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> I have a pet theory that when people interview they bring this buried frustration into the room with them and use the interviewing process to play the part of
by moduspol 8y ago
> I have a pet theory that when people interview they bring this buried frustration into the room with them and use the interviewing process to play the part of the people they feel humiliated them.
I think it's possible--but there was an experiment someone ran a few years ago with a guy applying to jobs in both software development and management (while qualified for both and resumes optimized for each). One of the key differences that was found is that software developers essentially started out at zero and every wrong answer / misstep essentially reduced their score. For the management interviews, it was tougher to answer something wrong, but each good answer earned points.
It naturally results in software developers feeling like they blew it, but managers just wondering if they wowed them more than the other candidates. To me that suggests it's something more inherent to software developer interviewing than a frustration bias. If I had to guess, it's just that aspects of software development are more measurable than in other roles, and there's more genuine fear of hiring someone who can't fizzbuzz.
- Klonoar 8y agoThis is one of those moments where citing a source (that experiment) would be incredibly useful...
- moduspol 8y agoI wish my Googling skills were stronger, but alas, they are not. I remember one of the other key takeaways was that the manager role was treated more favorably--specifically that they apologized they could only offer some (reasonable) amount of relocation assistance while none was even offered in the developer role. It was theorized that managers were seen as an "in group" among other managers, but that was obviously just speculation. I wasn't on HN at the time, so I can't confirm it was here. It was one of those blog posts / write-ups that made the rounds.
- rwallace 8y agoI think it was a blog post by Michael O Church, though I don't have the reference to hand.
- S4M 8y agoI managed to dig it from archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20160113210613/https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/07/13/how-the-other-half-works-an-adventure-in-the-low-status-of-software-engineers/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160113210613/https://michaeloc...
- moduspol 8y agoThat's the one! Thank you so much.
- bryanrasmussen 8y agoI would think it isn't that managers are an in-group but are peers, even if a manager helps hire another manager that hire can be a potential problem for them if they feel slighted, but if the developer feels slighted - well the developer is subservient, not a peer.
- FundThrowaway 8y ago> and there's more genuine fear of hiring someone who can't fizzbuzz. I always hear this fear proclaimed but have never heard an actual story of a candidate failing to fizzbuzz, would love to hear an anecdote or two from anyone who has one.
- Aeolun 8y agoNot a candidate, someone we had already hired through an agency. Two someone’s actually. Never again. They were great people, but couldn’t distinguish a string from an int.
- FundThrowaway 8y agoThat's pretty crazy, how do these people exist and get jobs? What kind of development were they supposed to be doing?
- kajmagnusmobile 8y agoAnd what's the reason they were asked to do the fizzbugz test?
- Aeolun 8y agoThey weren’t asked until we had some internal hackathon where we were trying to implement tested fizz buzz in new languages we were working with.
- Aeolun 8y agoFull stack Webdevelopment. Had 2 years of experience.
- jogjayr 8y agoI have both once failed fizzbuzz in an interview and gotten offers from FAANG companies (different interviews, obviously). At the time I failed the fizzbuzz, I even knew it was a fizzbuzz question i.e. I'd read Jeff Atwood or Joel Spolsky's blogpost introducing the concept. I just got very very nervous. I work at Google now. There's not much to say really. I think people for like me who get very nervous at live coding interviews, the variation between best and worst performance can be massive.