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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

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.
    - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
      In real life there's still going to be pressure to come up with an answer regardless of how long that takes and how distasteful it might be. What I don't need is for someone who is completely risk and pressure-averse to have a meltdown because they feel that the answer to the question I ask is going to be unsatisfactory. I want to know what the correct assessment of the situation is so that I can make an informed decision going forward, not some glossed over bullshit that turns into a bigger problem down the road. People like that are their own worst enemies.
      - joelbluminator 5y ago
        > In real life there's still going to be pressure to come up with an answer Like how? Honestly. What answer are you immediately looking for if there's a bug? You're looking for a fix, not an answer. And it takes time, a bug fix for a non trivial production system is almost always 10+ minutes unless it's some silly html/css bug.
  - lanstin 5y ago
    I like to work with people that take a day and get the best solution, not the people that get an ok solution right away. To understand the essence of what is needed rather than the brute force answer. I also find a lot of people can function at that level when the environment is structured to reward deep thought and to help people calm themselves to the point they can think.
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    Job pressure and interview pressure have almost nothing to do with each other besides that both phrases end in " pressure". You don't understand the problem, and are doubling down on the solution. Sadly common.
  - taurath 5y ago
    This comment is the personification of the mindset that makes interviews a hostile situation. You are not only extremely biased against some of the best coders I've ever worked with but actively harming the hiring process for your employer if you are involved at all.
    - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
      It isn't my fault that you have prejudged the person on the other side of the desk as hostile. That's on you.
- acheron 5y ago
  It’s just hazing. “I had to do it, so you do too!” Fortunately not every company is like that. I’d suggest finding the good ones.
  - fsloth 5y ago
    "It’s just hazing." I think you've found the core idea. Some profession include situations with actual stress and mortal danger. Doing good programming should be more like solving high school math problems in solitude than a high pressure social interaction. Or: if your development environment has high stress interaction get a consultant to settle the issue, you likely have multiple issues that need to be dealt with.
- visarga 5y ago
  Everyone's talking like they deserve the job and it's just the format that's causing anxiety, but in reality upwards of 90% of applicants don't measure up.
  - josephg 5y ago
    In their defence, anxiety does cause some applicants to fail. But the vast majority of applicants who apply to any technical role can’t really program. It’s obvious in these comment threads that lots of folks have never sat on the other side of an interview room. Performance anxiety is real though. One mark of a good interviewer is how well they can get a candidate to relax and perform at their best. I’ve done over 400 interviews and I still worry I don’t quite have that skill down.
bradneuberg 5y ago
Anecdotally, I'm very comfortable with public speaking and presenting complex ideas, code, and architectures to a room of colleagues. I've given conference keynotes to 1000s with no problems. However, high pressure technical whiteboards still cause my brain to freeze. So I think they are different parts of the brain, and doing well or not on a high pressure whiteboard doesn't correlate with how well that employee will do convincing and presenting complex ideas to coworkers (it's definitely not true in my own case, I know thats N=1, but its something).
- MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  I think I already addressed the whiteboarding issue. I don't find it to be useful in any setting other than a VERY high level discussion about architecture.
  - lanstin 5y ago
    Yeah, put the things on the white-board that you will need to be reminded over the next several months while you execute the details of the design.
    - josephg 5y ago
      I disagree about this. I have a whiteboard at home just for programming work because it helps me think. When I find a problem difficult, I find it much easier to problem solve away from the computer. And I often prefer a whiteboard to paper for some reason.
taurath 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. This may sound logical and like common sense, but it is flat out wrong. Pressure in interviews is not the same as pressure in a job. I've been the one to fix something in 5 minutes during a global outage with 10 people watching behind me, when the previous solution would have taken hours. I've been the lead on calls with 20 partner companies across 5 countries as the largest spike of traffic per year hits us. I can handle pressure. I've also had panic attacks in interviews. I've shut down completely. I've had my heart rate jump to 150. Not every time, but enough for interviewing to be a really big problem for me. Whats the difference? For me, it's the perception of conflict or adversary. Some interviewers LOVE to put it out, like they're some shining knight protecting their company from the slithering fake programmers. They're looking for reasons for you to fail. They're looking for whether you're a "cog", as you use the word, and more often than not when looking for that you find it. When I'm on a team who all has the same goal, I shine plenty bright. I would ask that you reevaluate your biases.
- MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  It's not wrong in the slightest. There are multiple parts to performing at a development job, but one of the parts that you can least afford to screw up on is communication with members of your team. If you can't communicate effectively when nothing is actually at stake, then I would never trust you to communicate effectively when everything is on fire. A job interview is not an adversarial confrontation. It is an assessment of what you've done and how you communicate your ideas. You having an adversarial perception of a normal question and answer session says far more about you than it does the interviewer.
  - Apocryphon 5y ago
    It sounds like you've had the good fortune of never running afoul of a harsh interviewer. I don't believe I've had either, but certainly stories abound. And I've definitely encountered interviewers who were checked out and seemed rudely unfocused on the interview. While interviews might not be inherently adversarial, they are at least inherently confrontational, there is a power asymmetry. One is being evaluated. The fail state of rejection is present and the other party is willing to use it against you if you fail their expectations. Whereas at most companies with non-toxic cultures, your coworkers do not consider doing that to you. As such, interviews are always inherently different social environments from day to day work.

