuss stuff on the whiteboard with colleagues?

Maybe the results could be taken as "give people who fail the coding interview another chance", but I wouldn't take it as "don't do coding interviews".

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

#850

Post by Deestan » Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 8:40 AM UTC

dcow wrote: post #449

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…

>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…

We do take-home, and tell the candidate to not use more than 4 hours on it and deliver it any time during the next week (this is to respect their time). The testing system logs their activity, so if someone decides to spend two days on it, we'll know. Not a problem as such, but it raises our expectations of the delivery. :)

Next stage is a technical interview of 60-90 minutes where we a) try to find what their strengths are and how deep they go, and b) ask them to explain how they solved the take-home.

b) is critical. Of course it tests for the skill that is critical in teamwork: communication ability, but it also lets us catch cheaters.

After this it's HR and reference checking.

It's worked well so far.