<story><title>Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study</title><url>https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/07/tech-job-interviews-anxiety/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>koheripbal</author><text>One trend I&amp;#x27;ve noticed that is markedly different from when I started programming in 1998, is how dependent we&amp;#x27;ve become to program via Google&amp;#x2F;StackExchange searches.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not sure I know how to write anything from scratch anymore, because I just search&amp;#x2F;read&amp;#x2F;alter&amp;#x2F;test.  The breadth of what I work on is 100x wider than it used to be, and so I&amp;#x27;ve become absolutely dependent on quickly reading docs, copying code found online, and then deep diving into testing and rolling it out the door.&lt;p&gt;I deliver a TON more, but I&amp;#x27;m convinced I&amp;#x27;d bomb literally every interview I go to today.  Today, for example, I updated our firewall rules, updated some Java business logic, tweaked some javascipt and PHP on the site, reversed an odd macro email-phishing virus we got, configured a new RDS server VM for clients, and updated some network GPOs.  20 years ago, I would have never worked on ALL of those things in the same week - let alone the same day.&lt;p&gt;Maybe we should interview with small take-home tasks to be submitted with some write-ups to test how people research, reason, and write-up problems, rather than writing code on the spot on a whiteboard.  ...but maybe that&amp;#x27;s just me.</text></item><item><author>lrem</author><text>People bomb, including good people. That is sadly part of the system.&lt;p&gt;Once I had this candidate. Damn, I know my questions are deceptively simple on purpose, but he literally couldn&amp;#x27;t do anything. Not even a trivial brute force. Not even any related simple knowledge questions. Couldn&amp;#x27;t tell an average from a median. The only good thing I could write in the feedback was &amp;quot;seems to know some basic syntax&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;It was quite a learning moment to read that everyone else was praising how this was the most brilliant candidate they&amp;#x27;ve seen in years. Well, mine was the interview just before lunch, in a schedule that was atypically later than usual. I guess starting an interview after most people start their lunch break was asking for it. He also got hired - apparently the committee agreed that &amp;quot;can&amp;#x27;t think when hungry&amp;quot; is not really that important a flaw.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>OliverJones</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve been doing this for a LOOONG time. Early on, the core skill for a programmer was intensive in-depth knowledge of the language being used.   We all talked a good game about what we called &amp;quot;reusable software,&amp;quot; but yeah. Talk.&lt;p&gt;Now things are TOTALLY different. Doing a good job requires extensive, encyclopedic, knowledge of what&amp;#x27;s out there, how well it works, and how to integrate it.  npm, nuget, maven, anaconda, we all know the drill. In a day&amp;#x27;s work it&amp;#x27;s much less necessary to implement an algorithm from memory.&lt;p&gt;What should programmers know from memory?  Simple stuff like fizzbuzz. The difference between TCP and UDP. What DNS is for. If SQL data&amp;#x27;s involved the difference between JOIN and LEFT JOIN.&lt;p&gt;And, if they&amp;#x27;re experienced, they must be able to describe intelligently how their own stuff fit into the bigger system they worked on.  Because there&amp;#x27;s always a bigger system.&lt;p&gt;If they&amp;#x27;re being hired to be a tech rep to an *sshole customer, possibly their performance under pressure matters a lot. Otherwise, not.&lt;p&gt;This business of high stakes quiz questions serves just one purpose: feeding the ego of the interviewer. &amp;quot;We have high standards!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Yeah, so high that we wouldn&amp;#x27;t hire Jesus of Nazareth to be a storyteller.</text></comment>
<story><title>Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills: study</title><url>https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/07/tech-job-interviews-anxiety/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>koheripbal</author><text>One trend I&amp;#x27;ve noticed that is markedly different from when I started programming in 1998, is how dependent we&amp;#x27;ve become to program via Google&amp;#x2F;StackExchange searches.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not sure I know how to write anything from scratch anymore, because I just search&amp;#x2F;read&amp;#x2F;alter&amp;#x2F;test.  The breadth of what I work on is 100x wider than it used to be, and so I&amp;#x27;ve become absolutely dependent on quickly reading docs, copying code found online, and then deep diving into testing and rolling it out the door.&lt;p&gt;I deliver a TON more, but I&amp;#x27;m convinced I&amp;#x27;d bomb literally every interview I go to today.  Today, for example, I updated our firewall rules, updated some Java business logic, tweaked some javascipt and PHP on the site, reversed an odd macro email-phishing virus we got, configured a new RDS server VM for clients, and updated some network GPOs.  20 years ago, I would have never worked on ALL of those things in the same week - let alone the same day.&lt;p&gt;Maybe we should interview with small take-home tasks to be submitted with some write-ups to test how people research, reason, and write-up problems, rather than writing code on the spot on a whiteboard.  ...but maybe that&amp;#x27;s just me.</text></item><item><author>lrem</author><text>People bomb, including good people. That is sadly part of the system.&lt;p&gt;Once I had this candidate. Damn, I know my questions are deceptively simple on purpose, but he literally couldn&amp;#x27;t do anything. Not even a trivial brute force. Not even any related simple knowledge questions. Couldn&amp;#x27;t tell an average from a median. The only good thing I could write in the feedback was &amp;quot;seems to know some basic syntax&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;It was quite a learning moment to read that everyone else was praising how this was the most brilliant candidate they&amp;#x27;ve seen in years. Well, mine was the interview just before lunch, in a schedule that was atypically later than usual. I guess starting an interview after most people start their lunch break was asking for it. He also got hired - apparently the committee agreed that &amp;quot;can&amp;#x27;t think when hungry&amp;quot; is not really that important a flaw.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>blisterpeanuts</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not just you :)
A much more realistic way to test people is to tell them to bring their laptop, point to a problem on the whiteboard and say &amp;quot;here, solve it, and use whatever resources you need.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m somewhat like you; I do a wide variety of tasks every day and simply can&amp;#x27;t keep all the different rules and syntaxes in my head.  I&amp;#x27;m terrible at tests anyway and would probably bomb a FAANG interview badly because of my lousy memory.&lt;p&gt;As an interviewer, I would rather someone be generally smart, have a good work ethic and lots of experience solving problems.  In the long run that seems more useful than being able to write computer programs on a piece of paper in a conference room.</text></comment>