I got an in-person interview, which didn&#x27;t go as smoothly.

One of the best interviews that I ever had was a phone interview where I just so happened to have a good session of meditation beforehand. I never realized how much how well I could do in an interview until I did one while feeling relaxed.

I think it’s pretty funny that HN constantly promotes articles about how shitty tech hiring is, and the threads are always a mix of workers agreeing and then managers often also agreeing but 100% confident that their hiring process works well and weeds out enormous numbers of faking bozos. It’s like, ok but almost none of you have useful actual data to back up your process and you can’t all be anywhere near as good as you think if hiring is, in fact, broken.

You&#x27;re conflating the personality traits of the interviewee with criticism of the generally accepted &#x27;best practice&#x27; of interviewers.On my experience far too many companies are using processes that select for entirely the wrong criteria.

Same here. A guy was soaked in arrogance even though the test he submitted was average at best. &quot;This looks good enough. when do I start?&quot;Even worse: I had an encounter with another guy who refused to make a test because his CV demonstrated everything we needed to know and asking him to solve a few problems was &quot;incredibly disrespectful&quot;. He was also apparently going to start next Monday. Needless to say he didn&#x27;t.

Uh, maybe at times, but I assure you -- I&#x27;ve interviewed some VERY confident, VERY incompetent software dev candidates.

Having capital or hiring authority doesn&#x27;t correlate with willingness to try to actually hire value rather than assemble something that they think resembles a team.What I don&#x27;t get is why no one is attracted by the social brownie points they&#x27;d end up with when their moneyballed team inevitably turns out to be 70% female.

Many smaller companies do pick up the money, which is one of the major factors allowing them to succeed in a world where the big software companies toss around ridiculous amounts of compensation. The Googles and Facebooks of the world are structurally unable to do the arbitrage because many (probably most) of their interviewers don&#x27;t particularly care about interviewing.

&gt; the findings suggest that companies are missing out on really good programmers because those programmers aren’t good at writing on a whiteboard and explaining their work out loud while codingSure, no love for whiteboards from me. However, this does suggest an arbitrage opportunity for an employer who is willing to look differently at these candidates, and then profit handsomely, Moneyball-style.There&#x27;s a bunch of money just being left on the table and nobody is picking it up, really?My two cents is that interviewing candidates can give a whole lot more insight into how to perform in an interview. Interview performance is a skill that is separate from the actual job, and gauging that performance is sub-optimal. But everything in this space is sub-optimal, it&#x27;s all pick your poison.

Haha. So the more driven and hungry i am the worse ill be viewed. The more silver spoon and apathetic ill be cherished.Sounds like dating ;)

This is so true and yet so difficult to control for.

Some of this is like the Groucho Marx joke &quot;I don&#x27;t want to belong to any club that will have me&quot;.  For companies, it&#x27;s &quot;I don&#x27;t want to hire anyone that doesn&#x27;t have a job&quot;.  The thought being that if they were any good they&#x27;d have a job already.

This is one of the things I look for when I&#x27;m being interviewed. Does the company want me to be desperate?Some companies will only hire those who are desperate and will do anything. I assume, hopefully correctly, that those are the companies not worth working for, so instead I use the interview opportunity to get better at interviewing. Because these companies want to take advantage of their employees, I do not feel bad wasting their time.

People can smell desperation, and rightly or wrongly, it pushes them away.

I had a similar experience for my current job. I went to the interview on whim, assuming that I would fail horribly. It was only practice.Then my brilliant plan was spoiled.

This is described in <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;carlos.bueno.org&#x2F;2014&#x2F;06&#x2F;mirrortocracy.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;carlos.bueno.org&#x2F;2014&#x2F;06&#x2F;mirrortocracy.html</a>Some companies stress interpersonal fit over technical ability, as you are initiated in &quot;the Culture.&quot;

I&#x27;d like to see this two margarita interview technique catch on.

This was true for me, too.My previous startup I worked at had gone under, and I was thinking about starting my own. An old coworker of mine invited me to lunch. We had a couple of margaritas, and he asked if I wanted to see his office.I went to check it out, and suddenly he asks if I can talk to some of his coworkers.So I basically interviewed while drunk and not fully realizing I was being interviewed.They offered me the job, and I have been working there for 8 years now.Maybe the best way to be relaxed during a job interview is to not even realize it is happening. And having a couple of margaritas can&#x27;t hurt.

That is funny as that is the way alot of my interviews go as well. I tend to have extreme anxiety on a job I really want and &quot;pysch myself out&quot; so to speak. I really dislike typical tech interviews as it is alot of pop quiz obscure answers under extremely tight timelines never seen on the job. I have had interviews where 3 interviewers are all demanding answers at the same time and it was horrible. I hope at some point in the future this is realized as a colossal fail in the industry and a new method is realized.

That&#x27;s how non-FAANG goes. I work at an old, non-tech corp and the interview (just one) was basically a popularity contest with some light technical questions. Don&#x27;t screw up and crack some jokes and you&#x27;re in. Of course, that means our level of technical ability is low, and we have poor project outcomes because of it. But it&#x27;s a nice place to work.

You must be coming off as confident subconsciously with your air of indifference you carry for the interview process.

Same. Sometimes I only go on an interview to &quot;practice&quot;, and BAM! Offer comes.

I also treated my Google interview as a free trip to the Bay Area, and used it to visit a friend and do touristy stuff. Wasn&#x27;t expecting an offer, but got one and stayed there for many years.I&#x27;ve read advice that you shouldn&#x27;t schedule your interview on a Friday, but that&#x27;s exactly what I did so that I could spend the following weekend in SF :)

wait so Google did the entire red black tree interview thing again, even though you already worked for them for 6 years?lol this industry is hopeless

What’s frustrating to me is clearly you’ve spent 10+ years on the industry, worked at big cos like Google and startups, passed Google onsite twice, and still got rejected by all those companies. Which would be fine if industry execs weren’t constantly bemoaning about talent shortages and difficulty hiring engineers. They’ve established a cultural pattern of talking about how acceptable it is to reject highly qualified engineers, labeling them “false negatives”, then refuse to introspect on that when discussing why they find hiring challenging. (I’ve also spent 10+ years in industry, 3+ years as a Google SWE, and got zero feedback rejections from companies like Stripe and many many others in the last few years.)

That can help a lot with anxiety. If you think it&#x27;s pointless and you&#x27;ll never get the job, you have a chance to just have fun with it and do what you can do.My first time interviewing with Google (in 2008), the press was reporting that they were in a hiring freeze, I had no big names on my resume, so I figured it was basically hopeless and I&#x27;d just do the best I could and enjoy my trip to Silicon Valley. After my interview, I was like &quot;Well, I did okay, but you really have to be perfect to work at Google and I wasn&#x27;t perfect. I&#x27;m never coming back to California anyway, so I might as well do all the tourist stuff [I&#x27;d held an extra day to interview with Twitter, but they ended up not moving forwards with my candidacy] and just treat it as an all-expenses paid trip to SF.&quot; So I just went to Alcatraz and Fisherman&#x27;s Wharf, treated myself to a nice dinner, and took the red-eye home to Boston. As I&#x27;m groggily waking up after a post-red-eye nap, the Google recruiter called me to say &quot;Your interview feedback looks great. We&#x27;d like to fast-track your application on the assumption that the hiring committee will say yes.&quot;Been living in California for 11 years now, and I just started back at Google after working there for 5.5 years, leaving, and doing startups for another 6. The most recent round of interviews was the same - I was super nervous for Lyft, Stripe, Coinbase, Netflix, etc. and ended up not getting the job, but with Google it was like &quot;Hey, I worked there once, I know people who also know my interviewers, I used to give interviews like the one I&#x27;m sitting in now, what&#x27;s the big deal?&quot;

I had a quick phone screen with a recruiter the other day. For unreleated reasons the night before I hadn&#x27;t slept much. That morning I was clambering about in the woods and stumbled on a wasp nest and got about 15 stings all over my body. I took 3 Benadryl anti-histamines before I remembered that I had the interview that afternoon. I was a complete space cadet.Somehow the recruiter was still interested.Maybe this should be my strategy for every job application? :-)

I solved this horrible problem with legal anxiolytics. I crashed and burned every interview I had until I decided to drink kava[0] beforehand until I couldn&#x27;t care less about whether I got the job. I&#x27;ve been working there for years now.Like it or not, interviews are a game. Smart people will figure out how to play them after losing enough, though maybe some of us take a bit longer ...[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Kava" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Kava</a>

Similarly, I used to find I interviewed better when I had a hangover.(I&#x27;m older now, have hangovers less often, and find them much more tiring, so this might not apply any more)

How I got my internship that converted into a full time job and everything that followed from it. I literally gave the interview and went to the sports stadium. To this day I&#x27;ve been job hopping without interviews. Everyone who works with me knows my skills (and my drawbacks) and they&#x27;re the ones who hire me or recommend highly of me to lead to a job. My next job may not be so lucky so I&#x27;m starting to dust off my &quot;interview skills&quot;. It&#x27;s frustrating. I&#x27;d rather be building something usual than solving these. But that&#x27;s the nature of  it today.

