18 ms·

Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills (2020)

249 points by PretzelFisch 5y ago

Animats 5y ago
"For this study, researchers conducted technical interviews of 48 computer science undergraduates and graduate students." Ah, the convenience sample problem.
- tehjoker 5y ago
  For what it's worth, that sample would be semi-accurate for people trying to get their first job, though not mid-late career.
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jstx1 5y ago
Personal anecdote - several months ago I got an interview at a prestigious big tech company. I couldn't sleep properly for at least a week before the interview and I failed. I also track my bodyweight and I can see a spike up just after the interview and then another one after I got rejected - I gained over 10kg (22lbs) in the following weeks while before that I was successfully losing weight for a while.
- yellow_lead 5y ago
  It's hard to not be nervous for these interviews especially when coming from a non-FANG / huge tech company. The salary difference and opportunity can very much change your life. I don't have advice for this, but what you said resonates with me.
  - raydev 5y ago
    Personally, I did the phone screen for FB when it would've been a lifechanging 6x compensation boost. And after a couple years trying out at lower-tier-but-still-Bay-Area companies I landed a job that was "only" 4x. I made it to the onsite the second time and failed that, but it mattered less since the money, while still significant, was no longer life-changing. You've probably heard it before, but.... yeah. Practice. All the failures you accumulate do eventually add up to knowledge and some successes. Unfortunately, the failures seem to come at great cost to my physical and mental health. But the money is good.
- joelbluminator 5y ago
  Are you anxious in general? Or do you have some issue with tests? I hate algorithm interviews like the next guy but it sounds like you have it worse than most.
  - jstx1 5y ago
    In general I'm not anxious person at all, quite the opposite. I found it very surprising myself. I actually prefer algorithm interviews, and I had never really been anxious for an interview before. This was also remote - I suspect that it would have been easier in person (I know for a lot of people it would be the opposite though).
- curiousgal 5y ago
  As someone struggling to gain weight, alright!
  - jstx1 5y ago
    It wasn't the kind of weight you want to be gaining.
- ssully 5y ago
  I don't have it this bad, but I certainly have major anxiety during interviews. I was interviewing for a position at my current company and I blanked on what wget did. Literally a utility I used frequently and I completely blanked on it. So I bombed that interview, but I got a job with another group at the same company. I still get secondhand embarrassment whenever I think about it.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Link to actual study: http://chrisparnin.me/pdf/stress_FSE_20.pdf http://chrisparnin.me/pdf/stress_FSE_20.pdf The study participants were split into two groups. One group solved the problem alone, in silence. The other group was instructed to narrate their thought process out loud to an interviewer who stood over their shoulder (literally, see the photo on page 3) while they solved it. The flaw in this study is that the two groups weren't really assigned the same task. Solving a problem isn't the same as verbally narrating your solution to a problem. The authors attributed the differences not to the extra work narration work assigned to the second group, but to anxiety levels. The participants even explained that their difficulty came from having to talk while solving: > Participants also had difficulty with performing tasks that involved multiple simultaneous actions. Participants felt stressed by having to “talk while trying to write” (P44), “talking while writing” (P25), and “think and talk and do code at the same time” (P39). P41 found it difficult to “constantly speak during solving” and “lost breath at a few places during the task”. There are other concerns with the study format such as many of a significant number of participants simply giving up well before the clock ran out, in both the private and public interview groups. They were given 30 minutes to solve 3 problems, but some of the participants (including in the private group) were giving up around the 10 minute mark without solving anything at all. This suggests a very high variance of the underlying abilities of their candidates, which necessitates a much larger sample size to draw conclusions.
- deleted 5y ago
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- kerblang 5y ago
  Am I reading this incorrectly or did literally all the female candidates finish the test in private while none of them finished in public? (disclaimer: Am male but still cannot talk and hack at the same time)
  - deleted 5y ago
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  - Jensson 5y ago
bitwize 5y ago
Yeah, no shit. Today's "tech" firms are actually advertising/marketing firms. The ideal candidate, therefore, resembles the ideal marketroid: extraverted, outgoing, and super confident, with a "can-do" attitude toward everything. I've actually been passed over fot jobs because I wasn't confident enough. Well, stick me in a room full of MIT Ph.D.s who ask me to solve hard AI-related problems and what do you expect? Do you want to hire a programmer or Gilderoy fucking Lockhart?
- annoyingnoob 5y ago
  Its Bertram fucking Gilfoyle they want.
- bigyellow 5y ago
  Can confirm: will easily pass over candidates that lack self-esteem and confidence, even if they possess strong technical backgrounds. Nobody cares that you can program in C, they just want to know if you're going to be a dick to work with and whether you're actually going to get shit done.
  - buitreVirtual 5y ago
    Interview anxiety does not mean lack of confidence or ability to get things done. It is an issue more related to social settings for many people who are otherwise enormously productive and smart. The point is that this interview style definitely misses lots of qualified individuals while it can also accept talkative people with outsized egos, which is also a problem down the road.
arenaninja 5y ago
> [...] the technical interview process means that many job candidates try to spend weeks or months training specifically for the technical interview, rather than for the actual job they’d be doing. I could've told you all of this ;) > [...] all of the women who took the public interview failed, while all of the women who took the private interview passed there's other underrepresented minorities that also underperform in these interviews Nothing will change for the foreseeable future
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  > Nothing will change for the foreseeable future Makes me wonder if remote interviews will help or hinder this situation.
