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0 pointslapcat4y ago0 comments

> I've had people seriously panic maybe once or twice in that entire time.

I think you're making too much of the example of the candidate crying. That is indeed an outlier case, not the norm. But the crying case is an undeniable sign that job candidates can get extremely anxious during an interview, in a way that affects their performance. The issue isn't "breakdowns" per se, the issue is that coding tests are testing anxiety level rather than skill level. Ironically, most job candidates are in fact "controlling their emotions", as you say: they may show no outward sign of breakdown or panic, but on the inside, their mind and stomach are churning heavily, and this makes it difficult to perform at their normal level. Everyone is trying to act calm and collected during an interview, but often it's merely an act, and they're actually not calm and collected at all. What you perceive from the outside as incompetence may be a whole different story on the inside for the candidate. https://www.engr.ncsu.edu/news/2020/11/11/tech-sector-job-in...

Anxiety isn't all or nothing. There's a wide spectrum between totally calm and crying breakdown. When there's a crying breakdown, it's easy to recognize, but anxiety is not so easy to recognize if there's not a breakdown.

> I've done a lot of interviews and nobody ever mentioned having to prepare for them.

Why would they mention it, even if they did prepare?

> That idea seems to be a relatively recent idea (last ~10 years or so) and is probably a result of so many people competing for very highly paid jobs at a small number of firms.

Regardless, we're living in the present now, under current conditions, not living in the past, so for the purposes of getting a job, it doesn't really matter when the idea originated.

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native_samples4y ago· 2 in thread

After they were hired, and we were talking about interview design, and they were proposing questions harder than mine? Seems reasonable to mention if they had to prep then. Later I also pushed back on proposals for things like homework, but others seemed to find that idea acceptable. I guess they'd have mentioned it then.

You seem to be suggesting something totally unfalsifiable - that candidates who do a bad job aren't actually bad programmers, but are just nervous inside in undetectable ways. There's no way I or anyone else can argue against this notion because there's no way to prove a negative like that, but suffice it to say that the sort of issues I'd associate with nervousness - minor slips that they then notice and correct, stumbles, brief moments of forgetfulness etc - are not why people tend to fail interviews. They fail interviews because their coding skills suck.

lapcatOP4y ago

> You seem to be suggesting something totally unfalsifiable - that candidates who do a bad job aren't actually bad programmers, but are just nervous inside in undetectable ways.

Heh. It's only unfalsifiable if you ignore a person's previous experience and accomplishments, refusing to acknowledge anything other than your own interview as an accurate gauge of the person's skills.

Also, I'm literally telling you that it happens to me. (And I've heard many people say it happens to them.) So either I'm a liar, or you have to admit that it happens. Go ahead and call me a liar if that's what you want to believe, but I'm not even trying to get a job anymore. I'm happily self-employed now, and my customers also seem very happy with my coding skills.

The term "control your emotions" is somewhat vague. You can hide your emotions, but that doesn't mean you're not experiencing the emotions. An extreme example of that is if you "put on a brave face" after a personal tragedy. You may not cry and break down, but that doesn't mean the sadness doesn't affect you severely. The reason I mentioned therapy is that you'd probably need therapy in order to somehow train yourself to not even feel the emotions in the first place in situations where they arise automatically for you, i.e., to not have certain phobias at all.

> the sort of issues I'd associate with nervousness

Have you considered that you might not have a full understanding and appreciation for human psychology and the wide variance among humans?

native_samples4y ago

"It's only unfalsifiable if you ignore a person's previous experience and accomplishments, refusing to acknowledge anything other than your own interview as an accurate gauge of the person's skills."

Which is often the right thing to do unless you have very specific knowledge of that experience e.g. a referral, because so many people flat out lie about their experience and accomplishments. If you can't directly verify it, the accuracy is so low it's best ignored.

As for your experience, I'm glad to hear you're now happily self employed (so am I!). How are you proving your skills to customers, if you can't handle job interviews? Or are you making a product?

"Have you considered that you might not have a full understanding and appreciation for human psychology and the wide variance among humans?"

I have an average such understanding, having lived an average life. But the problem remains: someone who claims to be able to do a job fine but can't demonstrate that capability when asked, is from an employer's perspective best avoided. That isn't a flaw in the interviewing process, that's the point of it! The reasons why someone can't demonstrate it are irrelevant because there's no better alternative available, and anyway, someone who can't handle the pressure of a job interview is very likely to crack in other situations. You claim it's not true and there's something psychologically unique about interviewing, but, I don't really believe this and clearly neither do other people doing hiring.

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