I got my first salary job this way. After that I did my typical analysis seeing if I couldn&#x27;t learn from the situation and improve beyond it.My conclusion was if I interview to gain interview experience, not to get the job, I do far better, and I gain interview experience. This is the local maxima I found from that, but there could be better.

+1. Either this, or I have an offer in hand and so I don&#x27;t have to care anymore.The role of anxiety in interviewing became very clear to me during a season when I failed all my interviews until I got my first (and a very good) offer. Suddenly I started passing all of them. It was night and day. I was very surprised having always had much longer and frustrating recruiting processes.

I&#x27;ll sometimes go on interviews when I&#x27;m NOT looking for a job. It&#x27;s good practice and keeps you informed of what&#x27;s out there.

Huh, the only successful interviews I have are the ones where I&#x27;m burned out after a long, fruitless, frustrating job search. And so I walk in assuming the interview will be a waste of time and just not caring anymore.That&#x27;s when I get an offer.

The small N is addressed by the authors.To acquire a larger N would mean recruiting more participants, which would require either compensation&#x2F;extra credit or rely on people volunteering ~1 hour of their time. Likewise, collecting that data would require time and money. It is an time&#x2F;resource issue with human research. You can require a small N and get some results or require a large N and not have enough funding to support it.Also note, what is a &quot;large N&quot;? There is no set in stone amount and I&#x27;ve even seen reviewers say a sample size of 10,000 is too small.

&gt; but isn&#x27;t N=48 a little small?Not when the effect is large. 48 people is fine when there is a 2x difference.

I appreciate their effort to use science to support the narrative that tech interviews suck, because I do think they suck and need to change, but isn&#x27;t N=48 a little small? Also, if it was only undergraduates or graduates, who&#x27;s to say their performance is indicative of the rest of the tech workforce?

Everyone says this but has anyone been hired if they can’t come up with working code in the session?

The point of a whiteboard interview for me isn&#x27;t about accuracy and efficiency.  It&#x27;s about seeing whether the person can code and can talk to me about coding.

I was an undergraduate at NC State. I wonder how the study could be replicated at UNC and Duke. I&#x27;d wager they&#x27;d have a significantly higher success rate.

The methodology:&gt; For this study, researchers conducted technical interviews of 48 computer science undergraduates and graduate students. Half of the study participants were given a conventional technical interview, with an interviewer looking on. The other half of the participants were asked to solve their problem on a whiteboard in a private room. The private interviews did not require study participants to explain their solutions aloud, and had no interviewers looking over their shoulders.&gt; Researchers measured each study participant’s interview performance by assessing the accuracy and efficiency of each solution.[...]&gt; “People who took the traditional interview performed half as well as people that were able to interview in private,”

It does suck that it’s like this in an industry where you have a lot of non-neurotypical people though. People who are very good and capable but on the spectrum, or shy and reclusive, who really can’t do the networking and conference scene thing, etc. Wish there was a better answer than to tell them they just have to be wired differently.

Hiring primarily based on references almost guarantees bias. White engineers will tend to know more white engineers. Asian engineers will tend to know more Asian engineers.

Having multiple respectable people that can vouch for you is a much better performance predictor than a 1-day interview. Same reason that recommendation letters are more important than GRE tests for the ones seeking PhD studies.

Good networking has always been the best way to find work. Or, come to think of it, opportunity of any kind.

On the other hand you can get pretty far even if you don&#x27;t any social network but you can solve textbook problems.

I&#x27;m actually a little scared to leave my current FAANG gig for that exact reason tbh. I&#x27;m fairly certain I wouldn&#x27;t make it back in the door without more leetcode grinding + repeated loops than I&#x27;m willing to do at this point in my career.Plus, stack on top of that, I&#x27;ve seen how the sausage is made. I&#x27;ve done 90+ interviews on the other side. At the end of the day, it comes down to how lucky you got in the loop. I&#x27;ve seen some people written off for some bullshit reasons. Similarly, I&#x27;VE declined on people who&#x27;re likely far, far, far more skilled than I am because of the lowers&#x2F;raises approach and the narrow slice you&#x27;re tasked with reviewing in the 50min you&#x27;re given.

I don&#x27;t understand this obsession with leetcode style questions specifically. I just got a job at a FAANG on an algorithm heavy team and all they asked me was linked lists, some basic graph questions, and some basic (and I mean really basic, high school non-calc level) vector math. I think just having a rock solid understanding of the basics will help much more than trying to grind questions and memorize patterns.

Agreed. Connections at best let me skip the phone screen and do the onsite leetcode at FAANG.Maybe I just don&#x27;t have friends at the &gt;= VP level?

Eh, I got my job at a very early stage startup through a friend I met on Twitter. The &quot;interview&quot; was a chat with the (reasonably technical) CEO, where we talked about political philosophy for 45 minutes, then I said something about &quot;oh, I should probably tell you about my experience and resume,&quot; so we went over that briefly. No coding challenge or anything. I assume my case is an extreme outlier, though.But yeah. &quot;Networking&quot; by meeting groups of strangers for drinks probably wont get you a job. But making friends who happen to work in (entrepreneurial) tech might.

Am I crazy or are you replying to a comment that is a clear example of how knowing someone can lead getting jobs in spite of whiteboard interviews?EDIT: Ahh, didn&#x27;t see the FAANG qualifier.

Tech seems to be the only field that does these dumb types of interviews. Accounting, law, medicine etc seems to work well without these filters. Why are tech interviews so stupid?

&gt; I feel in the tech industry, networking and knowing people only gets you so farI think it depends how influential your connection is.At my previous FAANG job, my director was tapping his network to back-fill some positions and i heard through the grape vine that she waved parts of the interview in order expedite the process.it could&#x27;ve been a rumor, but then again the person who joined was terrible to work with so i&#x27;m biased.

If you know the right people, they might tell you pretty much what Leetcode questions will be asked, who you might be interviewing with, what their personalities are like, etc. though. That is alot easier than going in blind (for most people I would assume).

The trick is knowing someone who works with your interviewers. If they talk you up to the interviewers ahead of time, it will bias them to be more forgiving, offer more help because &quot;I&#x27;m sure it&#x27;s just nerves&quot;, etc.It&#x27;s generally not even on purpose, just subconscience bias.

&gt;FWIW, all of my friends who somehow managed to get into FAANG or other top tech companies swear that were they to go through the interview again, odds are they would fail. This despite all of them being great engineers.Im fairly confident that&#x27;s at least part of the dominance of this approach in big tech. If the tech companies can&#x27;t collude with no-hire agreements (as they have in the past) to prevent developers from jumping ship to seek raises (i.e. introducing direct anticompetitive barriers) they can collude on an unspoken agreement to raising the barrier to entry, making the labor market less mobile and therefore, artificially decreasing competition. It would be pretty difficult at this point to make a case that the current hiring trends are intentionally colluded anticompetitive labor market practices but the end result is the same.I say part of the reason because the mess that is the current hiring process is really a multifaceted win approach for big tech and loss approach for most of the labor force.I suspect if you had a large movement of mid-senior level developers that wanted to shift positions at the same time and began refusing businesses participating in this practice, the industry might be forced to make reasonable changes.The issue is that our industry has no labor organization and the probability of a critical mass of labor independently making such a fundamental shift (especially in the current economic client) is near zero.

Not sure if that is FAANG or US but nah; I recommend people and people recommend me to large corps and the interview is pleasant banter and nothing else. If I see a whiteboard I would walk out anyway; what is this, grade school? If my resume and references do not help then I have no interest working for you.

Networking can in fact overturn results of the interview loop. In some cases, the result is known and the interview is arranged to support the case. You may outright fail some questions, and still get a green light from those interviewers.

I feel in the tech industry, networking and knowing people only gets you so far - typically just to the whiteboard interview. Then you have to solve the leetcode problems just like everyone else. Especially so in larger companies.FWIW, all of my friends who somehow managed to get into FAANG or other top tech companies swear that were they to go through the interview again, odds are they would fail. This despite all of them being great engineers.

Your advice goes directly against your example and I would say that most companies interview like that. Surely the advice should be to spend time on interview prep regardless of how good you are at the job.

Genuine programming skill has no correlation to the skill of regurgitating algorithms in a reality-show type setting. Actual development, of real products, isn&#x27;t done like that. This is the reason why it&#x27;s so perpetually controversial to put developers through this type of interviews which measure nothing relevant to the job.

&gt; If you want a job and good career progression the best advice has to be prioritize making friends with lots of peopleGetting good at interviewing should also be a priority, and is doable.Getting good at interviewing is largely about developing (a) genuine programming skill; and b) at least some people&#x2F;communication skill.When you have those skills, you have less anxiety about the interview, and can perform well.

I interviewed someone that several of my coworkers had worked with before, and spoke very highly of. He even was my current manager&#x27;s manager at their last job together.He kinda blew the interview. He did okay, but not even close to the level of experience he had.It was very obvious he was nervous, so we hired him anyway. No regrets.

&gt; HR tells me that&#x27;s not feasible for reasons I don&#x27;t understandYou are asking them to do some work.

