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The ability to acquire and apply technical knowledge, and ability to demonstrate random technical knowledge under time pressure, in a foreign environment, while

by kyllo 7y ago

The ability to acquire and apply technical knowledge, and ability to demonstrate random technical knowledge under time pressure, in a foreign environment, while other people are watching and judging you, are orthogonal skills and many engineers are great at the former and terrible at the latter. There's also a ton of opinion and taste involved in software engineering, which can bias the interviewer's view of someone's technical ability. Not to mention all the unconscious biases against people who don't "fit the description" of a typical software engineer demographically. The Googles of the world limit their own potential by rejecting many talented people who couldn't make it through their hiring filter for reasons that have nothing to do with their actual ability to build software. Then they express angst over how difficult it is to fill positions. It's a self-inflicted problem, and a hard one to solve. It's probably impossible to design a theoretically perfectly fair hiring process without also solving all causes of inequality in society generally. But it can be made better and more fair than it is, and many companies and applicants aren't satisfied with the existing hiring processes, so they are making efforts to change the situation, as they should.

parsimo2010 7y ago
Time pressure, foreign environments, and people watching/judging your work are all exactly the things that happen when you're developing stuff that hasn't been done. You run into problems. You find out that requirements or an API spec weren't perfectly written and have to deal with change. You have to work with other people, and they will judge you. Hard coding exercises with a time limit that have an answer that can't be found on Stack Overflow do a pretty good job of simulating real world job pressures in a controlled environment so they can fairly rank order candidates. The technical interviewers that might be biased against you are either the exact people that will have to work with you, or at least they fit in the same company. If they don't like you during the hiring interview, they won't like working with you. Alphabet's market cap is literally a trillion dollars, so I'd love to hear about how they should stop limiting themselves and start hiring people that can't finish an ill-defined task with a deadline looming and other people waiting for you to finish your module.
- petagonoral 7y ago
  You're speaking as if you have experience with this but looking at your LinkedIn and previous comments, you have zero years professional software dev experience? Yet, you speak so authoritatively and decisively in this comment and your parent comment. The other people responding (including me) all have multiple years experience in actual software companies of all sizes.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - parsimo2010 7y ago
    I never claimed to work at a FAANG company, but I must have hit a nerve if people are going through the effort of looking at my LinkedIn profile and looking at more than the first page of my comments. Believe it or not, you don't need to have passed the tests or have software development experience to make the observation that people complaining about a process are the ones that don't perform well. I've written and graded many exams, but only ever received complaints from students with C- grades or lower. Funny how that works. And it's not like software engineering is some magical pony that is different from other white collar jobs. To get into my current PhD program I had to interview with multiple people, take a 4-hour written exam, do a week-long exam at home, and I wasn't compensated for my time. So I'm not that sympathetic to people that complain about tech job interviews.
    - kyllo 7y ago
      I've held many other white collar jobs in my career. Software engineering is different, the interviews are at least an order of magnitude harder. Google knows and admits that their process has flaws and their HR team does internal studies on it. Just because Google does something, and Google is big, doesn't mean what they do is optimal.
    - petagonoral 7y ago
      > I never claimed to work at a FAANG company, Yet you spoke as if you had worked at some/any software company. Literally zero years dev experience (FAANG or any other). Zero software interviews. You have zero knowledge or experience of what we're talking about. Looking through your LinkedIn/comments is low effort and confirmed my suspicions of you being whatever the inverse of Dunning–Kruger is. If GoT was still relevant, I'd wistfully look at you and whisper "You know nothing, Jon Snow"

by kyllo 7y ago

parsimo2010 7y ago

Time pressure, foreign environments, and people watching/judging your work are all exactly the things that happen when you're developing stuff that hasn't been done. You run into problems. You find out that requirements or an API spec weren't perfectly written and have to deal with change. You have to work with other people, and they will judge you. Hard coding exercises with a time limit that have an answer that can't be found on Stack Overflow do a pretty good job of simulating real world job pressures in a controlled environment so they can fairly rank order candidates. The technical interviewers that might be biased against you are either the exact people that will have to work with you, or at least they fit in the same company. If they don't like you during the hiring interview, they won't like working with you. Alphabet's market cap is literally a trillion dollars, so I'd love to hear about how they should stop limiting themselves and start hiring people that can't finish an ill-defined task with a deadline looming and other people waiting for you to finish your module.

petagonoral 7y ago
You're speaking as if you have experience with this but looking at your LinkedIn and previous comments, you have zero years professional software dev experience? Yet, you speak so authoritatively and decisively in this comment and your parent comment. The other people responding (including me) all have multiple years experience in actual software companies of all sizes.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- parsimo2010 7y ago
  I never claimed to work at a FAANG company, but I must have hit a nerve if people are going through the effort of looking at my LinkedIn profile and looking at more than the first page of my comments. Believe it or not, you don't need to have passed the tests or have software development experience to make the observation that people complaining about a process are the ones that don't perform well. I've written and graded many exams, but only ever received complaints from students with C- grades or lower. Funny how that works. And it's not like software engineering is some magical pony that is different from other white collar jobs. To get into my current PhD program I had to interview with multiple people, take a 4-hour written exam, do a week-long exam at home, and I wasn't compensated for my time. So I'm not that sympathetic to people that complain about tech job interviews.
  - kyllo 7y ago
    I've held many other white collar jobs in my career. Software engineering is different, the interviews are at least an order of magnitude harder. Google knows and admits that their process has flaws and their HR team does internal studies on it. Just because Google does something, and Google is big, doesn't mean what they do is optimal.
  - petagonoral 7y ago
    > I never claimed to work at a FAANG company, Yet you spoke as if you had worked at some/any software company. Literally zero years dev experience (FAANG or any other). Zero software interviews. You have zero knowledge or experience of what we're talking about. Looking through your LinkedIn/comments is low effort and confirmed my suspicions of you being whatever the inverse of Dunning–Kruger is. If GoT was still relevant, I'd wistfully look at you and whisper "You know nothing, Jon Snow"