  - WalterSear 5y ago
    I was recently diagnosed with trauma disorder by my psychiatrist - due to long standing work-related issues, but specifically in regards to my current rounds of remote technical interviews. So, at least IME, it's not helpful.
    - joelbluminator 5y ago
      Wait seriously - you've been diagnosed with trauma from interviews? Jeez what the hell happened in there - if it's alright I'm asking?
      - taurath 5y ago
        In the same way that kids with pressure on their SATs or college admissions or just generally "must do well" develop severe anxiety and depression there's no reason a panel of people testing you to determine your future economic value couldn't be legitimately traumatic - especially if you have a lot on the line either physically or emotionally, and don't have much in the way of security. I've nearly passed out in whiteboard interviews. I've had my BP spike to 150. I've nearly completely shut down. This doesn't happen even most of the time - I've also run multiple high profile launches for companies you know of and I react to emergencies extremely cool and collected. But I have a background that includes severe childhood trauma. Just to help your imagination!
rsyring 5y ago
Our process is very evidence based. We use skills tests that are as close to real world as possible, given time limitations. We can't remove all anxiety, but we make an effort to mitigate it and limit its impact. Details of our interview and assessment process is at the bottom of each job listing: https://www.level12.io/careers/ https://www.level12.io/careers/
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > Details of our interview and assessment process is at the bottom of each job listing: https://www.level12.io/careers/ https://www.level12.io/careers/ I clicked the first job listing and didn't find anything about the interview or assessment. They do have a weird note about the company's "Biblical principles" though: > Level 12 was founded on biblical principles and has biblically informed Values. Can you please write out your process here instead of making us search for it on your website?
  - pyaccount 5y ago
    I am not religious but biblical principles and biblical values could be an extremely good thing for an employer to have.
  - alpaca128 5y ago
    Perhaps we have to look it up in the Bible? > We exist to serve our customers, our employees, our partners, and our community in a way that brings them genuine benefit, honors Jesus Christ, and advances the Kingdom of God. Well, that's not what I expected from a software development website. And I can't speak for others, but this alone would be a reason I wouldn't even apply.
    - handrous 5y ago
      You see these sorts of companies sometimes, especially outside the coasts. It's kinda like plumbers (or whatever) with the ichthus symbol prominent in their logo. Sometimes they even find a way to work it into the name.
ragle 5y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23848039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23848039
me_im_counting 5y ago
I never had test anxiety growing up and didn't really empathize with why someone would (sympathized obviously). But solving a problem in FRONT of someone as they are evaluating me (rather than a normal collaboration) triggers a panic. The only thing that helped reduce the panic is repeated drills, which take a lot of time.
- WalterSear 5y ago
  IMHO, you can't really drill for technical interviews. The landscape is way too large for one to be fresh on whatever they ask you to do.
  - wombat-man 5y ago
    learning some tips and tricks has made it all a lot less spooky. I hate that it's like this but it is kind of about that nowadays, for certain companies anyway. I guess they assume you have unlimited time to study, so if know enough it shouldn't be too hard. But if you are just walking in there cold as an experienced applicant, you can end up having a really bad time.
    - WalterSear 5y ago
      I have over a decade of programming experience. I've completed almost 10% of Leetcode's problem set. I've done dozens of technical interviews. I prep for days, specifically for every interview, and they invariably go about as bad as the first one.
      - joelbluminator 5y ago
        I can empathize. The only interviews where I think "huh, this went reasonably well" are basically online tests. Almost never when I interview in front of a person / live screen and do white boarding. The bad news is my chances of getting into FAANG are very slim. The good news there are tons of companies who aren't FAANG.
MisterBastahrd 5y ago
But if you can't communicate and think while under a bit of interview pressure, then you're not likely to be able to cope long-term in a development job. I don't think the way most companies interview is great. Particularly, I don't think whiteboarding is a decent use of anyone's time in a face to face meeting. At the same time, if I ask you a question and your eyes roll into the back of your head because you can't handle the pressure of coming up with an answer at a time where the result of getting it wrong is literally the status quo... then you probably aren't going to be the person I want in the long-run anyway. I'm hiring you to be an employee, not a cog.
- _robbywashere 5y ago
  It’s interesting to me that this type of comment always shows up with like minded articles and studies. It’s always along the lines of “YOU CANT HANDLE THE PRESSURE”
  - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
    Because it's true. Job interviews aren't remotely as anxiety-inducing as a manager who wants to know why the widget you worked on blew up in production. If you can't answer basic questions about your background and experience, then you're not the sort of person I want to work with. I hire technical people with the expectation that they will one day either be able to fill my chair or exceed my abilities. If you're hiring a person who you would never want to work for, then you are hiring the wrong people. I guess the one caveat would be to hire someone directly out of school, since they would be less likely to have experienced that sort of direct pressure... but I expect an experienced employee to be able to answer questions with some sort of confidence.
    - joelbluminator 5y ago
      In real life you'll ask them why there's a bug on production - and he'll tell you wait 5 minutes I'm checking/reproducing the issue. It's very rare that you'll have to get an answer immediately - this isn't emergency medicine. We're only programmers.
kodah 5y ago
As someone who didn't go to school, I struggle with doing algorithms and implementing data structures in front of someone. Outside of timeboxed interviews I negotiate them fairly well, but I'm almost always seeing something for the first time. Then again, for as long as I've been in software it's always been tailored for academics. This seems to be just fine and even championed as a good thing. My reaction is to plan my exit from the industry whenever this job comes to an end. I'll end up going back to school in my thirties, despite being qualified, because of self-imposed constraints by this industry that have little if anything to do with the tasks I'll be given or planning day to day.