My preference would be to hire someone as a contractorWhen I was contracting it was common to be offered a job at the end of the contract. I always turned it down because I liked being a contractor. From talking to my peers at the time this was common.If someone didn&#x27;t want to be a contractor then they wouldn&#x27;t accept your offer in the first place.

At my company we interviewed two people. Both did fairly poorly in different ways. One we hired because he was a referral and came highly recommended despite a not great interview. He&#x27;s been great.The second guy was rejected but later hired as a contractor and he&#x27;s worked out well as well and now we&#x27;re looking at offering him a full-time position.My conclusion is that our interview process isn&#x27;t good at determining if a candidate would be a good employee.My preference would be to hire someone as a contractor and give them a project then use that to determine their quality and fit. Unfortunately, HR tells me that&#x27;s not feasible for reasons I don&#x27;t understand.

It was made the clearest to me when I interviewed a colleague who had left to another company and two years later was interviewing to return. I knew he knew everything and had the skills for the job because, well, I know him, I’d worked with him before. He’d done this very job previously. Yet he still performed terribly in the interview and (rightly or wrongly) I had to base my evaluation on my knowledge of him rather than his performance in the interview. Interviews suck so much for evaluating people. If you want a job and good career progression the best advice has to be prioritize making friends with lots of people.

&gt; The whiteboard environment is a bit unnatural…

Most of the job: was that explaining while you write the code, under time pressure, or explaining your debugged code after you&#x27;ve tested it a bit and have confidence in it?

If I’m in the room, I will steer them away from dead ends and ask leading questions when they get stuck. The point of the interview is to give the interviewee as much of a chance as possible to demonstrate their skills.I’ll say for sure, not everyone interviews this way. A lot of devs running interviews think of it as a “test” with pass&#x2F;fail. I’d say the better interviewers see it as an opportunity to dig around and figure out how to get evidence of the candidate’s skills. That means being creative, that means responding to what the candidate says and finding opportunities to focus on their strengths.

So have them explain it to you after they complete the problem with you out of the room.

There is a world of difference in explaining your work to someone you&#x27;ve never met before on a problem you&#x27;ve never seen in an environment you&#x27;ve never worked in.Versus explaining your code to your coworker whom you&#x27;ve worked with for the past X time who understands some of your eccentricities or idiosyncrasies and without a pass&#x2F;fail judgment lingering over your head like a sword of Damocles.

The skill of explaining your work is a very important one in practically any creative problem solving field. This only increases as the technical complexity of the problems faced increases.Sometimes this explaining happens in textual format, like code reviews and design specifications, but often it happens verbally. Absent an explanation, it&#x27;s hard to build consensus among the parties involved (co-workers, users, management) that your solution (as manifested by the resulting code) is the right one, and for anything non-trivial, you surely can&#x27;t expect others to just assume that it is the right one.

&gt; Also, I&#x27;m very bad at solving a problem while being required to think out loud.There’s a simple strategy for this, which works fairly well in both interviews and meetings. You give people time to focus and think about the problem and solving it, and don’t force people into discussions right away. It’s not a panacea but in practice it is very effective.The reason why this is important in meetings, as someone running a meeting, if you don’t give people time to think, it will always be the same one or two voices in the room. This is why brainstorming sessions suck. The same thing applies when you are choosing who will take responsibilities—the same few people always speak up first.

I would definitely not want to work for you, I think there&#x27;s something deeply ineffective when most of the job is explaining your code.I say that as someone who cares a lot about writing easy to read code and has no problem explaining it. Also, I&#x27;m very bad at solving a problem while being required to think out loud.

&gt; That&#x27;s not what is being asked. It&#x27;s explaining your thought process while actively doing the work in an &quot;unnatural&quot; environment.In short, that’s a limitation of the study.The study is comparing “explain your thought process aloud as you solve the problem” against “solve the problem by yourself and don’t explain anything”. There’s a whole range of sensible middle options, like “solve the problem by yourself and explain it afterwards” or “solve the problem with the interviewer and then explain it”.

&gt; explaining your work was most of the job and writing code was less important.That&#x27;s not what is being asked. It&#x27;s explaining your thought process while actively doing the work in an &quot;unnatural&quot; environment.&gt; The whiteboard environment is a bit unnaturalI don&#x27;t know anyone that codes on a whiteboard.&gt; but I don’t want to hire someone who gets the right answer if they can’t explain it to me.Again, that&#x27;s not what is being asked. They are being asked to explain their work before they get an answer.

&gt; In short, the findings suggest that companies are missing out on really good programmers because those programmers aren’t good at writing on a whiteboard and explaining their work out loud while coding.In most of my programming jobs, explaining your work was most of the job and writing code was less important.The whiteboard environment is a bit unnatural but I don’t want to hire someone who gets the right answer if they can’t explain it to me.

In one of my recent interviews at a mid size silicon valley company, I was given 4 hours to make a tetris like game.One of the most enjoyable interviews ever with no whiteboard and no one around me to check on my progress. I was blank for first half an hour or so but made great progress by the end. Eventually got the offer.

Right? At least pre-covid, I would say I spent at least an hour (sometimes many hours) every working day &quot;explaining things on a whiteboard in front of an audience&quot;. It&#x27;s a huge part of my job.(Post Covid, I do the same thing, but have to do it over chat)IMO: &quot;Do you have a clear understanding of your area of expertise, and can you communicate that understanding on to others?&quot; is a far more useful predictor of success than &quot;Can you find the right answer to the kind of problem that can be solved on a whiteboard in 45 minutes, or in 5 minutes by searching for an answer on stackoverflow?&quot;That said, I agree that generally interviews are terrible. But the (implicit) screening for soft skills isn&#x27;t the terrible part.

There is something to be said for the soft-skills evaluation being relative to the expectations of the job position, sure.I&#x27;m saying: I find it odd that I rarely see these types of studies discussing the merits of that nuance. Especially when the idea of differentiating between soft and hard skills is not something that would be foreign to the average interviewer.&quot;Interviews are 100% for soft skills and technical evaluations are 100% for hard skills&quot; seems to be a common assumption which I&#x27;d argue is false. Few tasks a developer does is purely a hard or a soft skill, there&#x27;s always some overlap.

I&#x27;ve had the opposite experience. In &gt;10 years of software, I&#x27;ve never written code on a whiteboard outside of an interview. Systems layout, designs, code pathing, sure; but never real, compilable code.I agree with the last point, but I don&#x27;t think either of us can tie our anecdotes to it.

I find it interesting that academia often points out that skills interviews have a soft-skills bias, but rarely do I see them consider that this may be a feature and not a bug.&gt; “Our study suggests that a lot of well-qualified job candidates are being eliminated because they’re not used to working on a whiteboard in front of an audience.”This is a common daily task at any company I&#x27;ve ever written software at. People who can communicate their ideas effectively are better at their job.

Sounds like Apple. Same thing happened to me :)

Its really funny. I was interviewing at a large company recently and the way they do interviews is weird. Each team that is interested in you does their own on-site. The first one I bombed b&#x2F;c I was so anxious but after I experienced it once, I aced all the other teams I interviewed with. Nerves definitely play a role, its cool to see that it is being quantified.

I used to be super anxious and get brain freeze.This doesnt&#x27; happen to me after I grinded leetcode for a couple of months.you are anxious if you feel unprepared.

In my normal work I don’t have someone staring at me and probably thinking I’m an idiot for blanking so it’s not at all a simulation of work stress

Hmm...but if everybody is stressed out, then it equalizes and you&#x27;re testing for skills again, just skills under pressure.And having skills retained under pressure is actually a valuable trait in this industry. And at least at desirable companies, the process is designed to minimize false positive, it doesn&#x27;t care that much about false negatives. This is by design.My guess would be that they filter out orders of magnitude more people with poor resume-writing skills or that didn&#x27;t go to the right school.Although I do agree that interviews that you can&#x2F;must practice for are silly and there&#x27;s a lot oof that around.

Well they are auditions rather than interviews. So it seem to be accurate.

Hassling someone once a minute while they try to write algorithmic code is not a great way to assess anything useful either.

Agreed. When I&#x27;m conducting interviews, the actual code produced is less than half of what I&#x27;m looking for.I want to assess if the candidate can communicate their thoughts effectively, if they can identify alternative approaches and justify their decisions, how they receive and incorporate feedback.Locking someone in a room to write on a whiteboard is not a coding interview.

I think a hybrid model (create solution in private, then present it and answer questions) might be better. That way you can assess the person&#x27;s communication without looking over their shoulder.

