4 ms·

I hire for industrial IT, and being able to handle the anxiety of a high-pressure situation with grace (e.g. mill down, losing tens of thousands of dollars a mi

I hire for industrial IT, and being able to handle the anxiety of a high-pressure situation with grace (e.g. mill down, losing tens of thousands of dollars a minute) is an important factor. No one expects miracles, but you need to be able to keep your cool and work the problem, not waste time fighting with your own rising anxiety. Seeing how they deal with a stressful situation is an integral part of the interview in my opinion, and I imagine it is a feature for any IT role where that is the case. Standard dev roles, or other roles where time-based stresses aren't as prevalent, may be different. Only yesterday I had a candidate bow out 10 minutes into the whiteboarding exercise, which is probably best for both the individual and the company if that kind of situation is untenable for them.

TigeriusKirk 6y ago
This is certainly the most common rationalization. But the reality is that the situations are very different and elicit very different responses.
- redisman 6y ago
  I do great in a real production fire and stay cool and collected. Put me in a room with a stranger who’s judging my every move and my mind just goes blank
GaryNumanVevo 6y ago
Stress when interviewing is similar, but not the same as on the job stress. One major factor, with a job: you're still getting paid. I think the economic anxiety one faces is pretty stark, if you fail a job interview you're going to be unemployed until you can pass the next one.
- _qulr 6y ago
  Yes, interview stress is completely different. You have to commit a pretty egregious offense on the job to get fired on the spot, but literally anything you do during a job interview can cause you to lose the job.
  - _qulr 6y ago
    Also, performing in front of strangers is completely different from performing in front of people you already know (co-workers). It's extremely common for people to be nervous when meeting strangers but fine among associates. This is such a blatantly obvious empirical fact, it mystifies me how the tech industry can act as if this phenomenon does not or should not exist.
  - UncleOxidant 6y ago
    And often you won't have any idea what caused you to lose the job in a particular interview. There's generally no feedback at all so it can be very difficult to try to improve.
leafboi 6y ago
Yeah, devs that work for me also work in a critical environment such as yours. As soon as an issue is raised by our clients, they immediately kick off a 40 minute long timer and put a physical whiteboard in front of us asking us to solve the whiteboard problem in front of them in under an hour. All the while the client is physically behind us commenting on our code and watching our every move as we paint the whiteboard with a solution. This is literally what happens to me and my engineers on the Job. All of our code happens on the whiteboard (we don't use editors or keyboard or mice!.) The only thing we need to deliver to our client is a picture of our code on the whiteboard along with some trivial complexity analysis and our client pays us money for coding under pressure. Our interviews just consists of me doing the exact same thing as what happens on the job and therefore our interviews are 100% identical to our real life coding problems. When science tells someone that the interview process they've been conducting for years is essentially wrong people have to sort of remake reality and their own reasoning to justify the science rather than admit fault. Obviously, this isn't what's happening with me or you in this case.... the interview process at my company is 100% identical to real world scenarios so I'm good. I've always been telling everyone I know since before this article that I interview for anxiety not useless technical skills; anxiety is what determines whether a developer is great or not.
- redisman 6y ago
  I can’t tell if this is an actual white boarding purgatory you live in or a joke ?
  - leafboi 6y ago
    Our company consults in a variety of software related things. For example in our interviews we ask our candidates why are manhole covers round? We ask them this because, literally on the job our employees are suppose to program robots that make manhole covers. Daily problems we face include deciding whether we should program the robots to make square manhole covers or round manhole covers. Really hard stuff... and you really need to be able to figure out why manhole covers are round or how many golf balls can fit in a bus in order to do the job... If you can't figure this stuff out you're not qualified to work for my company. Not to mention, as I said before, none of our programming happens using computers. We do it all on a whiteboard in under an hour while the client is over our shoulder watching.
jariel 6y ago
It's fine if you believe this is true for your environment, but that's really quite rare. I can see 'high pressure' particularly in Devops, but that's a different kind of problem solving. The headline speaks perfectly to my intuition after many years in the trade, and that we are 'measuring confidence'. Note that they assumed that interviews were set up to be fair - they are not - and that's actually ok. If a company has preferred candidates, it's perfectly within their right to do that (so long as 'preferred' doesn't just mean 'gender' or whatever). It's been a while since doing this for me, but when I do it again, the 'on site' will be a page with some neat problems, some Q&A and then they take basically as long as they want to go through them, the interviews start when they are ready and you just go over 'what they did' and then interview for the rest of the issues. 'Having someone watch you solve a problem' is very specific social condition.
wolco 6y ago
Honestly if you built a better bridge more would come over. Looking at white boarding comfort and judging that the person can't handle stressful situations when they have a defined role and understand the stack are two different things. I feel like everyone wants to make a quick judgement and pat themselves on the back. People can learn quickly but no one believes it.