- irq 5y ago
  Or you can ignore employers who interview like that and keep searching until you find one that doesn’t. A lot of people do this for the same reason you outlined.
  - annoyingnoob 5y ago
    I gave up on software interviews. Everyone wants to follow what FB and Google do to 'find the best people'. In my experience, 'keep searching until you find one' is bad advice. Can't tell you how many companies I interviewed with that simply take their entire process from others. We interview like X, we group teams/squads like Y, we do our agile process like Z. I don't want to work for your wannabe something else organization, get a clue.
    - irq 5y ago
      > In my experience, 'keep searching until you find one' is bad advice. This advice worked for me and several of my long term colleagues across decades of career experience. We’re all introverts so this is a big deal for us. I suspect you are giving up too easily.
      - annoyingnoob 5y ago
        > across decades of career experience Modern whiteboard interviews are not decades old. I never had any issue until the last 5 years or so. Tech interviews are testing for presentation skills and brainstorming skills, and placing a lot of weight on those alone. If that is what the job is like then I don't want it. If your idea of best practices is copying (as best you can) someone else then I'm not a good fit for your company. In my view, its your loss and not mine - you missed an opportunity because you are not creative enough to see any other workable process. I passed the last crap whiteboard interview I went to, even the question that no one else had gotten right previously (so they say). Didn't get the job, over-qualified - they wanted someone cheaper really. It is not about giving up too soon, its about doing something I dislike, and that has nothing to do with the day-to-day work, over-and-over.
tharne 5y ago
What's going on with "anxiety" lately? This went from something you heard about here and there 20-30 years ago, to something that everyone and their brother is feeling all the time. What changed?
- iab 5y ago
  Economic uncertainty in a fundamentally unfair economic system on a planet that is literally degrading in front of our eyes, if I was to hazard a guess
- jayd16 5y ago
  You're comparing, what, the booming 90s to now? That said, I don't think anyone ever thought interviews were anxiety free.
- taurath 5y ago
  The pandemic has made most people a bit more aware, at least. The distractions people enjoyed were suddenly taken away, for at least over a year. That has heightened awareness, along with the need for self care. Even the idea of anxiety was extremely stigmatized, especially in the workplace, and still is but is now less so. What you're seeing is a growth of people talking about it as the stigma lessens.
- mikkelam 5y ago
  Honestly I think we just started paying more attention to the subject. Anxiety is a completely natural survival mechanism: “was that a tiger in those bushes!?”. It keeps us alive.
  - danaris 5y ago
    5,000 years ago it kept us alive. Now it just adds unnecessary stress and impedes our functioning 99.8% of the time. We no longer live in a situation where a tiger lurking in the bushes is likely, but our brains haven't evolved to compensate for that.
    - 5y ago
posharma 5y ago
Another tech interview discussion :-). How many do we have these in a month? Seriously, if you want to get into FAANG type companies and want the kind of money/work they offer, there's just no choice left other than leetcode. And it's not going to change unless these FAANG companies change. So, until then let's just get over it and get back to leetcode :-). Edit: I'm being downvoted. But I can't help speaking the raw truth here.
- BlargMcLarg 5y ago
  Okay, now explain why this is happening outside FAANG too and why we should accept it.
  - posharma 5y ago
    Unfortunately, other companies copy FAANG because FAANG are the most successful companies. We don't have to accept it. We just have to choose our battles. As I said, if you want the kind of money/work these companies offer, there's just no other choice these days.
    - handrous 5y ago
      Also because "four years at FAANG -> CTO or Development Lead (with a major hiring component) of a smallish funded startup" is a really common path, and those folks often bring along those interviewing processes. Startup founders & salespeople love to be able to say "so-and-so came to us from Google" when talking to e.g. potential investors or major sales prospects, but often can't really afford great managers or well-seasoned developers from those places, most of the time, so you see a lot of this "this is my fourth job ever, counting an internship, and I've never held a position higher than Team Lead in which I still mostly wrote code, and I've been in industry less than ten years total, but half of that was at FAANG and one time I presented at a minor conference and that's on Youtube, so now I'm CTO of [25-employee startup]" I think those places are screwing up, since they usually can't match FAANG comp and anyone who is great at those kinds of interviews will just go to FAANG instead, but whatever.
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Mountain_Skies 5y ago
Sooner or later someone is going to get sued. Too many of the things tech companies are testing for are proxies for attributes of protected classes. Tech companies give lots of lip service to diversity but only certain kinds of diversity and certainly not diversity that covers ALL protected classes. Some company is going to get a large judgement against them at some point but I doubt there will be any change before then. The amount of the judgement, or any consent decree, will be minor compared to the reputational hit these companies will get once it is found out that their thin veneer of inclusion was only millimeters deep. Since almost all of them are doing it, once one gets caught, they'll all be in danger.
- deleted 5y ago
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- gruez 5y ago
  >Sooner or later someone is going to get sued. Too many of the things tech companies are testing for are proxies for attributes of protected classes. IANAL, but my understanding is that discriminating is allowed if it's relevant for the job. Requiring programmers to deadlift 150b (which probably discriminates against women) would run afoul of anti-discrimination laws because it's not relevant to the job, but requiring that from construction workers is probably legal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bona_fide_occupational_qualification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bona_fide_occupational_qualifi...