Well, I can communicate and explain things reasonably well to a room full of people. I ran a side business doing that for about seven or eight years.And I can ship products. I&#x27;ve done that a bunch of times--in several cases I&#x27;ve written most or all of the code in the shipping product.I can&#x27;t interview all that well, though, and I&#x27;m absolutely terrible at whiteboard coding, or pretty much any kind of problem-solving with people watching me. Except pair programming. Pair programming with a colleague that I know well is no problem.I have two obstacles. One is anxiety. I score really high on trait neuroticism. It&#x27;s one of the so-called &quot;Big Five&quot; personality traits. One of the things it means is that I have a lot of self doubt regardless of cause or circumstance, and a lot of anxiety to go with it. As for &quot;working on myself a little bit,&quot; the Big Five are extremely resistant to change. Basically, the only things we know of that affect them much are psychedelic drugs and catastrophic trauma. Working on myself a little isn&#x27;t going to reduce my trait neuroticism much.I&#x27;ve been through quite a few tech interviews, including some familiar big names. I&#x27;ve gotten offers. But that&#x27;s never been because of my performance in coding or solving brain teasers, at which my anxiety has been uniformly awful, and so has my performance.The second obstacle I have is that I cannot combine certain classes of cognitive activity. For example, I cannot navigate and carry on a conversation at the same time. I can drive just fine--safely and competently. I just can&#x27;t navigate if involved in a conversation, and will predictably get lost. It&#x27;s predictable enough that when my daughter was a teenager she exploited it for laughs. &quot;Let&#x27;s see where we end up!&quot;Another thing I cannot do is solve logic and programming problems while being watched or while carrying on conversations with strangers. The interaction with the strangers forcibly occupies 100% of my attention.I don&#x27;t know if I&#x27;m representative of a vanishingly small fraction of the population. Maybe so. But maybe there are others more or less like me.Doesn&#x27;t mean you need to change your hiring preferences. Probably does mean you won&#x27;t hire me. Oh well. I seem to be making do.If there are others like me reading, and wondering what to do about it, one thing that has worked well for me is to do good work for people and cultivate good working relationships with them. I have more often than not been hired by someone who already knew my work, or on the recommendation of someone who knew my work.

Hopping aboard your train of thought here... I&#x27;ve never been asked to whiteboard anything truly heinous, and I absolutely despise interviews that are set up as a gauntlet to be ran.But if I&#x27;m interviewing you for a senior SQL engineer position, and you can&#x27;t talk me through whiteboarding a simple query with one join and one aggregate function... you&#x27;re not senior material. I&#x27;m sorry. We need people that can communicate and explain themselves, and talk through their own line of reasoning, where I work.Again, I&#x27;m not defending SWE interviews... but of course people are better at expressing their skillset when they&#x27;re in a controlled environment. The trouble is, the workplace isn&#x27;t a controlled environment. Life isn&#x27;t a controlled environment.I don&#x27;t want to work with brilliant programmers that have zero social skills. If devs can&#x27;t muster up the courage to answer interview questions... maybe that means that they should work on themselves a little bit?

That&#x27;s a good point. But for a lot of people it&#x27;s not even a problem to do that in front of your co-workers who you work with on a daily basis. Even when I had to work with customers, I had zero problems talking to them, getting requirements, and figuring things out.If I had to land that customer for the business, I would surely botch it. That&#x27;s why I didn&#x27;t go into sales.I think that the difference is you have much higher stakes in an interview. If you make a mistake with a co-worker or customer, you can usually just go back and fix it. If you make a mistake in your interview, it can cost you the job and it&#x27;s not so easy to go back and fix.

How right you are particularly when a role has any tie to a production support situation. Not only do you need to solve the problem, but you need to do so when other people are weighing on with their opinions on what might be wrong, escalating when it&#x27;s not solved fast enough, demanding answers you might not have or asking you to defend the ones you do, particularly if they answers are ones no one wants to hear.This is the genesis of the infamous behavioral interviews where people ask about conflict resolution skills, how and when you&#x27;d escalate problems you can&#x27;t solve, name a time when you had a problem and how you solved it, etc.

I think that&#x27;s one of a big problem for candidates to fix - that mindset is wrong and should be changed. An interview should not be a &quot;high stakes situation&quot;. It should be more of a casual event - trying to get each other and see if there&#x27;s any fit. An interview that didn&#x27;t go well is effectively the same as not having an interview at all. Worst case is losing some time and even then it&#x27;s often a possibility to learn something.Taking it all too personally is a big mistake. Sometimes even candidates that did really well don&#x27;t get a job offer for weird reasons, etc.It&#x27;s very similar to dating. Desperation ruins everything.I think that might be a reason why a lot of people report getting a job after they stopped carrying anymore.

Yes, but real-life situations are rarely as high stakes as interviews, on the individual level.Sure - you can find yourself in very stressful situations at work, but I have never in my life been in a situation where you&#x27;re given 45 mins (or hours, for that mater) to solve some problem, or you get fired.Simply but, there&#x27;s an incredible discrepancy between the stakes at play, between interviews and work.To put it a bit more extreme - but to hammer down the point: Imagine working on some problem, with no help whatsoever, and that in front of you, there&#x27;s some guy pointing a gun against you.Just imagine how stressful that must be, and how much of your focus is distracted on reading that guy.Same goes for interviews. For a lot of candidates, that interview is their way out of poverty or lower-class living. And the judge and executioner of your future, is sitting in the same room as you. It&#x27;s a very stressful situation - probably one of the most stressful situations in your life.

That experiment assumes that SWE job is exclusively about solving technical problems, so we can just &quot;lock the candidate in a private room and let them solve it&quot;.In reality human to human interactions, sometimes stressful, are part of the job. Customer &amp; PM requirements, technical debates, giving feedback, explaining your technical solutions, etc. are common.Maybe part of the problem is the education that does not prepare people to reality of the job.Note: I do realize that SWE interviews suck, and I&#x27;m not trying to defend them. Just making comment on the study.

Engineers tend to over-focus on correctness. I’ve run hiring process in the past where over a year we interviewed around 50 engineers. Feedback from our own engineers involved in the process would often be like “Seems like a nice guy. But his solution to the challenge - one he’d never seen before - had a bug in it! And the solution was just O(2^n) and failed to notice the O(n^2) solution. Even though I glared at him a lot and kept distracting him with hints” ... I’m exaggerating for effect of course but some form of that would happen often

This can be said of all interviews, not just tech. It’s hard for great many people to put themselves out there. I mean interview itself is a performance, isn’t it?Having said that communication and interpersonal skills are big part of most jobs even in tech. We hardly develop software in isolation these days.I don’t know about other industries, but in Tech there are some really inexperienced interviewers out there, who’re impulsive and lacks discipline in conducting objective and meaningful assessment.

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

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

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.

Stress when interviewing is similar, but not the same as on the job stress.One major factor, with a job: you&#x27;re still getting paid. I think the economic anxiety one faces is pretty stark, if you fail a job interview you&#x27;re going to be unemployed until you can pass the next one.

I can’t tell if this is an actual white boarding purgatory you live in or a joke ?

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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t what&#x27;s happening with me or you in this case.... the interview process at my company is 100% identical to real world scenarios so I&#x27;m good.I&#x27;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.

It&#x27;s fine if you believe this is true for your environment, but that&#x27;s really quite rare.I can see &#x27;high pressure&#x27; particularly in Devops, but that&#x27;s a different kind of problem solving.The headline speaks perfectly to my intuition after many years in the trade, and that we are &#x27;measuring confidence&#x27;.Note that they assumed that interviews were set up to be fair - they are not - and that&#x27;s actually ok. If a company has preferred candidates, it&#x27;s perfectly within their right to do that (so long as &#x27;preferred&#x27; doesn&#x27;t just mean &#x27;gender&#x27; or whatever).It&#x27;s been a while since doing this for me, but when I do it again, the &#x27;on site&#x27; will be a page with some neat problems, some Q&amp;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 &#x27;what they did&#x27; and then interview for the rest of the issues.&#x27;Having someone watch you solve a problem&#x27; is very specific social condition.

Honestly if you built a better bridge more would come over.Looking at white boarding comfort and judging that the person can&#x27;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.

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&#x27;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.

Well, yes, if you looked at my comments you&#x27;d see I&#x27;m part of that &quot;everybody&quot; set.But to moderate it a bit; in my interview training at Google it was clear: the interviewee doesn&#x27;t have to get the answer correct. The point is to see how they think.I mean, I think it&#x27;s still insulting, but there is that.

Your last paragraph sums what why everyone on HN is so upset about the interview process. That is, the process is tailored for new grads, and what is being tested is not at all related to the job. 5 years of schooling, and 10 years of experience is not enough if you can&#x27;t implement depth first search using double linked lists, hashes - and ultimately graph theory - within 45 mins. Heck, new grads can&#x27;t even do so.

Yes, true regarding the very last part.My first &quot;real&quot; CS-related interview, which had technical questions, I had on the very same day that I had taken my final exam in our data structures and algorithms class. And because our DSA class was quite rigorous, I knew the material in and out.I absolutely aced those questions, but did poorly on the systems design questions because, well, I simply did not have much experience designing or building complete systems&#x2F;software.Years later, it was the other way. I stumbled my way through the DSA questions, while acing the systems questions.But with that said, I think also the order of your performance matters. If you walk in, and absolutely bomb the first topics, I think there&#x27;s going to be a bias against you. Maybe they&#x27;ll think you&#x27;re a moron, or something like that.

