TE
科技回声
首页24小时热榜最新最佳问答展示工作
GitHubTwitter
首页

科技回声

基于 Next.js 构建的科技新闻平台,提供全球科技新闻和讨论内容。

GitHubTwitter

首页

首页最新最佳问答展示工作

资源链接

HackerNews API原版 HackerNewsNext.js

© 2025 科技回声. 版权所有。

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

249 点作者 PretzelFisch超过 3 年前

22 条评论

PragmaticPulp超过 3 年前
Link to actual study: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrisparnin.me&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;stress_FSE_20.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrisparnin.me&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;stress_FSE_20.pdf</a><p>The study participants were split into two groups. One group solved the problem alone, in silence. The other group was instructed to <i>narrate their thought process out loud</i> to an interviewer who stood over their shoulder (literally, see the photo on page 3) while they solved it.<p>The flaw in this study is that the two groups weren&#x27;t really assigned the same task. Solving a problem isn&#x27;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.<p>The participants even explained that their difficulty came from having to talk while solving:<p>&gt; 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”.<p>There are other concerns with the study format such as many of a significant number of participants simply <i>giving up</i> 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.
评论 #29180264 未加载
评论 #29179865 未加载
评论 #29179536 未加载
评论 #29181065 未加载
评论 #29181218 未加载
评论 #29179200 未加载
评论 #29187484 未加载
评论 #29180031 未加载
kodah超过 3 年前
As someone who didn&#x27;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&#x27;m almost always seeing something for the first time. Then again, for as long as I&#x27;ve been in software it&#x27;s always been tailored for academics. This seems to be just fine and even championed as a good thing.<p>My reaction is to plan my exit from the industry whenever this job comes to an end. I&#x27;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&#x27;ll be given or planning day to day.
评论 #29179963 未加载
评论 #29180674 未加载
评论 #29179933 未加载
评论 #29180080 未加载
评论 #29179945 未加载
评论 #29180088 未加载
评论 #29182520 未加载
评论 #29179968 未加载
评论 #29180665 未加载
throwaway81523超过 3 年前
Disclaimer: I haven&#x27;t read TFA yet (will look at it later). But I&#x27;ve interviewed software people, detected anxiety sometimes, and made a mental note to not hold it against them. They&#x27;re not interviewing for sales jobs, they are nerds, and it&#x27;s fine for nerds to be shy introverts, especially around strangers.<p>If you&#x27;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&#x27;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.
me_im_counting超过 3 年前
I never had test anxiety growing up and didn&#x27;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.
评论 #29179606 未加载
jstx1超过 3 年前
Personal anecdote - several months ago I got an interview at a prestigious big tech company. I couldn&#x27;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.
评论 #29180481 未加载
评论 #29180490 未加载
评论 #29181353 未加载
评论 #29181232 未加载
rsyring超过 3 年前
Our process is very evidence based. We use skills tests that are as close to real world as possible, given time limitations. We can&#x27;t remove all anxiety, but we make an effort to mitigate it and limit its impact.<p>Details of our interview and assessment process is at the bottom of each job listing: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.level12.io&#x2F;careers&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.level12.io&#x2F;careers&#x2F;</a>
评论 #29179377 未加载
评论 #29179664 未加载
tharne超过 3 年前
What&#x27;s going on with &quot;anxiety&quot; 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.<p>What changed?
评论 #29180925 未加载
评论 #29180714 未加载
评论 #29180423 未加载
评论 #29180379 未加载
评论 #29180594 未加载
评论 #29180620 未加载
评论 #29180648 未加载
评论 #29180651 未加载
评论 #29180462 未加载
Animats超过 3 年前
<i>&quot;For this study, researchers conducted technical interviews of 48 computer science undergraduates and graduate students.&quot;</i><p>Ah, the convenience sample problem.
评论 #29179961 未加载
Mountain_Skies超过 3 年前
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&#x27;ll all be in danger.
评论 #29180827 未加载
评论 #29180570 未加载
Richard_Kayala超过 3 年前
If you fundamentally have a problem presenting your ideas to others, then maybe you aren&#x27;t fit to work in a team.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;s more akin to real life than being in a cubicle coding all day alone with 0 human contact? Hmmm...
评论 #29186573 未加载
bitwize超过 3 年前