lacker 5y ago
For this study, researchers conducted technical interviews of 48 computer science undergraduates and graduate students. So they weren't studying real interviews. They were studying fake interviews as performed by a bunch of PhD students at NC State. And it turns out those fake interviews weren't good at assessing software skills. This just doesn't seem like a meaningful study. Interviewing is a skill; you can't just assume that a random PhD student is just as good an interviewer as an experienced, professional software engineer. Heck, many PhD students won't be able to pass a typical tech interview themselves.
- curiousgal 5y ago
  > They were studying fake interviews It's psychology research what did you expect.
throwaway81523 5y ago
Disclaimer: I haven't read TFA yet (will look at it later). But I've interviewed software people, detected anxiety sometimes, and made a mental note to not hold it against them. They're not interviewing for sales jobs, they are nerds, and it's fine for nerds to be shy introverts, especially around strangers. If you're interviewing someone like that, try to give them a little breathing space, and maybe even tell them that you are noticing the nervousness and that it is ok. If you're being interviewed, I think it is ok to say you are a little bit nervous, take a few deep breaths to calm yourself down, etc.
dang 5y ago
Discussed at the time: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23848039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23848039 - July 2020 (1141 comments)
weathawi 5y ago
Therefore practice meditation :)
decebalus1 5y ago
Anecdotally, the best (by far) interview performances in my career where when I didn't actually care about the outcome. I guess fear is indeed the mind-killer, at least for me. That's why the absolute best time to switch jobs in when you don't really need to change jobs.
dhanna 5y ago
It does both lol.
btheshoe 5y ago
I really dislike articles like these. It's a well known fact that the interview process is deeply flawed; this study isn't really presenting any new material. What's more, the flaw being critiqued - that interviews are bad for people with performance anxiety - adds nothing to the conversation. What is the advocacy here? That interviews should be abolished? Also, it's social science research with a small sample size, which means that few to no conclusions should be drawn from it (see: replication crisis).
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  No one says these interviews have to be abolished, but perhaps their formats can be tweaked to reduce anxiety. It could also be an argument in favor of asymmetric technical exercises such as take-home assignments or the mythical paid trial period. It's at least an attempt to apply some scientific methodology to examining the current interview process, and even if this individual research is flawed then it simply means more studies should be done with better sampling.
Richard_Kayala 5y ago
If you fundamentally have a problem presenting your ideas to others, then maybe you aren't fit to work in a team. The ability to code is less than half the battle. The other half is actually making sure the idea you have is even a good idea. Any moron can write garbage in a room alone. The premise of the test is whether or not a person can write code that solves a problem. Which is literally the lowest bar possible for a coding interview. How about the thought process it takes to derive a optimal solution? Maybe interviewers want to test someone who can actually collaborate with them, explain their reasoning, and logically come up with a solution? Maybe that's more akin to real life than being in a cubicle coding all day alone with 0 human contact? Hmmm...
- KronisLV 5y ago
  > How about the thought process it takes to derive a optimal solution? Maybe interviewers want to test someone who can actually collaborate with them, explain their reasoning, and logically come up with a solution? Maybe that's more akin to real life than being in a cubicle coding all day alone with 0 human contact? I don't think that that's a sufficiently generous consideration of how differently people think. Not everyone narrates all of the steps that are needed to solve their problems in a linear way of fully coherent arguments and needing to do so might slow them down, similarly to how some people don't have an inner monologue at all. Instead, consider that some might have "checkpoints" in the problem solving process that they can formulate after a bit of discovery and trying some things out: "Okay, so i felt that X might work because of Y, but it didn't because of Z and now i probably should try something else..." Having 5 to 10 minutes of silence between such sentences would be awkward in probably every single real time interview, thus people are forced into a mode of thinking that they won't do in practice, unless pair programming with someone else live. I don't know about you, but most of the communication with my colleagues happens either before or after development, mostly asking questions about specifics in Slack when needed, or rarely escalating to calls for non-trivial situations/questions (even though i fail to recall the last time when i called someone about a particular bit of code, yet have often explained things to others). So, as opposed to calling said people morons or claiming that every single thought needs to be representable to others, maybe it's useful to consider that the way people think might play a part in it, that there are also preferences people have for synchronous vs asynchronous communication (which doesn't imply NO communication) and that there might even be cultural differences?
bgro 5y ago
I can't believe the amount of comments here that boil down to... "Yeah tech interviews are bad... If you don't know how to do em! Everyone's an idiot except me, because I always do them right!" and "Well if you can't reverse a binary tree by taking "a day" to study [by having memorized every question rather than thinking through and actually solving a problem] then I guess you're not a real engineer. If you make a syntax error, you're not a real engineer. Nobody would make that problem on a test. You're just making up excuses." Maybe some of you do an OK job and reading between the lines and seeing if someone is a good developer (something I have literally never seen or heard of in practice), but it sounds like you're just interviewing people who are naturally good at test taking / memorizing academic questions and then auto-failing everybody else and just not talking about it here. I guess those fall into the assumed category "fake leaches who do nothing for a living" / "other" category you summarized in 1 word, even if they have a decade of experience. "Oh, no that's not true. The interview process is bad, but _I_ know what I'M doing so I'M not the problem. It's everybody else that's wrong."