Multiple discussions about this on HN today, that&#x27;s good. Maybe it will lead to the pendulum swinging back a bit.Interviewers need to do their due diligence. Coding tests can have their place when interviewing for certain kinds of positions, especially for new grads and entry level positions. In the end nothing can replace checking references and looking into a person&#x27;s work experience.There is no algorithms and data structure whiteboarding test that can differentiate between a junior and a senior developer. Being senior is a product of acquired wisdom, not just skill. And in fact senior devs can easily bomb out a whiteboarding test because we&#x27;re further from university CS experience.

I think the more accurate headline is likely to be &quot;anxiety can negatively affect performance in interviews.&quot;I would love to see what a control group of non-tech interviews looks like. Not sure what the equivalent &quot;whiteboard while out of the room&quot; is, but it&#x27;s hardly just software devs who get nervous and can panic in interview situations.

&gt; rather than whether the candidate is competent at codingAs a really quick reaction it&#x27;s worth noting that coding is probably less than 25% of my job as an engineer.In others&#x27; experience is this also the case for you?

We can&#x27;t expect everyone utterance to be rational and logical. We&#x27;re all just human at the end of the day. We should expect job candidates to try their best to get the job.

What&#x27;s the point of asking these sorts of questions? Typically to try to get a sense of how somebody thinks and what sort of rapport they have with the interviewer while problem solving, not that they get to the &quot;correct&quot; answer.I think they have some utility because this is a common occurrence when dealing with clients.

He isn’t advocating it. He is just saying that you must play the system as it is.

I&#x27;m not sure he&#x27;s advocating for it, just pointing out that it&#x27;s true.

You&#x27;re right, unfortunately that&#x27;s what it sounds like I&#x27;m saying. It&#x27;s not really what I meant. The idea I was trying to get across is closer to &quot;being able to communicate what I&#x27;m thinking about as I&#x27;m thinking about it, and verbalizing that as a coherent sentence rather than just fragments.&quot; Ironically, I wish I had communicated that better :)

&gt; That and debate gave me the ability to just start a sentence without knowing where it will end and then talk my way to a conclusion that sounds like it makes senseYou&#x27;re effectively advocating for more bullshit. The problem is that this works in the first place - we shouldn&#x27;t be rewarding it.

Rhetoric was the most respected skill in Ancient Athens.[0] I think we would do well to stop thinking of rhetoric, debating, and public speaking as hobbies for some high school students. They are essential skills for wealth creation and advancement in society.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;liberalarts.online&#x2F;trivium-and-quadrivium&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;liberalarts.online&#x2F;trivium-and-quadrivium&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;d be interested to hear more about how you do that, and what you try to select for instead.

Why is it a bad thing? It&#x27;s off the cuff, and likely less filtered than a prepared statement. If they end up somewhere sensible, then your interview process actually worked; you found someone who when confronted with a new problem, is able to think sensibly about it, even in an interview situation.

Duplicating a comment I made above, the idea I wanted to communicate is closer to &quot;being able to communicate what I&#x27;m thinking about as I&#x27;m thinking about it&quot; — NOT just rambling my way to a BS answer.

&gt; That and debate gave me the ability to just start a sentence without knowing where it will end ... it sounds like I&#x27;ve been thinking sensibly about it.I&#x27;ve always structured my interviews to weed that kind of thing out.

And an interview is very much marketing and sales of your skills :)

&gt; That and debate gave me the ability to just start a sentence without knowing where it will end and then talk my way to a conclusion that sounds like it makes senseThat sounds like a good skill to have in marketing, sales or politics. It sounds like a bad skill to have for engineering.

To be clear: I don&#x27;t advocate for doing that, and I don&#x27;t try to BS my interviewers. That&#x27;s why I said &quot;let alone if I&#x27;m just a bit unsure&quot;—if, during high school debate, I can confidently BS, then now, during an interview, I can confidently talk even if I&#x27;m nervous and not fully sure of myself.

&gt; project confidence even if I know what I&#x27;m saying is BSOne of my very worst bosses had this quality. Perversely, it was about the only thing I admired about him.The guy could walk into a meeting of NASA flight engineers and engage in conversation without uttering a single fact that would betray his total lack of any knowledge&#x2F;qualifications.n.b. He was fired not long after I left the company.

I&#x27;m not from a country that really does &quot;debate teams&quot;, but as I understand them a lot seems to be about &quot;winning the argument&quot;, which doesn&#x27;t strike me as especially great.On the other hand, it probably makes people better at spotting a bad&#x2F;fallacious arguments, and gain appreciation that complex topics tend to have multiple reasonable opinions on it – two things we desperately need more of.

I don&#x27;t mean to give advice on gaming the system—I&#x27;m sorry if I came across that way. The point I was trying to make was much closer to your first line—that the current interviewing system rewards confidence and communication skills, and that debate helped me build those. Ironically, I wish I had communicated that better :)Also, I agree that there are drawbacks to doing debate. For one, there&#x27;s a certain &quot;debate kid&quot; mentality that I picked up and had to unlearn.

An upvote is warranted for a life long gift to kids to be able to communicate confidently.A downvote is warranted for giving a bad advice on gaming a system and giving both parties in an interview process a poor indication of what is expected in possibly years to come.Thus, no vote given.I think given what I read about debate teams -- on podcasts and here in HN, I am on the fence on suggesting that to my kids. There are certainly great benefits, but not too certain if those out weights the drawbacks.

I concur. I did BP for only 1 semester in college but the experience proved to be valuable down the line. It forces you to articulate yourself &quot;on the fly&quot;, streaming out ideas as they are formed (from core principles &#x2F; bullet points you have in your mind).

Interesting. I usually do pretty well in interviews and I&#x27;ve always attributed that to my four years on the debate team in high school. This tells me it might be even more true than I previously thought. Even when I&#x27;m nervous as hell, when you put me in front of a judge (interviewer), I click into &quot;performance mode&quot; where I project confidence even if I know what I&#x27;m saying is BS, let alone just a bit unsure. This is how you win parliamentary debates when you&#x27;ve had five minutes to prepare for a topic you know little to nothing about—and I guess it helps in interviews too!That and debate gave me the ability to just start a sentence without knowing where it will end and then talk my way to a conclusion that sounds like it makes sense (useful when you have 2 minutes to prepare a 3-5 minute speech on a topic you&#x27;ve never seen before). So when I get up in front of a whitebard, I just start talking confidently, and even if by the end haven&#x27;t solved the problem quickly or efficiently or at all, it sounds like I&#x27;ve been thinking sensibly about it.My takeaway, I guess—parents, make your kids do debate!

I was in the same boat. Nearly 10 years experience at the same company that hired me after university. My first phone interview had me write a linked list and I froze. I had even practiced writing linked lists that week. The interviewer probably thought I lied about my resume.I spent 4 months doing leetcode problems and reading books before I started doing interviews again. I would interview at places like Facebook that I had no interest in working at but I needed the experience. 7 months after I started I finally got an offer.I don&#x27;t want to go through that again but I agree that you probably need to do interviews every year inorder to not completely lose that skill.

Interviewing is a skill. I once had a good job where I was happy and didn&#x27;t move for 10 years. Big mistake - after that I bombed at interviews. After doing 10 interviews I&#x27;m now up to speed. I kinda feel like I need to do some interviews every year just to remind me how to behave and how to keep market ready.

I just went through a job search and this is what I landed on.Every CRUD webapp startup thinks they need FAANG-like hiring processes and fucking suck at it.I ended up taking a job that was mostly a no-interview process. Two calls to talk about the fit.They looked at my job history (gasp!) talked to some references (double gasp!) verified my ability to code with my github contributes (omfg I can&#x27;t breathe!) and offered me a position.Less money, but definitely less bullshit. It was a good choice for me.

In tech cities almost every non-tiny company has the FAANG approach

&quot;Technical interviews are feared and hated in the industry, and it turns out that these interview techniques may also be hurting the industry’s ability to find and hire skilled software engineers.&quot;It doesn&#x27;t hurt &quot;the industry&quot;, there&#x27;s a competitive edge to hiring otherwise superior engineers that are passed up by poor hiring practices at certain companies.Not everybody needs to work at FAANG, or worse, companies that act like they&#x27;re FAANG. Less money, less bullshit.

I work in an interesting tech career that does need to assess this: Pre-sales Engineering.At my current job, we have our candidates do a short take-home assignment to assess coding skill, but we also have them do a live presentation to assess their pre-sales skills and ability to present under pressure.We try to separate the two tests to get a better read on the two skill sets we&#x27;re looking for. So far we&#x27;ve hired strong candidates. We prioritize avoiding false positives over false negatives; in other words, we prioritize turning candidates away over hiring someone we&#x27;re unsure about.

Totally true that people with no self-doubt&#x2F;impostor syndrome overperform their ability level in whiteboard interviews compared to people with more self-doubt, who are often the better engineers. I am personally a beneficiary of this. It also contributes to all of the terrible dick-swinging culture in a lot of tech companies since these are the people who pass the interview.

