Don't miss the footnote: "I’m always terrified of misspelling “Dunning-Kruger” and not double-checking it because of overconfidence in my own spelling abilities."
People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance
91–100 of 152 posts
Re: People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I absolutely judge a company by the interview process and the questions they ask. "Would I want to work for a company where the employees pass their given process?"
A company's bad interview process might have nothing at all to do with the rest of the company. At this point, isn't it generally accepted that all tech interviewing sucks, and companies would do better throwing darts at resumes? If all interviewing is bad, and all companies are not bad, there's no benefit to judging a company based on that process.
>A company's bad interview process might have nothing at all to do with the rest of the company.
The rest of the company didn't care enough to fix a bad interview process. That has plenty to do with the rest of the company.
>isn't it generally accepted that all tech interviewing sucks,
No. The interview process I went through was phenomenal. And my job is very pleasant and rewarding.
Re: People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trust me, if you have a passionate non-web developer he can do the job just fine. And he/she applied for the job so they are interested to learn something new, maybe already started doing so but there is nothing to put down in a CV. They will read the tutorials, the documentation and they will deliver. I feel that nobody wants to give a chance to anybody.
I totally agree that they -can- do the job. The most important thing for a software developer is the ability to learn. We need to give people chances so that they even even enter the field to one day become senior level. But I also understand how a lot of business owners feel about it. It takes time to learn these things vs someone who has basically already done this project before in this stack before. A business in…
I think what you're getting at taps into the heart of the issue- it's not just that the software industry is fast-paced in terms of innovation, it's fast-paced in terms of business requirements, in getting products out of market to scramble for users, which translates to higher valuation, and more VC dumb money. So in SV we kinda have a HFT-type situation where companies have to continuously get more and more speedy and optimize greater, even if it comes at a human cost- i.e., everyone's hiring only for senior engineers and there's not enough openings for junior developers, much less the resources to train juniors.
As an aside, it's paradoxical that the industry simultaneously desires 10x seniors, while prizes youth (who they don't have to pay at senior salaries). So the true profile of a unicorn coder is basically a 10x dev with 10+ years of experience who is also a new grad that requires no training. Keeps down the cost, all around.
Re: People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I was at Code for America I redid their hiring process to optimize for interviewee experience rather than hiring manager experience. One of the things that really struck me at the time was that traditional interview processes are built around a notion of worker surplus and job scarcity. They make very little sense when the opposite condition applies. Even little things like contacting all applicants within 24 ho…
Very true. Some well known companies, like Google, still have more applicants than jobs, and so they need to filter people out. Most companies have the opposite problem - they need to attract people. This shift means that the interview process has to be re-thought.
> "still have more applicants than jobs"
This is true for a lot of companies - but there's only a surplus of labor if the applicants are qualified.
For a company to be able to be frivolous with their process, they'd need to have more qualified applicants than jobs, and I think even for many name-brand BigCorps, this isn't the case.
Re: People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance
#95> Therefore, every bar above 0 is impostor syndrome country, and every bar below zero belongs to its foulsome, overconfident cousin, the Dunning-Kruger effect. Dunning-Kruger effect is attributed to "a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude." [1] Seems like a harsh accusation for being off by a single star. And the author makes a generalization that the imposter effect is "better" than…
I'm so mind-bendingly sick of these two terms (Dunning-Kruger and Imposter Syndrome). They're very much in-vouge as of late and it seems like an overwhelming number of /r/programming and HN posts have at least some reference to it. Pulling some piece of psychology jargon out of thin air doesn't make it immediately applicable or accurate. Presumably, the terms get used so frequently for the "look how smart I sound" ef…
Yep. You can pretty much tell when people use those terms that they're more driven by a desire to use those terms than out of having anything interesting to say.
Re: People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
People have been talking about the terribleness of tech interviewing for years. If a company isn't able/willing to improve important processes, that's definitely a sign to me.
This has been a deepening mystery throughout my career. I see most companies are utterly uninterested in improving their recruitment processes, and are at the same time frustrated that most projects fail or don't quite deliver. Meanwhile, the best engineers I know have to look for a really long time to find suitable jobs.
> "I see most companies are utterly uninterested in improving their recruitment processes"
I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. Most companies seem to be interesting in improving their recruitment processes - but certain fundamental systems and assumptions are treated as inviolate and sacred.
Here is a quick but incomplete list of the ones that come to mind:
- Open-ended unstructured interviews are the optimal way to evaluate candidates.
- Whiteboard coding is an acceptable, reliable, and reasonably accurate way to gauge coding ability.
- Algorithms and data structure knowledge predicts overall software engineering capability.
- Culture fit (in however nebulous ways) is a stronger predictor of future performance than standardized evaluation.
The list goes on.
The tech industry overall seems very interested in improving recruitment and hiring, so long as these fundamental tenets are never violated. Suffice it to say, this stands in contrast to tech's (in)famous claims of thinking outside the box, breaking the rules, and holding nothing sacred to disruption.
I've personally seen companies try to improve candidate sourcing, scoring systems, interview scheduling, etc etc, but practically never any of the above. Companies try really, really hard to optimize within an extremely narrow band of parameters.
Re: People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance
#97I understand companies are unwilling to give negative feedback to applicants for fear of legal repercussion. But often not getting any form of feedback is highly detrimental to an applicant who's invested days if not weeks of going through the process, only to receive a boilerplate "thank you for applying, please try again" response.
One wonders if it's possible to devise some sort of neutral, yet helpful, assessment that could be given to applicants without fear of legal retaliation. Or, if eventually an applicant will sue a company for not providing feedback after they were rejected.
Re: People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has been a deepening mystery throughout my career. I see most companies are utterly uninterested in improving their recruitment processes, and are at the same time frustrated that most projects fail or don't quite deliver. Meanwhile, the best engineers I know have to look for a really long time to find suitable jobs.
> "I see most companies are utterly uninterested in improving their recruitment processes" I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. Most companies seem to be interesting in improving their recruitment processes - but certain fundamental systems and assumptions are treated as inviolate and sacred . Here is a quick but incomplete list of the ones that come to mind: - Open-ended unstructured interviews are the optimal…
Agreed, but I'd put it that way: most companies I see are very interested in pretending to improve their recruitment processes.
What they don't really want, is to take on people who are noticeably better than (or different in any way from) the people already working there.
Re: People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "I see most companies are utterly uninterested in improving their recruitment processes" I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. Most companies seem to be interesting in improving their recruitment processes - but certain fundamental systems and assumptions are treated as inviolate and sacred . Here is a quick but incomplete list of the ones that come to mind: - Open-ended unstructured interviews are the optimal…
Agreed, but I'd put it that way: most companies I see are very interested in pretending to improve their recruitment processes. What they don't really want, is to take on people who are noticeably better than (or different in any way from) the people already working there.
Perhaps a more exact personal observation would be that hiring managers always hire the same type of person.
Re: People are still bad at gauging their own interview performance
#100These interview training programs seems to be really reminiscent of coding bootcamps and appear to have grown rapidly in a very short period of time. I think I'd almost prefer interviewees being judged based on the schools they attended and companies they worked at. I'm not sure that I find the ability to cram for data structures and algorithms questions to be indicative of intelligence and problem solving skills. Sc…
At this rate, no matter how coding interviews change, there will be a new bootcamp or training program created to assist applicants to pass them.