249 points by PretzelFisch 5y ago

"For this study, researchers conducted technical interviews of 48 computer science undergraduates and graduate students." Ah, the convenience sample problem.

tehjoker 5y ago
For what it's worth, that sample would be semi-accurate for people trying to get their first job, though not mid-late career.

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jstx1 5y ago

Personal anecdote - several months ago I got an interview at a prestigious big tech company. I couldn't sleep properly for at least a week before the interview and I failed. I also track my bodyweight and I can see a spike up just after the interview and then another one after I got rejected - I gained over 10kg (22lbs) in the following weeks while before that I was successfully losing weight for a while.

yellow_lead 5y ago
It's hard to not be nervous for these interviews especially when coming from a non-FANG / huge tech company. The salary difference and opportunity can very much change your life. I don't have advice for this, but what you said resonates with me.
- raydev 5y ago
  Personally, I did the phone screen for FB when it would've been a lifechanging 6x compensation boost. And after a couple years trying out at lower-tier-but-still-Bay-Area companies I landed a job that was "only" 4x. I made it to the onsite the second time and failed that, but it mattered less since the money, while still significant, was no longer life-changing. You've probably heard it before, but.... yeah. Practice. All the failures you accumulate do eventually add up to knowledge and some successes. Unfortunately, the failures seem to come at great cost to my physical and mental health. But the money is good.
joelbluminator 5y ago
Are you anxious in general? Or do you have some issue with tests? I hate algorithm interviews like the next guy but it sounds like you have it worse than most.
- jstx1 5y ago
  In general I'm not anxious person at all, quite the opposite. I found it very surprising myself. I actually prefer algorithm interviews, and I had never really been anxious for an interview before. This was also remote - I suspect that it would have been easier in person (I know for a lot of people it would be the opposite though).
curiousgal 5y ago
As someone struggling to gain weight, alright!
- jstx1 5y ago
  It wasn't the kind of weight you want to be gaining.
ssully 5y ago
I don't have it this bad, but I certainly have major anxiety during interviews. I was interviewing for a position at my current company and I blanked on what wget did. Literally a utility I used frequently and I completely blanked on it. So I bombed that interview, but I got a job with another group at the same company. I still get secondhand embarrassment whenever I think about it.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

Link to actual study: http://chrisparnin.me/pdf/stress_FSE_20.pdf http://chrisparnin.me/pdf/stress_FSE_20.pdf The study participants were split into two groups. One group solved the problem alone, in silence. The other group was instructed to narrate their thought process out loud to an interviewer who stood over their shoulder (literally, see the photo on page 3) while they solved it. The flaw in this study is that the two groups weren't really assigned the same task. Solving a problem isn't the same as verbally narrating your solution to a problem. The authors attributed the differences not to the extra work narration work assigned to the second group, but to anxiety levels. The participants even explained that their difficulty came from having to talk while solving: > Participants also had difficulty with performing tasks that involved multiple simultaneous actions. Participants felt stressed by having to “talk while trying to write” (P44), “talking while writing” (P25), and “think and talk and do code at the same time” (P39). P41 found it difficult to “constantly speak during solving” and “lost breath at a few places during the task”. There are other concerns with the study format such as many of a significant number of participants simply giving up well before the clock ran out, in both the private and public interview groups. They were given 30 minutes to solve 3 problems, but some of the participants (including in the private group) were giving up around the 10 minute mark without solving anything at all. This suggests a very high variance of the underlying abilities of their candidates, which necessitates a much larger sample size to draw conclusions.

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kerblang 5y ago
Am I reading this incorrectly or did literally all the female candidates finish the test in private while none of them finished in public? (disclaimer: Am male but still cannot talk and hack at the same time)
- deleted 5y ago
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- Jensson 5y ago

bitwize 5y ago

Yeah, no shit. Today's "tech" firms are actually advertising/marketing firms. The ideal candidate, therefore, resembles the ideal marketroid: extraverted, outgoing, and super confident, with a "can-do" attitude toward everything. I've actually been passed over fot jobs because I wasn't confident enough. Well, stick me in a room full of MIT Ph.D.s who ask me to solve hard AI-related problems and what do you expect? Do you want to hire a programmer or Gilderoy fucking Lockhart?

annoyingnoob 5y ago
Its Bertram fucking Gilfoyle they want.
bigyellow 5y ago
Can confirm: will easily pass over candidates that lack self-esteem and confidence, even if they possess strong technical backgrounds. Nobody cares that you can program in C, they just want to know if you're going to be a dick to work with and whether you're actually going to get shit done.
- buitreVirtual 5y ago
  Interview anxiety does not mean lack of confidence or ability to get things done. It is an issue more related to social settings for many people who are otherwise enormously productive and smart. The point is that this interview style definitely misses lots of qualified individuals while it can also accept talkative people with outsized egos, which is also a problem down the road.

arenaninja 5y ago

> [...] the technical interview process means that many job candidates try to spend weeks or months training specifically for the technical interview, rather than for the actual job they’d be doing. I could've told you all of this ;) > [...] all of the women who took the public interview failed, while all of the women who took the private interview passed there's other underrepresented minorities that also underperform in these interviews Nothing will change for the foreseeable future