I agree with this. It really is putting on a show.Ideally you get a problem that you are familiar with. Even more so if you know the exact problem and optimal solution. If not exactly, then at least similar to something you&#x27;ve solved before.Then you put on a show acting as if this is the first time you&#x27;re seeing the problem. With practiced confidence, you roughly outline a naive solution, then quickly and smoothly iterate your way to the ideal optimal solution. All the while explaining your &quot;thought processes&quot; as if you serendipitously saw the solution materialize before your eyes.By practicing (say, grinding leetcode), you ensure that you have the confidence to smoothly put on this show, and also not waste your precious interview minutes meandering down suboptimal dead-end paths.

I went through the interview gauntlet last year. When my extended family would ask what it is like I would say:Imagine you want to hire a comedy writer for a TV show. However, you conduct your interview by having your candidate perform stand-up improv comedy like &quot;Who&#x27;s Line is it Anyway&quot;. While you want to hire someone funny, you don&#x27;t need to hire a performer.In my experience, programming interviews are basically an improv programming performance. I didn&#x27;t pass an interview until I had enough practice performing while others watched.

Oh my god. I&#x27;m so sorry... that had to have been very, very traumatizing.It sounds like a net win that you didn&#x27;t get that job, for multiple reasons. I wouldn&#x27;t want to work somewhere that I&#x27;d gotten mugged on the way in for an interview, nor for a company that didn&#x27;t give me as much time as I needed to collect myself.The closest I&#x27;ve gotten to that, was that I had an interview set up with a company in Saginaw, MI, that I was really excited about. I did a quick internet search to learn more about their company, and the first thing that popped up was that a few months prior, an employee had been shot in a drive-by in their parking lot.I ended up cancelling the interview.

wow that is incredible, they didn&#x27;t offer to postpone or anything?

That is seriously fucked up. Who goes to the trouble to suggest you take your time and then takes it away? That sounds like something a bully would do.If they behave like that outside of work, I wonder how many breakups they&#x27;ve been through. Few people would put up with that kind of behavior and those people are probably wrong.

A company flew me out to San Francisco to interview once. On my way into the building in the morning I was mugged (almost right outside). I told my interviewer, they took me to the lunch room to sit down and compose myself. &quot;Take as long as you like&quot;, they said. 2 minutes later they came to collect me for my interview.I was a wreck. Worst interview of my life. Didn&#x27;t get the job. I am pretty sure I would have if I wasn&#x27;t falling apart.

I have found that what best predicts interview success for me is the ability to confidently give answers, even if they are nonsense. One of the problems is that interviewers often aren&#x27;t sure of the answer either.

Given that women seem to be around twice as likely to suffer from anxiety as men, this is a result I was not at all surprised to see.- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.webmd.com&#x2F;women&#x2F;news&#x2F;20160606&#x2F;women-more-prone-to-anxiety-than-men-review-finds#1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.webmd.com&#x2F;women&#x2F;news&#x2F;20160606&#x2F;women-more-prone-t...</a>

Even if the science on this isn&#x27;t settled yet, it&#x27;s such low hanging fruit that I can&#x27;t think of any reason why the big N companies aren&#x27;t already doing it. Besides, it would require less time from the interviewers (since they don&#x27;t have to be present for the reading and thinking portion).

&gt;All of the women who took the public interview failed, while all of the women who took the private interview passed.Companies that are serious about avoiding gender discrimination in their hiring practices need to carefully consider what they are really looking for when certain candidates seem to have &quot;the right stuff&quot; after a whiteboard interview. We need more research in this area.

Not being able to tell if it&#x27;s a bad hire is the core problem for the rest.

Worth noting that, at least as far as I&#x27;ve heard, the pressure on employees in at least some roles at the two companies you mentioned is incredibly stressful. I would rather have an interview without undue stress than a stressful one, but I&#x27;d rather have a stressful interview than continuous stress on the job. (I am differentiating here between &quot;working on difficult problems&quot; stress and &quot;always wondering if you&#x27;re going to get canned&quot; stress.)

&gt;Bad interviews make for bad hires. Bad hires can cost a company more than not hiring at all.But is that really true? There are plenty of companies who take a Fire Better approach (Amazon, Netflix to name a few) who seem to be doing just fine.

Bad interviews make for bad hires. Bad hires can cost a company more than not hiring at all.Whenever I&#x27;ve conducted interviews in the past, I&#x27;ve gone out of my way to help the candidates relax. Need to use Google? Go ahead, I do literally all the time. Need some advice, something explained? Just ask, that&#x27;s why we have peers. Nobody writes code on a whiteboard, with no docs, with three people watching, silently taking notes.Interviews should reflect the environment within which the job is actually done, and allow the candidate to demonstrate what they&#x27;re good at, instead of treating them like a circus animal jumping through hoops, giving them performance anxiety.For my most recent job, they circumvented my interview entirely and just did a few days of contract work instead. That way the company gets usable work, the candidate gets paid, and it filters out those who can interview really well but may not be a good company fit.

I have extreme performance anxiety when it comes to interviews. Recently I had a very good experience interviewing with Netflix, where the take-home assignment allowed me to show what I was capable of doing. All the technical interviews after that were talking about the take-home at a high-level. The experience felt more accurate to how actual work is (receive an issue ticket, do work, then a code-review).I was rejected in the end, and I believe I either a) wasn&#x27;t a culture fit or b) they found someone with more experience (I&#x27;m 6 years in at my first tech job). What was nice about it though was that I was very calm and collected throughout.

I&#x27;m susceptible to stuttering and&#x2F;or rambling when I&#x27;m extremely anxious, sometimes without even being fully aware of it. I made it to final interviews for tech jobs twice, and I got the offer both times.In retrospect, I was extremely anxious the first time, but the company was about to enter a high-growth phase and didn&#x27;t seem to have fully-developed hiring practices (I got a tentative, very informal verbal offer on-the-spot, and a phone call to confirm I had the job about 24 hours later).The second time, I was interviewing with a big US bank so I assume they had a better eye for details. Maybe I&#x27;m getting better at not showing my anxiety.

&gt; A data structures and algorithms test is fair and objectiveThe article makes clear that the issue isn&#x27;t the content of a technical interview, but rather how it is administered. Specifically, from Chris Parnin, a co-author in the study:&gt; But the format may also serve as a barrier to entire classes of candidates. For example, in our study, all of the women who took the public interview failed, while all of the women who took the private interview passed. Our study was limited, and a larger sample size would be needed to draw firm conclusions, but the idea that the very design of the interview process may effectively exclude an entire class of job candidates is troubling.So the &quot;objective&quot; in-person tech interview excludes a huge bunch of talented applicants because there is nothing objective about it at all.

One alternative is providing candidates with a problem to work on for a few hours on their own (have them bring their own laptop, allow them access to Google and their own development environment), then have them walk you through their solution.Do this as part of the interview and not something they have to do in their &quot;spare time&quot; at home. It&#x27;s not uncommon for large companies to do all-day interviews anyway, so a way to structure this can be to have the interviewee come in in the morning, provide them the problem and allow them to ask any questions they might have (as if it was a real work problem), then allow them the morning to work on it.Then in the afternoon you can review the solution and ask them to talk through how they arrived at it and what their thoughts were during the process.

The study in the article suggests that the same whiteboard question done in private rather than with a judge in the room has all of the benefits with none of the disadvantages in terms of the candidates software skill.

&gt; What I need is a way that tells whether the person I&#x27;m interviewing can actually do the work that I&#x27;m hiring them to do. Maybe I should ask them about that. Maybe I should give them some problems similar to the actual work.Would you mind sharing with us how to draw the rest of the owl?Look, I don&#x27;t even want to defend leetcode here, but it is a struggle to find questions that are:1) Correlated with the actual work performance2) Neat enough to be explained and solved in the course of an interview3) Have objective enough answers so that it&#x27;s possible to overcome likability bias in interviewers4) Have objective enough answers to be able to meaningfully compare different candidates5) Demonstrate that candidates can actually go from hearing a description of the problem to producing code that solves the problem

There are more alternatives than &quot;look the part&quot; and &quot;leetcode&quot;. If I&#x27;m hiring a software engineer, I&#x27;m not hiring for how they look - the compiler doesn&#x27;t care. And I&#x27;m (probably) not hiring for the ability to solve leetcode problems, either - of the work I would assign to someone I&#x27;m hiring, almost zero of it looks like leetcode problems.What I need is a way that tells whether the person I&#x27;m interviewing can actually do the work that I&#x27;m hiring them to do. Maybe I should ask them about that. Maybe I should give them some problems similar to the actual work.

&gt; A data structures and algorithms test is fair and objective.Anything but! For starters, in 2020 brute-force solutions are not acceptable anymore. Then, there are often several working approaches and substantial percentage of interviewers will fail you just because you use the approach they are unfamiliar with.But even if you implemented the optimal approach, if the interviewer disliked you as a person then they find a way to fail you regardless. &quot;Sloppy code&quot;, &quot;bad communication&quot; - no fairness and objectiveness in those assessments.

A juggling test would also be fair and objective. Just hit LeetJuggle for a few months before the interview and you’ll be golden

I fear there&#x27;s a movement to get rid of leetcode interviews and I&#x27;m against it. What&#x27;s the alternative? We go back to &quot;you have to look the part&quot;, nepotism, credentialism, and other such BS in other industries. A data structures and algorithms test is fair and objective. You can objectively get all the challenges correct and then there&#x27;s little reason to not hire you. Compare that to interviewing for, say, an investment banking position where you&#x27;re judged on stuff like what frat you were a member of and how charismatic you are.

