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

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

#901

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

mav3rick wrote: post #852
rainyMammoth wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ethics? You are asking people to study and spend hours working on LeetCode problems for something close to completely useless. On the ethical scale, people that accept to spend hours of their limited life doing so are probably not the ones I would think of as "looking to work on something great"

Yeah writing an OS, a machine learning framework, designing deduplication for a photos app with a billion users , working on on board sensors for a self driving car. Such "grunt work". I'd love to know what exciting and hot thing you're working on ? Is CRUD the new sexy ?

You're looking at the best of FAANGs projects compared to the median of overall developer jobs, which isn't a fair comparison.

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

#902

Post by bananaface »

yamazaki wrote: post #392
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…

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.

Aren't you worried about filtering out good candidates who have enough options that they won't spend time on your test?

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

#903

Post by bananaface »

mathattack wrote: post #213

This is why internships are so important. Sometimes it’s still hard to tell after 10 weeks. It’s very naive to think we will know after a 30 minute interview.

True, but who with options is going to agree to an internship?

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

#904

Post by bananaface »

user5994461 wrote: post #312
solidasparagus wrote: post #227

Earlier 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 would wager the opposite. That many people looking for a job are open to a (paid) trial week, when the alternative is countless grueling interviews that lead nowhere.

I don't think this is true because taking a trial week requires leaving your existing job for... a trial. Why would you do that?

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

#905

Post by michaelt »

pmontra wrote: post #814
stormbrew wrote: post #774

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the replies to this are getting at, it's really important that if you do this you don't require the candidate to use their own laptop. You need to provide a laptop or like, a mac mini or something you know you can plug in and has baseline requirements for working on the problem you're giving them. And you need to make sure that the problem isn't complex enough that they can't do it in the allotted time if they str…

Give me a Mac and I'll spend half of the time asking you how to do X on a Mac, keyboard, mouse, touchpad, menus and unfamiliar software. Do you really have to test for the ability to use tools instead of the ability of reasoning? A whiteboard doesn't seem bad for that. I would like to understand how the candidates reason, how they interact with colleagues and yes, also how they handle stress. Example from yesterday:…

> Give me a Mac and I'll spend half of the time asking you how to do X on a Mac

I worked at a place that got around this by giving the candidate a choice of their own laptop, a Windows laptop, a Mac laptop, and an Ubuntu laptop. Half a dozen different IDEs on each.

Of course, you have to find someone to take on the glamorous job of keeping track of all the laptops, and wiping them between candidates...

> Do you really have to test for the ability to use tools instead of the ability of reasoning? A whiteboard doesn't seem bad for that.

It depends: If you're a big believer in test-driven development, red-green-refactor, clear naming and good code structure, test coverage, use of version control - you don't tend to see those in whiteboard coding.

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

#906

Post by mathattack »

bananaface wrote: post #903
mathattack wrote: post #213

This is why internships are so important. Sometimes it’s still hard to tell after 10 weeks. It’s very naive to think we will know after a 30 minute interview.

True, but who with options is going to agree to an internship?

Very good point. If you have options, then your work reputation will have to suffice. (Also imperfect because it excludes)

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

#907

Post by collyw »

bananaface wrote: post #872
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 tests are stupid because they instantly filter out anybody with options. If I'm being hit up by recruiters, I might come for an interview with you, but I'm not going to waste time with your test. You're going to end up with monkeys. But even beyond that, it's so dumb to re-demonstrate coding chops to every single employer, especially when I have no idea what my chances are to begin with. Are you interviewin…

Yes, I did one recently, got told it should take 2 or 3 hours, so I spent a morning on it.

Got failed for a number of the most trivial reasons - it didn't meet PEP 8 (it was two white space errors, as I didn't have pep installed on my home laptop, so I missed them).

A load of stuff about not mocking tests (setting up that would have doubled the scope of the project). The spec and said if you don't have time, then describe what you would have added in terms of tests - which I did). I did provide the most difficult to implement integration test to prove the system worked.

There was a complaint providing an HTML webpage rather than a JSON endpoint (the spec described it as a "page" and said not to bother with styling - so implied that it was HTML). Plus a couple of other equally ridiculous complains.

Don't waste your time with takehome tests without speaking to someone in engineering first. Sennder is the company if anyone else wants to avoid, I think we should be naming and shaming such companies.

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

#908

Post by bananaface »

reagent_finder wrote: post #893
tchaffee wrote: post #817

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've just slightly improved upon a very broken way of interviewing engineering candidates. I've been paid by clients happy with the results to do everything from cryptography to writing a compiler / interpreter. Very computer sciencey stuff at times. The devs I work with consistently rate me highly and I often get put in mentoring positions. I couldn't tell you what N^2 is. I learned it in uni. In decades of progra…

"N^2 is bad, except when it isn't" is my take on it. In uni I maybe had one week of doing O-evaluations, it never came up and I never got interested. I've seen 20,000-word debates on Reddit on whether something is n, n2 or logn... and to my knowledge nobody ever learned anything from those. In the workplace I've several times ran into the problem of "This is taking way too long," developing tools and methods to measu…

The problem with Big O complexity is that it just isn't the reason most things are slow. Usually, your input is either so large that you physically can't run a polynomial solution, or your input is so small that it doesn't matter. Speed increases usually come from caching, avoiding indirection, removing slow API calls & properly making use of your hardware.

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

#909

Post by bananaface »

mathattack wrote: post #906
bananaface wrote: post #903

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but who with options is going to agree to an internship?

Very good point. If you have options, then your work reputation will have to suffice. (Also imperfect because it excludes)

Mmm. Most interactive techniques that take longer than an hour or two seem completely useless as soon as someone has options. It's odd to me that all of this stuff seems so tailored to graduates, but nobody seems to adapt it as you go up the seniority chain. I feel like I'm missing something.

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

#910

Post by collyw »

As the interview process seems so crap and few people have any suggestions, here is mine.

I got asked to bring in my laptop with some code of my own we could discuss. I had a side project at the time so wasn't a problem. I got asked some questions, asked to add a simple feature. It was pleasant. I knew the code, so I was relaxed and didn't need to look up stuff. I think the interviewer learned some stuff as well.

The only problem people might say is that you used someone else's code. Even if that was the case, if someone else can talk confidently about code that they didn't write and jump in and add a feature easily, you have probably found someone good.

Can we try and push this as the new way of doing interviews. Low stress and respects peoples own time.

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