Apocryphon 5y ago
> Nothing will change for the foreseeable future Makes me wonder if remote interviews will help or hinder this situation.
- WalterSear 5y ago
  I was recently diagnosed with trauma disorder by my psychiatrist - due to long standing work-related issues, but specifically in regards to my current rounds of remote technical interviews. So, at least IME, it's not helpful.
  - joelbluminator 5y ago
    Wait seriously - you've been diagnosed with trauma from interviews? Jeez what the hell happened in there - if it's alright I'm asking?
    - taurath 5y ago
      In the same way that kids with pressure on their SATs or college admissions or just generally "must do well" develop severe anxiety and depression there's no reason a panel of people testing you to determine your future economic value couldn't be legitimately traumatic - especially if you have a lot on the line either physically or emotionally, and don't have much in the way of security. I've nearly passed out in whiteboard interviews. I've had my BP spike to 150. I've nearly completely shut down. This doesn't happen even most of the time - I've also run multiple high profile launches for companies you know of and I react to emergencies extremely cool and collected. But I have a background that includes severe childhood trauma. Just to help your imagination!

rsyring 5y ago

Our process is very evidence based. We use skills tests that are as close to real world as possible, given time limitations. We can't remove all anxiety, but we make an effort to mitigate it and limit its impact. Details of our interview and assessment process is at the bottom of each job listing: https://www.level12.io/careers/ https://www.level12.io/careers/

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> Details of our interview and assessment process is at the bottom of each job listing: https://www.level12.io/careers/ https://www.level12.io/careers/ I clicked the first job listing and didn't find anything about the interview or assessment. They do have a weird note about the company's "Biblical principles" though: > Level 12 was founded on biblical principles and has biblically informed Values. Can you please write out your process here instead of making us search for it on your website?
- pyaccount 5y ago
  I am not religious but biblical principles and biblical values could be an extremely good thing for an employer to have.
- alpaca128 5y ago
  Perhaps we have to look it up in the Bible? > We exist to serve our customers, our employees, our partners, and our community in a way that brings them genuine benefit, honors Jesus Christ, and advances the Kingdom of God. Well, that's not what I expected from a software development website. And I can't speak for others, but this alone would be a reason I wouldn't even apply.
  - handrous 5y ago
    You see these sorts of companies sometimes, especially outside the coasts. It's kinda like plumbers (or whatever) with the ichthus symbol prominent in their logo. Sometimes they even find a way to work it into the name.

ragle 5y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23848039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23848039

me_im_counting 5y ago

I never had test anxiety growing up and didn't really empathize with why someone would (sympathized obviously). But solving a problem in FRONT of someone as they are evaluating me (rather than a normal collaboration) triggers a panic. The only thing that helped reduce the panic is repeated drills, which take a lot of time.

WalterSear 5y ago
IMHO, you can't really drill for technical interviews. The landscape is way too large for one to be fresh on whatever they ask you to do.
- wombat-man 5y ago
  learning some tips and tricks has made it all a lot less spooky. I hate that it's like this but it is kind of about that nowadays, for certain companies anyway. I guess they assume you have unlimited time to study, so if know enough it shouldn't be too hard. But if you are just walking in there cold as an experienced applicant, you can end up having a really bad time.
  - WalterSear 5y ago
    I have over a decade of programming experience. I've completed almost 10% of Leetcode's problem set. I've done dozens of technical interviews. I prep for days, specifically for every interview, and they invariably go about as bad as the first one.
    - joelbluminator 5y ago
      I can empathize. The only interviews where I think "huh, this went reasonably well" are basically online tests. Almost never when I interview in front of a person / live screen and do white boarding. The bad news is my chances of getting into FAANG are very slim. The good news there are tons of companies who aren't FAANG.

MisterBastahrd 5y ago

But if you can't communicate and think while under a bit of interview pressure, then you're not likely to be able to cope long-term in a development job. I don't think the way most companies interview is great. Particularly, I don't think whiteboarding is a decent use of anyone's time in a face to face meeting. At the same time, if I ask you a question and your eyes roll into the back of your head because you can't handle the pressure of coming up with an answer at a time where the result of getting it wrong is literally the status quo... then you probably aren't going to be the person I want in the long-run anyway. I'm hiring you to be an employee, not a cog.

_robbywashere 5y ago
It’s interesting to me that this type of comment always shows up with like minded articles and studies. It’s always along the lines of “YOU CANT HANDLE THE PRESSURE”
- MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  Because it's true. Job interviews aren't remotely as anxiety-inducing as a manager who wants to know why the widget you worked on blew up in production. If you can't answer basic questions about your background and experience, then you're not the sort of person I want to work with. I hire technical people with the expectation that they will one day either be able to fill my chair or exceed my abilities. If you're hiring a person who you would never want to work for, then you are hiring the wrong people. I guess the one caveat would be to hire someone directly out of school, since they would be less likely to have experienced that sort of direct pressure... but I expect an experienced employee to be able to answer questions with some sort of confidence.
  - joelbluminator 5y ago
    In real life you'll ask them why there's a bug on production - and he'll tell you wait 5 minutes I'm checking/reproducing the issue. It's very rare that you'll have to get an answer immediately - this isn't emergency medicine. We're only programmers.