Yeah, no shit. Today&#x27;s &quot;tech&quot; firms are actually advertising&#x2F;marketing firms. The ideal candidate, therefore, resembles the ideal marketroid: extraverted, outgoing, and super confident, with a &quot;can-do&quot; attitude toward everything.<p>I&#x27;ve actually been passed over fot jobs because I wasn&#x27;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?
评论 #29179640 未加载
评论 #29180195 未加载
bgro超过 3 年前
I can&#x27;t believe the amount of comments here that boil down to...<p>&quot;Yeah tech interviews are bad... If you don&#x27;t know how to do em! Everyone&#x27;s an idiot except me, because I always do them right!&quot;<p>and<p>&quot;Well if you can&#x27;t reverse a binary tree by taking &quot;a day&quot; to study [by having memorized every question rather than thinking through and actually solving a problem] then I guess you&#x27;re not a real engineer. If you make a syntax error, you&#x27;re not a real engineer. Nobody would make that problem on a test. You&#x27;re just making up excuses.&quot;<p>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&#x27;re just interviewing people who are naturally good at test taking &#x2F; memorizing academic questions and then auto-failing everybody else and just not talking about it here. I guess those fall into the assumed category &quot;fake leaches who do nothing for a living&quot; &#x2F; &quot;other&quot; category you summarized in 1 word, even if they have a decade of experience.<p>&quot;Oh, no that&#x27;s not true. The interview process is bad, but _I_ know what I&#x27;M doing so I&#x27;M not the problem. It&#x27;s everybody else that&#x27;s wrong.&quot;
arenaninja超过 3 年前
&gt; [...] 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.<p>I could&#x27;ve told you all of this ;)<p>&gt; [...] all of the women who took the public interview failed, while all of the women who took the private interview passed<p>there&#x27;s other underrepresented minorities that also underperform in these interviews<p>Nothing will change for the foreseeable future
评论 #29179317 未加载
MisterBastahrd超过 3 年前
But if you can&#x27;t communicate and think while under a bit of interview pressure, then you&#x27;re not likely to be able to cope long-term in a development job. I don&#x27;t think the way most companies interview is great. Particularly, I don&#x27;t think whiteboarding is a decent use of anyone&#x27;s time in a face to face meeting.<p>At the same time, if I ask you a question and your eyes roll into the back of your head because you can&#x27;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&#x27;t going to be the person I want in the long-run anyway. I&#x27;m hiring you to be an employee, not a cog.
评论 #29180938 未加载
评论 #29179978 未加载
评论 #29179839 未加载
lacker超过 3 年前
<i>For this study, researchers conducted technical interviews of 48 computer science undergraduates and graduate students.</i><p>So they weren&#x27;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&#x27;t good at assessing software skills.<p>This just doesn&#x27;t seem like a meaningful study. Interviewing is a skill; you can&#x27;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&#x27;t be able to pass a typical tech interview themselves.
评论 #29181224 未加载
btheshoe超过 3 年前
I really dislike articles like these. It&#x27;s a well known fact that the interview process is deeply flawed; this study isn&#x27;t really presenting any new material. What&#x27;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?<p>Also, it&#x27;s social science research with a small sample size, which means that few to no conclusions should be drawn from it (see: replication crisis).
评论 #29182634 未加载
posharma超过 3 年前
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&#x2F;work they offer, there&#x27;s just no choice left other than leetcode. And it&#x27;s not going to change unless these FAANG companies change. So, until then let&#x27;s just get over it and get back to leetcode :-). Edit: I&#x27;m being downvoted. But I can&#x27;t help speaking the raw truth here.
评论 #29180485 未加载
评论 #29193775 未加载
评论 #29180509 未加载
decebalus1超过 3 年前
Anecdotally, the best (by far) interview performances in my career where when I didn&#x27;t actually care about the outcome. I guess fear is indeed the mind-killer, at least for me. That&#x27;s why the absolute best time to switch jobs in when you don&#x27;t really need to change jobs.
dang超过 3 年前
Discussed at the time:<p><i>Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23848039" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23848039</a> - July 2020 (1141 comments)
ragle超过 3 年前
Previous discussion: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23848039" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23848039</a>
weathawi超过 3 年前
Therefore practice meditation :)
dhanna超过 3 年前
It does both lol.