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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

#931

Post by pdonis »

cactus2093 wrote: post #622
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…

This has actually not been my experience. I generally agree with your reasoning and have tried to run coding interviews this way, thinking that it is most similar to doing real work. Candidates can use their own computer, their own editor and plugins, whatever framework and language they prefer, can google anything they need, etc. It causes a surprising number of problems. A lot of candidates come in with their envir…

> A lot of candidates come in with their environments just very poorly configured, run into weird dependency errors, mismatched installed versions, no linting or syntax highlighting set up in their editor because they don't actually ever code on their personal computer, etc.

Isn't that a useful way to filter out candidates that you don't want to hire? Presumably they know in advance what kind of code you're going to ask them to write, so they have time to set things up beforehand.

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

#932

Post by foolmeonce »

bananaface wrote: post #888
foolmeonce wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problem is HR itself. Few companies should be large enough to warrant full time HR, but even small companies need many.. HR are specialist in expanding the disconnect between people the company thinks it needs and people who are willing to work for it.

You say that, but look through this thread. HR has a solid understanding of what a given company's large-scale objectives are when hiring. As evidenced by most replies in this thread, technicians on the ground do not.

The evidence is that it is a hard problem that is not solved. No amount of people who can't do the task demonstrate the existence of experts who can. Google and Microsoft have shown us examples of failing at simple HR tasks for years or decades with budgets for HR that dwarf a small companies entire payroll.

What virtually every attempt shows is that it is better to hire people who are roughly qualified and see what happens, managing the results instead of filtering. Having an HR strategy for hiring leads to creating biases (i.e. requirements based on your current work force) that gets you a group of overly similar and therefore collectively incompetent work force.

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

#933

Post by arethuza »

touristtam wrote: post #930
arethuza wrote: post #863

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned this lesson a few years back when I interviewed for the CTO role of a educational software company - the main part of the interview was preparing a presentation on how to launch a new product which I had to prepare and present to the management team. That went very well and I was feeling pretty good. Then the CEO had a quick chat and happened to ask me a very simple technical question and my brain would not…

> I think that's how I discovered that mental context switching is a real thing You had to go to that level to understand that? I am glad you did realize it, but I am surprised it was that late in your career.

I'd probably heard about it but I'd never had it really hit me like that before.

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

#934

Post by castratikron »

kamaal wrote: post #798
OliverJones wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been doing this for a LOOONG time. Early on, the core skill for a programmer was intensive in-depth knowledge of the language being used. We all talked a good game about what we called "reusable software," but yeah. Talk. Now things are TOTALLY different. Doing a good job requires extensive, encyclopedic, knowledge of what's out there, how well it works, and how to integrate it. npm, nuget, maven, anaconda, we a…

>>This business of high stakes quiz questions serves just one purpose: feeding the ego of the interviewer. "We have high standards!" It's scary how true this is. I know one manager who routinely rejects perfectly good candidates for making negligible mistakes in the interview. All on the grounds of "We have high standards!"

Haha. I worked at a place that did not start out as a software company but now had a software team (they built industrial machinery). The director of the electrical and software department was completely clueless of course. He insisted that since we are an engineering company, an engineering degree was required to work here. And that meant any candidate for a software engineering position was automatically rejected if they only had a computer science degree since it didn't have the word "engineering" in the title.

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

#935

Post by _____s »

bananaface wrote: post #865
OliverJones wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been doing this for a LOOONG time. Early on, the core skill for a programmer was intensive in-depth knowledge of the language being used. We all talked a good game about what we called "reusable software," but yeah. Talk. Now things are TOTALLY different. Doing a good job requires extensive, encyclopedic, knowledge of what's out there, how well it works, and how to integrate it. npm, nuget, maven, anaconda, we a…

I honestly don't agree with this. The worst programs are written by people who know how to plug a million and one things together, but can't drill down and analyse the algorithmic implications of what they're doing. Electron runs like shit and inhales RAM is because it was programmed by people who don't have solid understanding of fundamentals. They understand a huge number of horizontal abstractions but they have no…

The likelihood that people who created Electron don't understand caches or cache locality is close to zero. That's an oversimplification. Electron is a large project that does many things… there are many reasons why it could have been slow. Today there are many Electron based apps that are quite decent.

> Knowing how to maximally exploit a CPU is way more important than knowing eight different Javascript frameworks if good software is your objective. And frankly, learning Node is way easier than figuring out how to structure basic, bare-bones Javascript so that it leverages your L1 cache.

Learning Node isn't easier than learning how to structure basic, bare-bones code that leverages L1 cache. In fact, it's quite the opposite. You can learn cache locality as a concept in much less time than you would learn Node (or any programming ecosystem for that matter).

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

#936

Post by bananaface »

conradev wrote: post #921
bananaface wrote: post #865

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't agree with this. The worst programs are written by people who know how to plug a million and one things together, but can't drill down and analyse the algorithmic implications of what they're doing. Electron runs like shit and inhales RAM is because it was programmed by people who don't have solid understanding of fundamentals. They understand a huge number of horizontal abstractions but they have no…

> Electron runs like shit and inhales RAM is because it was programmed by people who don't have solid understanding of fundamentals. I feel like this is a huge oversimplification. I’d argue that for sufficiently large projects (say, Chromium) every single programmer who works on it could have a strong understanding of performance fundamentals but the product itself could still have performance problems because there…

I disagree. As evidence: games are way more complex, have enormous teams, and manage to simulate an entire game world rendering render hundreds of thousands of polygons 60 times every second. Twitter crashes my browser.

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

#937

Post by sideband »

The current "tech" job interview process is engineered to select for people that are both competent and secretly insecure about their skills, and to do this with little or no false positives. Competent employees are, well, competent and secretly insecure employees tend to have a need to impress. Both of these traits works to employers benefit.

A large amount of false negatives, like candidates that would otherwise be great employees but maybe just suck at whiteboard coding, is considered acceptable by most employers because research shows the cost of bad hires is much much higher than missing out on many good hires. Employers know the current process is miserable and leaves a lot of good people behind.

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

#938

Post by wtetzner »

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…

Why not give the take home test in advance, and then have the candidate explain their solution in the interview?

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

#939

Post by bananaface »

_____s wrote: post #935
bananaface wrote: post #865

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I honestly don't agree with this. The worst programs are written by people who know how to plug a million and one things together, but can't drill down and analyse the algorithmic implications of what they're doing. Electron runs like shit and inhales RAM is because it was programmed by people who don't have solid understanding of fundamentals. They understand a huge number of horizontal abstractions but they have no…

The likelihood that people who created Electron don't understand caches or cache locality is close to zero. That's an oversimplification. Electron is a large project that does many things… there are many reasons why it could have been slow. Today there are many Electron based apps that are quite decent. > Knowing how to maximally exploit a CPU is way more important than knowing eight different Javascript frameworks i…

I don't buy it. Unreal Engine is a larger project that does many more things, and the speed at which it does them compared to Electron is not even in the same universe.
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