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I'm bad at taking tests. I'm also bad at playing guitar when someone is looking or even when recording myself (and pretty good when playing without anyone looki
by m0zg 7y ago
I'm bad at taking tests. I'm also bad at playing guitar when someone is looking or even when recording myself (and pretty good when playing without anyone looking). I get anxious and self-conscious and that gets in the way of good public performance. This does not translate to public speaking - I'm pretty good at that, and I'm not afraid of audiences of just about any size - my largest so far was ~1K people.
I somehow managed to get a masters degree from the top engineering school in my country (with honors), and get hired at MS and Google, and a handful of other places, but that was in spite of my interview performance, not because of it. I've also failed a lot of interviews. I literally look and sound like an idiot when adrenalin kicks in, which for me it does at the most inopportune moments.
I very strongly suspect that there are _a lot_ of people who suffer from this. You can recognize them when they on the one hand have an illustrious resume and on the other suck pretty bad on simple coding problems. Those things are supposed to be mutually exclusive, and they usually are, except when the person's blood is full of adrenalin and they end up on the wrong end of fight-or-flight response.
If I spent 7 years as a SWE on high profile teams at Google it's pretty clear I know how to code, even if my interview performance on your Leetcode problem is not excellent. My C++ and systems design will likely be way better than all of your existing engineers, in a non-interview context, just because I've done a ton of both in an environment which expects excellence in both, and won't let you commit code if it sucks. 5 years after leaving I have not worked anywhere where this wasn't the case.
This is not the same, BTW, as "high pressure" usually encountered in the work environment. I can deal with that just fine. And I can code whatever algorithm you like in that environment, no problem. So I doubt a high pressure interview is terribly predictive of performance under "normal" levels of stress, too.
- inertiatic 7y agoI'm the exact same in the guitar department, play a riff for 5 mins flawlessly, try to record it as a 10 second clip (or even try to put it on a looper), fuck up a couple notes in. I also interview badly frequently but not due to poor test performance but due to my demeanor in an inherently awkward situation.
- sojournerc 7y agoAs I perform more and more, I realize the hard part is getting out of my own way. I fumble and stutter playing something when I try to think about what I'm doing, trying too hard to make it good. I'm at my best when my conscious mind doesn't really know what I'm doing, and I trust the musical muscle to do what I feel which produces more emotional, more compelling music
- inertiatic 7y agoGood advice, I'll try to embrace that mindset.
- northern-lights 7y agoYou just described me haha. In my Google phone screen, I fumbled around on solving an easy-moderate problem - so much so that when it ended, I felt that there was no way even I would hire me. And once it ended, I wrote the code for it in probably 10 minutes. Also, arranging it so that it was the first in the loop did not help either. The only good thing about the process was that the recruiter was nice about the whole debacle and did not make me feel too embarrassed.
- m0zg 7y agoMore than once the solutions to failed interview problems came to me on the way back to the parking lot.
- jonex 7y agoDo you think that there's something an interviewer could have done to help you get the solution written within the interview instead of after?
- northern-lights 7y agoReducing the emphasis on thinking out-loud every single one of your thoughts might have helped. I'm not the type of person who can verbalize everything and moreover, it's too slow and prone to errors. Perhaps I should have fought back and asked for the interviewer to be quiet and also let me be quiet for a while. Also, the absolute requirement that any of your workings should be done only on the shared Google doc seems like an overkill. There are a lot of times when I wanted to quickly note down / draw something on the notebook I had but couldn't.