Used to run interviews by putting candidates at a table with a laptop (typically their own). I&#x27;d give them a coding question and 45 minutes to solve it, and then spend 10 minutes walking through their solution together. I&#x27;d sit across the table from them and do my own work. They could stop me and ask questions all they wanted, just like we were teammates.It worked great. It also gave me (the interviewer) some time back in the day.

I&#x27;ve written about this before.I&#x27;ve become pretty much convinced that many of the leetcode tests are &quot;young-pass filters.&quot;I recently saw an ad for a two-month, intensive course on how to pass interview questions.The heck with that. I want to learn relevant stuff.If people don&#x27;t want me working for them, then I&#x27;m not particularly interested in working for them. Too bad. We could have made beautiful music together. I&#x27;m no slouch.

There&#x27;s a phenomenon where an entity which is successful for reason X is unaware that it&#x27;s hurting itself for reason Y, and may even attribute its success to reason Y. Which is all very well until X shrinks or Y grows.The point is that you can&#x27;t assume that just because something is doing well, everything it&#x27;s doing is perfect. In fact, success is likely to hide all sorts of bad practices, because the bad practices just don&#x27;t hurt enough to offset the success coming from another source.I kind of suspect that this is why declining tech companies often crash and burn so dramatically; they tend to have a lot of myths that they believe about themselves, and when the one thing keeping them going declines, they can&#x27;t address all the things that are pulling them down, because they don&#x27;t really believe in them in the first place.

I&#x27;m about 99% certain that the actual cause for the disparity between the two is that Boeing is a publicly traded company while SpaceX is a privately held firm, which completely eliminates the need for management to focus on short-term profitability. When you look at stupid practices inside of a company, and cultural erosion, you can almost always trace it back to decisions that management is making to maximize profit.  I&#x27;d go so far as to say, this is the ONLY reason why smaller companies are able to outmaneuver larger ones.

Current SWE interviews seem extraordinarily effective. They&#x27;ve produced corporations that dominate our lives, with systems that have unimaginable capabilities. Their profits currently dwarf other companies such that the S&amp;P500 is basically a tech company index. More companies will adopt hiring practices like these as the applicants become more competitive. SpaceX has grueling all-day multiround tech-like interviews like this, whereas Boeing just does 1 hour with 2 managers. The effect on employee quality is clear.

I always care about explaining to the candidate how the interview will look like, and what are the most important elements I care about. When you skip this part, the candidate has no idea if for example during live coding, you care about the results, the code quality, IDE shortcuts fluency, etc. The feedback after the interviews proves it is a game-changer.

The corollary may be that anyone with low social anxiety is likely to do better.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dr._Fox_effect" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Dr._Fox_effect</a>I&#x27;m genuinely curious - do whiteboarding and code exercises mititgate this at all?Clearly there has be some minimal standard of ability. But given two similar performers, do performance-interviews favour those who project confidence? Or is there no influence on outcomes?

No matter how difficult a coding interview was, the job afterwards was always harder and more challenging - taking that into account I would rather for even harder job interviews to reflect the actual difficulty of jobs.

Yea, I had one take home problem where the instructions stated &quot;Please don&#x27;t take more than 1 hour to solve.&quot; So, just once, I decided to hold myself to one hour, and barely managed to get to a solution that worked.During the code review in the follow-up interview, I was raked over the coals for not writing tests, failing to cover edge cases, etc. ,etc. Basically, they expected production-ready code. Didn&#x27;t get the job.

This is an accurate view of take home assignments. Most of the take home assignments I&#x27;ve done were &quot;supposed&quot; to take 5 hours. Most of them too around 20.The worst take home assignment I ever had was an extremely tricky brain teaser, the answer to which could not be found on google, and had to be done in the not very popular language this company used. So I not only had to write useless brain teaser code, but I couldn&#x27;t do it in a language I was already comfortable with.

&gt; Most software engineers would cry murder if you gave them a 3 to 5 day take home interview that is an actual problem the company is trying to solve.So pay them. $400 for 10 hours of work is nothing for a company compared to the man hours spent on the hiring process. It also signifies to the developer that this company is serious about hiring them.

I like the data science interview process a lot more, though I&#x27;m biased enjoying the kind of work I do.It&#x27;s somewhat common during a data science interview to be given the actual problem you would be working on if you took the job. Often times you&#x27;re given multiple days as a take home or multiple interviews to go through it, because the problem is difficult enough it does take research to begin to hypothesize a possible solution.Most software engineers would cry murder if you gave them a 3 to 5 day take home interview that is an actual problem the company is trying to solve. &quot;It&#x27;s free labor. They&#x27;re taking advantage of you.&quot; but in the data science world solving a problem can take 3 to 12 months, not 3 to 5 days, so you can&#x27;t solve it in that time frame, just come up with ideas that lead to paths forward. The company can&#x27;t take advantage of you this way.On the SWE side, a near equivalent would be pairing with someone on the actual code base with an actual jira issue for a day, learning the code base, seeing the problems in the bug tracker, and then deciding from there if those are the kinds of problems you want to spend the next handful of years of your life on.I like this kind of problem because I know what my 9 to 5 will be for the next year to years and if it is what I want to be doing with my life.

The interesting thing is that Leetcode style problems encourage your code to go into the opposite direction that most production code should go. The game of Leetcode is to write the most consise, clever function that solves the problem in a tricky way. Thats exactly the kind of code I would flag in a review - sure it might be super efficient and elegant, but good luck maintaining it a few months later. I would way rather go for a solution thats less efficient but easy to maintain - I can always improve it later if it becomes a bottleneck (it usually doesn&#x27;t).I know the take home assignment is a divisive subject, but I think it&#x27;s the perfect way to evaluate a person&#x27;s coding ability. Did they use dependency injection or did they reference globals straight in the code? Did they break down the code into small testable chunks or write one giant file? Would their code pass code review? These things are way more important for most codebases than shaving an order of magnitude of big 0 complexity.The only issue with the take homes is that they take a ton of time. Most companies say that it should only take a few hours but also ask for production grade code. Thats impossible - clean code takes time. Companies should at least start compensating for the time taken to do the assignment.My favorite interview process involved a take home assignment which if you pass takes you directly to the final onsite interview. There the live coding sessions involved building more features onto the take home. As an experienced programmer who sucks at Leetcode I really hope the industry moves in this direction.

From what I have read from Gayle Laakmaan, they know this throws away many good engineers, but it is acceptable to them because it doesn’t let bad ones through.

Gayle Laakman specifically has a business empire dedicated to help people get through the process. Regardless of the actual merits of the process her opinion is going to be biased.

I&#x27;m not a googler (but I&#x27;ve interviewed there) and I disagree somewhat with the original premise. I think whiteboarding does filter out bad candidates but also filters out good candidates who fail the anxiety test. Google, with their massive pipeline, probably doesn&#x27;t care about the false negatives enough to change; they still find enough people to hire. It&#x27;s the companies with smaller pipelines that need to scoop up these good candidates.

She will just say that the process is designed to minimize false positives and the expense of more false negatives. A bad hire is more expensive than a no hire.The problem is this isn&#x27;t what gets you the smartest people on the planet. A small number might be interested in DS&amp;A to that level, but most are not. They will learn enough to know how to google what they need and move on to what they are interested in. Smart people are constantly getting job offers from coworkers and bosses who move to other companies if they don&#x27;t start their own.The few smart people who do put in the effort necessary to go to the FAANG companies always leave after getting the golden sticker on their resume. They leave behind them a residue of SAT preppers who have PhD&#x27;s in inversing binary trees.

I interviewed a lot of people while I was at Google, and sometimes the people were clearly, clearly too anxious to interview. Like one fresh-grad who&#x27;s hands were shaking. I thought about how much pressure the kid must have been under.You try to help them relax, but you don&#x27;t have much time, and the whole thing is just so unnatural.Other places I&#x27;ve since been at, and interviewed with, give you a laptop, a problem to solve, and some time. You can focus on the problem instead of the situation much better, and I think that really helps. As an interviewer, it also helps keep some distance from the interviewer. It&#x27;s too easy to try to micromanage the interview and keep the candidate uneasy. But there&#x27;s a natural &quot;don&#x27;t interrupt someone when working&quot; instinct that keeps interviewers more distant when the candidate&#x27;s programming.Coderpads on video conference, I think, are pretty good when the candidate has a good space to work in. They&#x27;re in comfortable territory and you can see them by their keystrokes. The interviewer feels like they&#x27;re getting more accurate data about how the candidate really operates. I just wish it could do keyboard shortcuts better -- emacs users like me hate seeing Ctrl-N bring up a new window.The issue of IDE&#x2F;compiler&#x2F;keyboard&#x2F;keybindings is also there, but that&#x27;s easier to work with.

