
Interview Nightmares - shauns
Like lots of people at the moment I found myself back on the job market. Things have been going well, but an interview yesterday included a (virtual equivalent) whiteboard coding exercise.<p>Now, I’m not a huge fan of these and don’t use them in my own hiring. But as a dev of ~15y experience, still very much hands on, I should be able to handle it.<p>I found myself drawing an absolute blank. The exercise was nothing too complicated really, but the brain would simply not engage. <i>Nothing</i> was working.<p>As interviews go it was the worst experience I’ve ever had - I spent maybe twenty minutes in this blocked state but it felt like forever.<p>So I’m now feeling pretty depressed about job prospects, coding ability, my capability as a human being etc. Sharing or talking about a problem always helps to process it, so I thought 1. Why not do that with anonymous internet strangers, and 2. Why not provide a place for people to do the same. So it would be great if people felt able to share their stories too.<p>And for those of you also unexpectedly back in the job market: best of luck, you <i>will</i> get there.
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aguilar
Hi. I went through the same problem. After passing a hard online test on
Codility I had a live coding interview with a much simpler problem I just
froze and could not solve on time. I found this article here on HN and it
helped me understand what happened. [https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/07/tech-job-
interviews-anxiety/](https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/07/tech-job-interviews-
anxiety/)

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shauns
Thanks for sharing - and that article is really interesting.

Being "good at hiring" \-- and hence having better people -- is such an
advantage for an organisation, it always surprises me that too often we fall
back on seemingly default hiring processes, and we don't look at the sorts of
optimisations we could do to help surface the best candidates for a role.

~~~
adsjhdashkj
What's a good method of (technical) hiring in your view?

For some context on my question:

I'm part of a startup-ish group of people who, frankly, don't have a tech
hiring group. We have ~25 engineers _(i 'm losing track these days lol)_, but
no real manager-engineer bridge. Which translates to, we have a bunch of
people who code but none who know how to hire. Unfortunately, i am one of
those responsible for hiring, and i've got no clue what to do.

We've gone through various attempts over the years. I've been part of ~15
hires for the company - most of our current tech side, to one degree or
another. We heavily value hiring the "person" \- so we try to suss out people
values and cultural fit, but i think we really suffer from being able to
evaluate the technical ability of the candidate.

We're not worried about hiring the top talent of SF - we probably couldn't
afford that anyway. But we do want bright people who can grow in the problems
we're solving. This is where i'm struggling to improve on, as a person hiring.

Thoughts?

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shauns
Growth Mindset might be a bit of a wooly term but that tends to be what I look
for. I want people who continually get better. There are lots of resources on
specific things you can discuss for this. For me, I think simply asking "what
was a recent new thing you had to learn" opens up a good conversation.

For ascertaining whether someone meets a technical bar -- the gold standard
has to be facilitating some way where they can do some actual work with you.
That might be v difficult depending on nature of stack, tech debt, etc. But
the closer you can make that sort of process to what would really be
happening, the better. Coding exercises really only prove someone is good at
coding exercises -- that may or may not have any relevancy to what you do I
think.

~~~
adsjhdashkj
> I think simply asking "what was a recent new thing you had to learn" opens
> up a good conversation.

Really appreciate the reply, that's a great question.

> the gold standard has to be facilitating some way where they can do some
> actual work with you.

We've actually done this, recently. It worked okay. We identified a few
problems with that iteration for us though:

1\. We chose real projects, but we felt limited by finding a project where the
scope could be small enough for the developer to create it to a meaningful
extent and not be bogged down in planning. Projects without meaningful
planning however felt so simple that i didn't feel it would challenge anyone.
2\. I really hated giving interviews "real" work. Which is to say, it was work
we as a company needed - but that felt too easy to be seen as exploiting the
applicant - for good reason. 3\. I felt disconnected from the applicants
mindset. I want to understand how they think on a problem - what things
they're skipping for time, what pain points in the application need testing,
what things they think need to be abstracted, etc.

I did like how it gave them time to solve the problem themselves. As someone
who struggles with.. stage fright _(for lack of a better term)_ , interviews
are hell for me. I want to hire people even if they're terrified and draw a
blank.

