10 ms·
> He has Aspergers and locks up and fails miserably in the interviewing process, but the honest, reality is, he is10 times the developer I am, the guy sees patt
by gopalv 7y ago
> He has Aspergers and locks up and fails miserably in the interviewing process, but the honest, reality is, he is10 times the developer I am, the guy sees patterns instantly and has a knack for code organization.
I don't think I can get hired without a referral - haven't managed to land a cold interview once so far. So at least, there's no evidence of it.
Interviews are a performance act, they are the packaging that you throw away after buying a product for the cover.
The interview "suit" I wear is actually one of someone who's calm and smiling - instead of stimming with my hair and dead-pan with a smirk (if I was a woman, I'd have resting b-tch face).
I feel for this guy, because I figure out how to wear that suit, but I still need to thumb the scales to get hired, because the mask I'm wearing is effort & it does show to the perceptive HR person (& it doesn't matter what you are faking - if you're faking it, it counts against you).
However, here's where everything is unfair in this world.
I have a pretty decent job because I ran into the right people at the right conference back in 2004, where someone noticed that I might be able to do hard things with minimal effort (and fail at easy things, simultaneously).
There must be thousands of people in my state who never got that "come to Yahoo, have a coffee" invitation & get plugged into a network of people who have kept me gainfully employed for more than a decade.
I definitely had fewer challenges there because I wasn't an outright minority in the industry - I didn't have anything to prove beyond the performance.
- itronitron 7y agoAll things being equal, I'd rather hire someone that seemed nervous in an interview than someone that seemed relaxed, as the former is a good indicator that at least they are excited about the position.
- rtkwe 7y agoThat's gotta be a very noisy signal though. I'm nervous in any interview or public speaking thing whether I care much about the thing or not.
- jameslevy 7y agoNervousness is also often an indicator that you may not feel fully prepared. The best way I find to relieve nervousness in these situations is to be so prepared that there's really no reason at all to be nervous.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- cwojno 7y agoThe big question is, how did that person at the 2004 conference know you had the right stuff?
- gopalv 7y ago> how did that person at the 2004 conference know you had the right stuff? I was there talking about my FOSS work, that probably helped. toolz asked me if the "Portable .NET" platform was portable enough to run on some new hardware & gcc patches he had got before the conference (not insane, but cross-compile & port the project from a Zaurus/iPAC to run on a PicoPeta Simputer). Anyway, it must've looked more impressive than 2 days of work, because when toolz died, someone else remembered that incident[1]. (as a side note, I had already interviewed at IBM, Oracle Platforms team and several other places with no luck at that point ... so I had already spent 4 months prepping & interviewing in 2004.) And after the conference, I met Swaroop [2] & Philip, who were at Yahoo then. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5812177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5812177 [2] - https://python.swaroopch.com/ https://python.swaroopch.com/