kodah 5y ago

As someone who didn't go to school, I struggle with doing algorithms and implementing data structures in front of someone. Outside of timeboxed interviews I negotiate them fairly well, but I'm almost always seeing something for the first time. Then again, for as long as I've been in software it's always been tailored for academics. This seems to be just fine and even championed as a good thing. My reaction is to plan my exit from the industry whenever this job comes to an end. I'll end up going back to school in my thirties, despite being qualified, because of self-imposed constraints by this industry that have little if anything to do with the tasks I'll be given or planning day to day.

irq 5y ago
Or you can ignore employers who interview like that and keep searching until you find one that doesn’t. A lot of people do this for the same reason you outlined.
- annoyingnoob 5y ago
  I gave up on software interviews. Everyone wants to follow what FB and Google do to 'find the best people'. In my experience, 'keep searching until you find one' is bad advice. Can't tell you how many companies I interviewed with that simply take their entire process from others. We interview like X, we group teams/squads like Y, we do our agile process like Z. I don't want to work for your wannabe something else organization, get a clue.
  - irq 5y ago
    > In my experience, 'keep searching until you find one' is bad advice. This advice worked for me and several of my long term colleagues across decades of career experience. We’re all introverts so this is a big deal for us. I suspect you are giving up too easily.
    - annoyingnoob 5y ago
      > across decades of career experience Modern whiteboard interviews are not decades old. I never had any issue until the last 5 years or so. Tech interviews are testing for presentation skills and brainstorming skills, and placing a lot of weight on those alone. If that is what the job is like then I don't want it. If your idea of best practices is copying (as best you can) someone else then I'm not a good fit for your company. In my view, its your loss and not mine - you missed an opportunity because you are not creative enough to see any other workable process. I passed the last crap whiteboard interview I went to, even the question that no one else had gotten right previously (so they say). Didn't get the job, over-qualified - they wanted someone cheaper really. It is not about giving up too soon, its about doing something I dislike, and that has nothing to do with the day-to-day work, over-and-over.

tharne 5y ago

What's going on with "anxiety" lately? This went from something you heard about here and there 20-30 years ago, to something that everyone and their brother is feeling all the time. What changed?

iab 5y ago
Economic uncertainty in a fundamentally unfair economic system on a planet that is literally degrading in front of our eyes, if I was to hazard a guess
jayd16 5y ago
You're comparing, what, the booming 90s to now? That said, I don't think anyone ever thought interviews were anxiety free.
taurath 5y ago
The pandemic has made most people a bit more aware, at least. The distractions people enjoyed were suddenly taken away, for at least over a year. That has heightened awareness, along with the need for self care. Even the idea of anxiety was extremely stigmatized, especially in the workplace, and still is but is now less so. What you're seeing is a growth of people talking about it as the stigma lessens.
mikkelam 5y ago
Honestly I think we just started paying more attention to the subject. Anxiety is a completely natural survival mechanism: “was that a tiger in those bushes!?”. It keeps us alive.
- danaris 5y ago
  5,000 years ago it kept us alive. Now it just adds unnecessary stress and impedes our functioning 99.8% of the time. We no longer live in a situation where a tiger lurking in the bushes is likely, but our brains haven't evolved to compensate for that.
  - 5y ago

posharma 5y ago

Another tech interview discussion :-). How many do we have these in a month? Seriously, if you want to get into FAANG type companies and want the kind of money/work they offer, there's just no choice left other than leetcode. And it's not going to change unless these FAANG companies change. So, until then let's just get over it and get back to leetcode :-). Edit: I'm being downvoted. But I can't help speaking the raw truth here.

BlargMcLarg 5y ago
Okay, now explain why this is happening outside FAANG too and why we should accept it.
- posharma 5y ago
  Unfortunately, other companies copy FAANG because FAANG are the most successful companies. We don't have to accept it. We just have to choose our battles. As I said, if you want the kind of money/work these companies offer, there's just no other choice these days.
  - handrous 5y ago
    Also because "four years at FAANG -> CTO or Development Lead (with a major hiring component) of a smallish funded startup" is a really common path, and those folks often bring along those interviewing processes. Startup founders & salespeople love to be able to say "so-and-so came to us from Google" when talking to e.g. potential investors or major sales prospects, but often can't really afford great managers or well-seasoned developers from those places, most of the time, so you see a lot of this "this is my fourth job ever, counting an internship, and I've never held a position higher than Team Lead in which I still mostly wrote code, and I've been in industry less than ten years total, but half of that was at FAANG and one time I presented at a minor conference and that's on Youtube, so now I'm CTO of [25-employee startup]" I think those places are screwing up, since they usually can't match FAANG comp and anyone who is great at those kinds of interviews will just go to FAANG instead, but whatever.
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Mountain_Skies 5y ago

Sooner or later someone is going to get sued. Too many of the things tech companies are testing for are proxies for attributes of protected classes. Tech companies give lots of lip service to diversity but only certain kinds of diversity and certainly not diversity that covers ALL protected classes. Some company is going to get a large judgement against them at some point but I doubt there will be any change before then. The amount of the judgement, or any consent decree, will be minor compared to the reputational hit these companies will get once it is found out that their thin veneer of inclusion was only millimeters deep. Since almost all of them are doing it, once one gets caught, they'll all be in danger.