My next set of interviews coming up i'm thinking i'll try a combination of a
take-home project, but also something pair programmed. Perhaps a take-home,
and then we review in a pair program after? I want them to be able to not be
under pressure, but i also need some insight on their mind.

Unfortunately i have no idea offhand how to design a take-home that is both
simple but not brain dead. I don't want it to take long, i don't want to
riddle it with complex algorithm based requirements either. My initial gut is
to mock up some requirements - after implementing them myself - that have real
world value. How do they choose to abstract database access for unit testing?
What do they choose to cache with? Did they consider cache invalidation?
Something like this.. i guess.

My final concern is that we'll be hiring for specific languages, but i'd like
to be able to hire someone wanting to learn and use those languages. Partially
because it promotes growth, but also because it opens the job market. Namely,
we're a Rust shop and i don't want to hire only people who know Rust - but i
also don't want to hire evaluate someone based on a take-home in another
language.

I'm debating offering a pair programming option for the take-home if they're
not comfortable with Rust. I would expect their take-home to be far worse, as
so many concepts would be new.. so i'm unsure if this would be valuable.

Thanks for the reply, and if you have any more thoughts i'd love to hear them
:)

Best of luck on the market!

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giantg2
Don't worry. Even if you're a shitty developer (which I doubt), I'll always be
shittier.

I once had an interview that was so bad that I asked the manager at the end
why he even gave me an interview. He wanted a UI expert. His posting didn't
mention that requirement and my resume didn't list that type of experience. It
was a huge waste of our time.

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duggable
Ooof, that sounds awful.

Don't worry, there's no way you're a shittier developer than me. Maybe we
should form a club.

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giantg2
I don't think so. Pretty sure it's only a matter of time before I get fired.
I'm very demoralized by the past treatment the company has given me. I moved
to a new team but they just bounce me from technology to technology with no
training (Splunk, Tableau, Python, AWS). This will not allow me to become an
expert in anything. They aren't happy with my output. Because my prior
experience was FileNet and Neoxam, I don't have any career options.

~~~
duggable
Sorry friend. I don't have any advice, other than it sounds like it's time for
a new job. There are places that will treat you better out there. Maybe put
together a side project to learn a new technology that will make you more
employable?

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giantg2
Will it really be better at other places? The company I work for consistently
makes the top 10 in ComputerWorld's best places to work in IT list.

I did some very basic Android apps before. If I stick with the current job
long enough then I should get better at Python and AWS.

~~~
duggable
Best places to work surveys are garbage. Your experience isn't matching what
others might feel at the company. It's probably just a bad fit, which is okay.

Keep building experience, but start studying and applying for other jobs.

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DamonHD
I am fairly competent, am CTO of my nth start-up, have had fairly well paid
finance IT work in finance in London with multinational banks, etc, etc, and I
have still drawn a complete blank sometimes, and other times have bowled the
interviewers (and myself) over!

It happens. It's the equivalent of writer's block and the fear of the blank
page. Please just don't read too much into individual events.

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shauns
Thank you. Sleeping on it, and writing this post, has definitely bought things
back into perspective: we can all have off days.

It had been a while since I'd had this sort of negative experience, and what I
would say is it's re-reminded me to make sure my hiring in the future caters
for this sort of thing. Particularly for less experienced devs.

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rikroots
I suffered a brain freeze at an interview once. My brain freeze was not caused
by anxiety, but rather the Office Dog wandering into the interview room,
sitting down on my feet and shoving its snout firmly between my legs.

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ipi
I recently had an interview where I was supposed to record the screen while I
am solving the problem and share it with the interviewer. I couldn't do it. I
am one of those people who's mind goes blank when someone is standing behind
me and watching over the shoulders. The thought of recording my screen induced
the same feelings.

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sethammons
I once forgot how to write a simple join in SQL during an interview. Full
blank. It is like forgetting how to tie your shoes. The second I walked out of
the building, I instantly recalled the insanely simple task.

~~~
shauns
That is a perfect analogy!

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smtlaissezfaire
Thanks for posting. We've all been there.

This is something I'm working on solving:

[https://www.srchparty.com/](https://www.srchparty.com/)