_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.
  - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
    In real life there's still going to be pressure to come up with an answer regardless of how long that takes and how distasteful it might be. What I don't need is for someone who is completely risk and pressure-averse to have a meltdown because they feel that the answer to the question I ask is going to be unsatisfactory. I want to know what the correct assessment of the situation is so that I can make an informed decision going forward, not some glossed over bullshit that turns into a bigger problem down the road. People like that are their own worst enemies.
    - joelbluminator 5y ago
      > In real life there's still going to be pressure to come up with an answer Like how? Honestly. What answer are you immediately looking for if there's a bug? You're looking for a fix, not an answer. And it takes time, a bug fix for a non trivial production system is almost always 10+ minutes unless it's some silly html/css bug.
- lanstin 5y ago
  I like to work with people that take a day and get the best solution, not the people that get an ok solution right away. To understand the essence of what is needed rather than the brute force answer. I also find a lot of people can function at that level when the environment is structured to reward deep thought and to help people calm themselves to the point they can think.
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  Job pressure and interview pressure have almost nothing to do with each other besides that both phrases end in " pressure". You don't understand the problem, and are doubling down on the solution. Sadly common.
- taurath 5y ago
  This comment is the personification of the mindset that makes interviews a hostile situation. You are not only extremely biased against some of the best coders I've ever worked with but actively harming the hiring process for your employer if you are involved at all.
  - MisterBastahrd 5y ago
    It isn't my fault that you have prejudged the person on the other side of the desk as hostile. That's on you.
acheron 5y ago
It’s just hazing. “I had to do it, so you do too!” Fortunately not every company is like that. I’d suggest finding the good ones.
- fsloth 5y ago
  "It’s just hazing." I think you've found the core idea. Some profession include situations with actual stress and mortal danger. Doing good programming should be more like solving high school math problems in solitude than a high pressure social interaction. Or: if your development environment has high stress interaction get a consultant to settle the issue, you likely have multiple issues that need to be dealt with.
visarga 5y ago
Everyone's talking like they deserve the job and it's just the format that's causing anxiety, but in reality upwards of 90% of applicants don't measure up.
- josephg 5y ago
  In their defence, anxiety does cause some applicants to fail. But the vast majority of applicants who apply to any technical role can’t really program. It’s obvious in these comment threads that lots of folks have never sat on the other side of an interview room. Performance anxiety is real though. One mark of a good interviewer is how well they can get a candidate to relax and perform at their best. I’ve done over 400 interviews and I still worry I don’t quite have that skill down.

bradneuberg 5y ago

Anecdotally, I'm very comfortable with public speaking and presenting complex ideas, code, and architectures to a room of colleagues. I've given conference keynotes to 1000s with no problems. However, high pressure technical whiteboards still cause my brain to freeze. So I think they are different parts of the brain, and doing well or not on a high pressure whiteboard doesn't correlate with how well that employee will do convincing and presenting complex ideas to coworkers (it's definitely not true in my own case, I know thats N=1, but its something).

MisterBastahrd 5y ago
I think I already addressed the whiteboarding issue. I don't find it to be useful in any setting other than a VERY high level discussion about architecture.
- lanstin 5y ago
  Yeah, put the things on the white-board that you will need to be reminded over the next several months while you execute the details of the design.
  - josephg 5y ago
    I disagree about this. I have a whiteboard at home just for programming work because it helps me think. When I find a problem difficult, I find it much easier to problem solve away from the computer. And I often prefer a whiteboard to paper for some reason.

taurath 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. This may sound logical and like common sense, but it is flat out wrong. Pressure in interviews is not the same as pressure in a job. I've been the one to fix something in 5 minutes during a global outage with 10 people watching behind me, when the previous solution would have taken hours. I've been the lead on calls with 20 partner companies across 5 countries as the largest spike of traffic per year hits us. I can handle pressure. I've also had panic attacks in interviews. I've shut down completely. I've had my heart rate jump to 150. Not every time, but enough for interviewing to be a really big problem for me. Whats the difference? For me, it's the perception of conflict or adversary. Some interviewers LOVE to put it out, like they're some shining knight protecting their company from the slithering fake programmers. They're looking for reasons for you to fail. They're looking for whether you're a "cog", as you use the word, and more often than not when looking for that you find it. When I'm on a team who all has the same goal, I shine plenty bright. I would ask that you reevaluate your biases.

MisterBastahrd 5y ago
It's not wrong in the slightest. There are multiple parts to performing at a development job, but one of the parts that you can least afford to screw up on is communication with members of your team. If you can't communicate effectively when nothing is actually at stake, then I would never trust you to communicate effectively when everything is on fire. A job interview is not an adversarial confrontation. It is an assessment of what you've done and how you communicate your ideas. You having an adversarial perception of a normal question and answer session says far more about you than it does the interviewer.
- Apocryphon 5y ago
  It sounds like you've had the good fortune of never running afoul of a harsh interviewer. I don't believe I've had either, but certainly stories abound. And I've definitely encountered interviewers who were checked out and seemed rudely unfocused on the interview. While interviews might not be inherently adversarial, they are at least inherently confrontational, there is a power asymmetry. One is being evaluated. The fail state of rejection is present and the other party is willing to use it against you if you fail their expectations. Whereas at most companies with non-toxic cultures, your coworkers do not consider doing that to you. As such, interviews are always inherently different social environments from day to day work.