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gruez 5y ago
>Sooner or later someone is going to get sued. Too many of the things tech companies are testing for are proxies for attributes of protected classes. IANAL, but my understanding is that discriminating is allowed if it's relevant for the job. Requiring programmers to deadlift 150b (which probably discriminates against women) would run afoul of anti-discrimination laws because it's not relevant to the job, but requiring that from construction workers is probably legal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bona_fide_occupational_qualification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bona_fide_occupational_qualifi...

lacker 5y ago

For this study, researchers conducted technical interviews of 48 computer science undergraduates and graduate students. So they weren't studying real interviews. They were studying fake interviews as performed by a bunch of PhD students at NC State. And it turns out those fake interviews weren't good at assessing software skills. This just doesn't seem like a meaningful study. Interviewing is a skill; you can't just assume that a random PhD student is just as good an interviewer as an experienced, professional software engineer. Heck, many PhD students won't be able to pass a typical tech interview themselves.

curiousgal 5y ago
> They were studying fake interviews It's psychology research what did you expect.

throwaway81523 5y ago

Disclaimer: I haven't read TFA yet (will look at it later). But I've interviewed software people, detected anxiety sometimes, and made a mental note to not hold it against them. They're not interviewing for sales jobs, they are nerds, and it's fine for nerds to be shy introverts, especially around strangers. If you're interviewing someone like that, try to give them a little breathing space, and maybe even tell them that you are noticing the nervousness and that it is ok. If you're being interviewed, I think it is ok to say you are a little bit nervous, take a few deep breaths to calm yourself down, etc.

dang 5y ago

Discussed at the time: Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23848039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23848039 - July 2020 (1141 comments)

weathawi 5y ago

Therefore practice meditation :)

decebalus1 5y ago

Anecdotally, the best (by far) interview performances in my career where when I didn't actually care about the outcome. I guess fear is indeed the mind-killer, at least for me. That's why the absolute best time to switch jobs in when you don't really need to change jobs.

dhanna 5y ago

It does both lol.

btheshoe 5y ago

I really dislike articles like these. It's a well known fact that the interview process is deeply flawed; this study isn't really presenting any new material. What's more, the flaw being critiqued - that interviews are bad for people with performance anxiety - adds nothing to the conversation. What is the advocacy here? That interviews should be abolished? Also, it's social science research with a small sample size, which means that few to no conclusions should be drawn from it (see: replication crisis).

Apocryphon 5y ago
No one says these interviews have to be abolished, but perhaps their formats can be tweaked to reduce anxiety. It could also be an argument in favor of asymmetric technical exercises such as take-home assignments or the mythical paid trial period. It's at least an attempt to apply some scientific methodology to examining the current interview process, and even if this individual research is flawed then it simply means more studies should be done with better sampling.

Richard_Kayala 5y ago

If you fundamentally have a problem presenting your ideas to others, then maybe you aren't fit to work in a team. The ability to code is less than half the battle. The other half is actually making sure the idea you have is even a good idea. Any moron can write garbage in a room alone. The premise of the test is whether or not a person can write code that solves a problem. Which is literally the lowest bar possible for a coding interview. How about the thought process it takes to derive a optimal solution? Maybe interviewers want to test someone who can actually collaborate with them, explain their reasoning, and logically come up with a solution? Maybe that's more akin to real life than being in a cubicle coding all day alone with 0 human contact? Hmmm...

KronisLV 5y ago
> How about the thought process it takes to derive a optimal solution? Maybe interviewers want to test someone who can actually collaborate with them, explain their reasoning, and logically come up with a solution? Maybe that's more akin to real life than being in a cubicle coding all day alone with 0 human contact? I don't think that that's a sufficiently generous consideration of how differently people think. Not everyone narrates all of the steps that are needed to solve their problems in a linear way of fully coherent arguments and needing to do so might slow them down, similarly to how some people don't have an inner monologue at all. Instead, consider that some might have "checkpoints" in the problem solving process that they can formulate after a bit of discovery and trying some things out: "Okay, so i felt that X might work because of Y, but it didn't because of Z and now i probably should try something else..." Having 5 to 10 minutes of silence between such sentences would be awkward in probably every single real time interview, thus people are forced into a mode of thinking that they won't do in practice, unless pair programming with someone else live. I don't know about you, but most of the communication with my colleagues happens either before or after development, mostly asking questions about specifics in Slack when needed, or rarely escalating to calls for non-trivial situations/questions (even though i fail to recall the last time when i called someone about a particular bit of code, yet have often explained things to others). So, as opposed to calling said people morons or claiming that every single thought needs to be representable to others, maybe it's useful to consider that the way people think might play a part in it, that there are also preferences people have for synchronous vs asynchronous communication (which doesn't imply NO communication) and that there might even be cultural differences?

bgro 5y ago

I can't believe the amount of comments here that boil down to... "Yeah tech interviews are bad... If you don't know how to do em! Everyone's an idiot except me, because I always do them right!" and "Well if you can't reverse a binary tree by taking "a day" to study [by having memorized every question rather than thinking through and actually solving a problem] then I guess you're not a real engineer. If you make a syntax error, you're not a real engineer. Nobody would make that problem on a test. You're just making up excuses." Maybe some of you do an OK job and reading between the lines and seeing if someone is a good developer (something I have literally never seen or heard of in practice), but it sounds like you're just interviewing people who are naturally good at test taking / memorizing academic questions and then auto-failing everybody else and just not talking about it here. I guess those fall into the assumed category "fake leaches who do nothing for a living" / "other" category you summarized in 1 word, even if they have a decade of experience. "Oh, no that's not true. The interview process is bad, but _I_ know what I'M doing so I'M not the problem. It's everybody else that's wrong."