TigeriusKirk 6y ago

This is certainly the most common rationalization. But the reality is that the situations are very different and elicit very different responses.

redisman 6y ago
I do great in a real production fire and stay cool and collected. Put me in a room with a stranger who’s judging my every move and my mind just goes blank

GaryNumanVevo 6y ago

Stress when interviewing is similar, but not the same as on the job stress. One major factor, with a job: you're still getting paid. I think the economic anxiety one faces is pretty stark, if you fail a job interview you're going to be unemployed until you can pass the next one.

_qulr 6y ago
Yes, interview stress is completely different. You have to commit a pretty egregious offense on the job to get fired on the spot, but literally anything you do during a job interview can cause you to lose the job.
- _qulr 6y ago
  Also, performing in front of strangers is completely different from performing in front of people you already know (co-workers). It's extremely common for people to be nervous when meeting strangers but fine among associates. This is such a blatantly obvious empirical fact, it mystifies me how the tech industry can act as if this phenomenon does not or should not exist.
- UncleOxidant 6y ago
  And often you won't have any idea what caused you to lose the job in a particular interview. There's generally no feedback at all so it can be very difficult to try to improve.

leafboi 6y ago

Yeah, devs that work for me also work in a critical environment such as yours. As soon as an issue is raised by our clients, they immediately kick off a 40 minute long timer and put a physical whiteboard in front of us asking us to solve the whiteboard problem in front of them in under an hour. All the while the client is physically behind us commenting on our code and watching our every move as we paint the whiteboard with a solution. This is literally what happens to me and my engineers on the Job. All of our code happens on the whiteboard (we don't use editors or keyboard or mice!.) The only thing we need to deliver to our client is a picture of our code on the whiteboard along with some trivial complexity analysis and our client pays us money for coding under pressure. Our interviews just consists of me doing the exact same thing as what happens on the job and therefore our interviews are 100% identical to our real life coding problems. When science tells someone that the interview process they've been conducting for years is essentially wrong people have to sort of remake reality and their own reasoning to justify the science rather than admit fault. Obviously, this isn't what's happening with me or you in this case.... the interview process at my company is 100% identical to real world scenarios so I'm good. I've always been telling everyone I know since before this article that I interview for anxiety not useless technical skills; anxiety is what determines whether a developer is great or not.

redisman 6y ago
I can’t tell if this is an actual white boarding purgatory you live in or a joke ?
- leafboi 6y ago
  Our company consults in a variety of software related things. For example in our interviews we ask our candidates why are manhole covers round? We ask them this because, literally on the job our employees are suppose to program robots that make manhole covers. Daily problems we face include deciding whether we should program the robots to make square manhole covers or round manhole covers. Really hard stuff... and you really need to be able to figure out why manhole covers are round or how many golf balls can fit in a bus in order to do the job... If you can't figure this stuff out you're not qualified to work for my company. Not to mention, as I said before, none of our programming happens using computers. We do it all on a whiteboard in under an hour while the client is over our shoulder watching.

jariel 6y ago

It's fine if you believe this is true for your environment, but that's really quite rare. I can see 'high pressure' particularly in Devops, but that's a different kind of problem solving. The headline speaks perfectly to my intuition after many years in the trade, and that we are 'measuring confidence'. Note that they assumed that interviews were set up to be fair - they are not - and that's actually ok. If a company has preferred candidates, it's perfectly within their right to do that (so long as 'preferred' doesn't just mean 'gender' or whatever). It's been a while since doing this for me, but when I do it again, the 'on site' will be a page with some neat problems, some Q&A and then they take basically as long as they want to go through them, the interviews start when they are ready and you just go over 'what they did' and then interview for the rest of the issues. 'Having someone watch you solve a problem' is very specific social condition.

wolco 6y ago

Honestly if you built a better bridge more would come over. Looking at white boarding comfort and judging that the person can't handle stressful situations when they have a defined role and understand the stack are two different things. I feel like everyone wants to make a quick judgement and pat themselves on the back. People can learn quickly but no one believes it.