Over the past few years in tech, I have interacted with and observed (as a fly on the wall) a wide variety of recruiters, hiring managers, etc. from companies as small as a dozen (usually around the time a founder&#x2F;CEO brings in external &quot;support&quot;).There exists an incredible amount of arrogance and ego among them by-in-large. The best are humble and curious while maintaining clear and direct communication. To be fair, they are often tasked with making important judgement calls sans complete information, though that&#x27;s the fault of the leadership&#x2F;culture as to a poor approach.

At the start of my third year as a student, I biked through a record-worthy rainfall to my first interview with a small local games studio. Showed up completely soaked, but sat down relaxed and feeling reasonably confident. (I had done a handful of unity and opengl projects.)The interview started with a bit of small talk, I chatted with one of the guys about Brood War and Starcraft 2. Later during the technical interview they asked me about the difference between private, protected, and public and said I was the only student they had interviewed who had answered correctly which was wild and honestly stunned me for a moment.They liked how in one of my examples of scripting something I had written some fun dialog and I mentioned I did writing as a hobby which seemed like a plus. I talked about which classes I enjoyed the most and how they were challenging&#x2F;interesting.I did not get a job offer and learned from a friend that I had come off as &quot;depressed and disinterested&quot; (I don&#x27;t think they realized he was going to relay that info to me...) All I can do is guess that it&#x27;s a combination from showing up completely drenched and sharing how I enjoyed those &quot;challenging&quot; classes made it seem like I would get quickly bored of scripting...After that, I bombed an interview for a QA role because I went into it completely unprepared for just how much it would differ from a programming interview.Point being those first two experiences got in my head and I basically had anxiety over anything job-hunt related for the next 2.5 years.When I did get a job, I was extremely happy with the interview process (even though I felt I did poorly on it). Here&#x27;s more or less how it was structured (TL;DR):<pre><code> - Office tour&#x2F;chat with a programmer who had referred me
 - quick 5 minute introduction to senior programmers in charge of the technical interview 
 - 1 hour alone in a meeting room with a laptop and 4 written questions (a generous amount of time) 
 - ~15 minutes reviewing my answers with the senior programmers 
 - importantly, they gave me a chance to talk about my answers and when I got something wrong they would simply state that it had an error and see if I could spot it 
 - 15 minutes on C++&#x2F;memory&#x2F;performance&#x2F;behavior quirks (important stuff in AAA games) 
 - ~30 minutes talking about stuff I had worked on 
 - occasionally they would mention something related I hadn&#x27;t heard about and explain it while gauging how well I could follow along
</code></pre>
Basically, based on my own interview experience&#x2F;anxiety if I had to choose an interview method, it would be very similar to what I just mentioned. Seeing a familiar face and the introduction followed by the alone time did a lot to ease my anxiety. The time where I felt most comfortable was talking about the stuff I had done because I was very familiar with all of it&#x2F;it was easy to talk about.The process seemed less focused on where I had gaps in my knowledge and more focused if I had a decent amount of knowledge in general and if I had the ability to recognize and correct the gaps in my knowledge.Sorry if it&#x27;s a bit of an info dump, but it&#x27;s something I think back to a lot.

I&#x27;ve trained for interviewing twice at Google. I don&#x27;t volunteer to give the interviews, though, because the interview I was trained to give, I would never pass.And sadly, this is common and recognized at Google, was mentioned in interview training, and is just said to be part of the fact that the bar gets higher, or something, mumble mumble.I find this disturbing.

You&#x27;ve been arrogant for years and you know what? So have I. I and many, many people in this industry have been doing this for years.What&#x27;s different from you and many other people is that you admit and face your bias rather than justify it.I&#x27;m seriously curious what google interview board members have to say about this study. People like Gayle Laakmaan have been saying things to justify the whole process for years; but now that there&#x27;s actual science, what do they have to say in the face of science?

Looks like being an interviewer taught you a thing or two about the test content.

That sounds like when you spend a lot of time exposed to and walking through certain types of problems led you to getting good at solving those types of problems.

My experience has been quite opposite.I worked for a FANG and conducted over 100 interviews. Most of that time I thought I was asking really hard questions and wasn&#x27;t sure I would have been able to answer them if I hadn&#x27;t seen the question before.I later interviewed at a different FANG, surprised myself and answered harder questions than I typically gave and answered them better than most of the people we hired.Not sure what to make of that.

The depression hits those hardest who put their identity into what they do. Often, I don&#x27;t realize how dependent I am on positive feedback until it hits. Lately, I&#x27;ve tried to remember in those moments that I am a diverse person and that if I looked in the mirror and saw the worst developer ever I would be OK

Hang in there dude, I think the coronavirus and remote working really messed with the traditional hiring process.The fact that you are getting steady interviews speaks for itself that you have the design chops and experience. I think people don&#x27;t know how to interview design candidates well as is, removing the physical cues you get from an in-person interview makes it even harder to assess a designer. Also, it could just be companies are flying by the seat of their pants and a lot have reduced workforce with this second wave of infections.High probability it&#x27;s not you, it&#x27;s them and their broken process during covid-19. Keep your design skills sharp and keep building your portfolio and use this time to work on concepts that you are passionate about that haven&#x27;t come up in a 9-5, that will help you until the right opportunity comes along. You got this!

&gt;I panic and put too much effort into trying to figure out what they want to seeMy approach for take home challenges is this. Often I complete them and never even get any feedback from the firm beyond a form rejection letter. If that is going to be the case anyway I might as well make something I&#x27;m proud to have in my portfolio, even if it doesn&#x27;t line up with exactly what they are asking for. That transforms the work from something that I&#x27;m doing for them to something I&#x27;m doing for me. I know that&#x27;s hard when you are unemployed and have bills to pay, but if at the end of the day you have some work that at least meets with your expectations you can retain that bit of your pride.

For a live design challenge I recommend slowing yourself down and asking for more input from your interviewers. If you appear relaxed and asking for input from others then you will seem more open to both collaboration and constructive criticism. My two cents and good luck.

This. 
Adding up, front-end engineering has an identity crisis now. 
A friend of mine is a web dev who started back in the days when Javascript was for form validation.When JS frameworks and SPAs took over the web, he adapted himself. But being a UI engineer he cares about the craft&#x27;s visual aspects, than the technicalities of JS.Although he has a proven record of his works, he is now dealing with interview questions like &quot;what are the problems with closures&quot; and &quot;when you do use function.apply()&quot; and &quot;immutability&quot;.

Do you have a (substantial) GitHub? Why not mass-apply for positions and refer people to that instead of accepting laborious technical tests?

The same is true for design&#x2F;ux jobs interviews. Well, at least for me. I got laid off a couple of months ago, and have been interviewing pretty steadily since then. I have yet to receive an offer.I already know where my strengths and weaknesses are. I&#x27;m fine with 1 on 1s and all that, but when it comes to the technical part of the interview process like a take-home design project or a live design challenge, I usually fail.I know I have the skills. My work has always been well-received, and I&#x27;ve always received good marks on reviews and feedback, but I haven&#x27;t been able to translate it to the interview process.I&#x27;ve tried to assess where I go wrong, and I think I panic and put too much effort into trying to figure out what they want to see or come up with something innovative rather than just doing the work and following my normal approach.The stress of the time crunch (and sometimes not knowing anything about the product or problem) only add to my inability to improve in this space.--When I&#x27;ve sat on the other side of the table, I know that most interview processes aren&#x27;t that well-structured or set up to actually evaluate the candidate. Even when there&#x27;s a good process, it&#x27;s often too easy for one person to influence the results.So sometimes I tell myself that it was a crappy interview process and it just wasn&#x27;t set up for someone like me to succeed. But I still end up stewing over it and feeling depressed for a few days.

Additionally, companies doing common pool hiring are worsening the situation even further. One bad interview day or one failure to solve complex riddle means that you&#x27;re not good for any teams within that company until cool-off time passes which is typically from 6 months to 1 year. The system of cool-off period is equally brutal.

I mean this would apply to going on a first date as well. First impression is what matters and once the impression has been ruined, all bets are off.It is not specific to the interview process.

I was on the other side - I flew out to FB during a vacation earlier this year. I got there, could explain the solution but something was off and I kept losing the thread when I went to convert it to actual code.The interviewers didn’t know I’d gotten a call from my cat sitter that morning and one of my cats had to go in for an emergency check up. (He ended up being fine but didn’t know that at the time).Later that week I got the rejection from FB and then, 15 minutes later the positive response from Google. Really made me realize how much impact the day has on an interview outcome.

I conducted a couple hundred interviews for my first FAANG employer, and I was constantly amazed at the percentage of candidates with years of Microsoft or Facebook experience on the resumes who apparently did not know how to program. I always thought, &#x27;huh, guess I know why they quit after 3 years, amazing that they all lasted this long.&quot;Then I interviewed for another company and utterly bombed. It became suddenly clear to me that I had been an idiot. Of course nearly all of those candidates were perfectly good programmers. They had had shit interviewing days, probably mostly due to nerves, but they probably would have mostly been perfectly good employees. How frickin&#x27; arrogant I had been for concluding that people who couldn&#x27;t solve incredibly high stakes algorithm riddles on a whiteboard in 45 minutes with enough speed and flair were somehow not qualified to be my coworkers.

Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study