4 ms·

I can't say I enjoy interviews, but they're really not that bad. Reading the comments here, you'd think everyone gets paralyzing anxiety during interviews. They

I can't say I enjoy interviews, but they're really not that bad. Reading the comments here, you'd think everyone gets paralyzing anxiety during interviews. They're a chance to show off how smart you are.

kevingadd 6y ago
I've probably done at least a few hundred tech interviews in my career, and the vast majority of them are simply not an opportunity to show anything off. You're putting up with various interviewers in various moods of varying levels of competence, some of them actively hostile or working on some sort of weird agenda. You're bouncing between interviewers and getting asked the same question multiple times and having to explain the same thing over and over. Even if they don't make you anxious (that started to subside after the first hundred times or so) they're still not a good time. I've had senior staff running interviews at big companies do things like harass me over data structure choices, insist that I was lying when I described a textbook algorithm, accuse me of industrial espionage, and all other sorts of absurd or unpleasant things. In some cases even after that I still got an offer, because the interviewers weren't out to give someone a hard time... they were just bad at running interviews. One of my all-time worst interviews involved the design director (?) at a billion-dollar game studio calling me (unscheduled!) at 7am and demanding that I come up with 50 unique uses for a paperclip. Really. The gap between an average or bad interview and a truly good one is enormous, and the number of well-conducted interviews I've had is incredibly small. I can only imagine how much worse it is for someone with additional obstacles, like how is someone in a wheelchair supposed to stand up and write C++ on a whiteboard for 30 minutes? What does the whiteboard interview look like for a blind woman?

kevingadd 6y ago

I've probably done at least a few hundred tech interviews in my career, and the vast majority of them are simply not an opportunity to show anything off. You're putting up with various interviewers in various moods of varying levels of competence, some of them actively hostile or working on some sort of weird agenda. You're bouncing between interviewers and getting asked the same question multiple times and having to explain the same thing over and over. Even if they don't make you anxious (that started to subside after the first hundred times or so) they're still not a good time. I've had senior staff running interviews at big companies do things like harass me over data structure choices, insist that I was lying when I described a textbook algorithm, accuse me of industrial espionage, and all other sorts of absurd or unpleasant things. In some cases even after that I still got an offer, because the interviewers weren't out to give someone a hard time... they were just bad at running interviews. One of my all-time worst interviews involved the design director (?) at a billion-dollar game studio calling me (unscheduled!) at 7am and demanding that I come up with 50 unique uses for a paperclip. Really. The gap between an average or bad interview and a truly good one is enormous, and the number of well-conducted interviews I've had is incredibly small. I can only imagine how much worse it is for someone with additional obstacles, like how is someone in a wheelchair supposed to stand up and write C++ on a whiteboard for 30 minutes? What does the whiteboard interview look like for a blind woman?