
Does Stress Impact Technical Interview Performance? - azhenley
https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/15/it_hiring_whiteboard/
======
jsiepkes
> He said there's some support in academic literature to indicate the women
> have more performance anxiety than men, but he stressed that's a gross
> oversimplification because men experience performance anxiety too.

I (as a man) can absolutely work under stressful conditions such as dealing
with a major outage, even if there is a bunch of people looking over my
shoulder.

However having a bunch of people looking over my shoulder waiting for me to
write on a whiteboard what they have in mind and then judge me, that's going
to be a problem for me.

~~~
treeman79
Drove 4 hours to an interview. (Drive should have taken 2). Showed up exactly
On time but very frazzled. Then had to sit in front of 20+ engineering’s and
solve various puzzles. First 3 minutes were me staring at screen trying to
remember what programming was.

After settling down I proceeded to solve problem after problem effortlessly.

Later in career I got very sick.

I would be doing presentations while having minor strokes (TIAs) I shouldn’t
have been working, But I had no options if I lost my job. Doctors didn’t yet
know what cause was.

So literally I had to perform or die.

Yea that is stress.

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fastball
I think we all agree that there are a lot of improvements that could be made
in hiring processes.

At the same time, the idea that "ability to handle stress" isn't important for
software engineering seems (to me) a silly one.

So yes, if you're _trying_ to assess technical ability and you're failing at
that, it's a problem. But it is not discriminatory (in the bad way) to weed
out candidates who can't handle stress in an occupation that can be _very_
stressful. Though it was pointed out in the article that "public" vs "private"
settings made a difference, so your hiring process should reflect whichever of
those settings is more likely to come up if the candidate is actually hired.

At the end of the day, the goal of an interview should be to assess whether or
not that person will be able to do their job, so you want interview conditions
to match working conditions as much as possible. Unfortunately every job is
different so there is no one-size-fits-all solution.

~~~
plmpsu
I would argue that the kind of stress involved is different. I.e., social
stress, as I experience in whiteboard interviews, has nothing to do with the
stress of an impending deadline.

~~~
fastball
Well that's what's tough – I would say I've experienced both.

For example, when you're in charge of a production service, and that service
goes down, there is a lot of social stress to "just fix it", oftentimes under
non-ideal conditions (just like solving a problem on the spot in an
interview).

~~~
seba_dos1
> (just like solving a problem on the spot in an interview)

I don't think that's a conclusion you can actually make, it's still a very
different kind of stress, especially for someone introverted. When I'm being
evaluated, the stress is crippling me - I'm overly nervous and can mess up
even the simplest things; even finding correct words can be hard. However,
when I'm in a urgent situation where something needs fixing, or deadline is
passing, I become focused, assertive (but also easily irritated) and take
charge much more easily than usual - and that short-term stress actually helps
there. Those are very different situations that make people react differently.

------
kerkeslager
This is, yet again, a very bad nontechnical journalistic writeup of much more
technical research.

"Whiteboard coding interviews" are not what was studied--the terms the actual
study uses seem to be "public" versus "private" interviews, and the finding
was that public interviews tested ability to handle anxiety (not stress, as
some commenters are misidentifying) rather than coding ability. Critically,
_both forms of interview studied are whiteboard interviews_.

The Register's writeup is inaccurate worthless crap, demonstrating either
incompetence or dishonesty on the part of the authors. Let's try to link to
original studies in the future.

~~~
falcolas
Whiteboard interviews, in every situation I've seen and heard of, are always
performed with someone in the room. As such, an interview where the candidate
is working alone on the whiteboard is an artificial construct for the purpose
of this study.

~~~
kerkeslager
If I'm understanding correctly, the private interview still entails the
candidate presenting their solution once it's complete. I've never interviewed
a candidate via this method, but I've been interviewed this way.

------
azhenley
One of the authors of the study wrote a blog post [1] summarizing the findings
from the paper [2].

[1] [https://medium.com/@gameweld/the-case-for-the-private-
techni...](https://medium.com/@gameweld/the-case-for-the-private-technical-
interview-4a92947e1692)

[2]
[http://chrisparnin.me/pdf/stress_FSE_20.pdf](http://chrisparnin.me/pdf/stress_FSE_20.pdf)

------
NoOneNew
So, I'm an introvert and in my early 30s. Since middle school, I've forced
myself to do public speaking. I'm okay at it. I do pretty well in small scale
business presentations and I'm above average in mid scale (50-100 people)
professional public speaking events. I can keep people engaged but I'm not the
greatest by any stretch.

I've done 2 whiteboard interviews. I bombed them because the questions are
incredibly stupid and have zero real world application. And I'm a guy. I know
plenty of women that run circles around me when it comes to interviews and
public speaking. This paper's weak argument that women are incapable should be
shot down.

Stop blaming everyday people. This is diverting from the issue of wannabe
clever interview processes. 90% of whiteboard questions are stupid in nature.
People with real world experience typically have a hard time with uber
abstract questions that never come up in day to day.

In truth, a person that bombs one of these interviews should be immediately
hired. It shows they can't accept stupid thoughts. Regardless if they're a man
or woman.

~~~
falcolas
> This paper's weak argument that women are incapable should be shot down.

The argument is that, in the study: All women in supervised interviews failed
the interview. All women in unsupervised interviews passed the interview.

The sample size is too small to draw conclusions, but it definitely opens up
further avenues of inquiry that _should_ be done.

------
motohagiography
Whiteboard coding interviews are a hazing ritual for initiation and not really
a filter for programming proficiency. The headline is nonsense, and since they
don't try to establish anything intrinsically feminine or masculine that this
process is against, it is very misleading.

However, whiteboard architecture interviews for solving certain higher level
classes of problems do provide a signal for problem solving ability. Design is
a narrative process that you make concrete with diagrams, so it's more suited
to an interview situation.

The trial-by-trivia approach of coding interviews creates a culture where you
get a company full of people who shared copies of the exam answers with the
people they referred in for the hiring bonus. A company succeeds on the
quality of its products, which is the effect of the quality of design and
architecture thinking, and not on the ability of its staff to perform live
optimizations on fizzbuzz.

~~~
falcolas
The impact by gender in the original study was: All women in the supervised
whiteboard interviews failed. All women in the unsupervised whiteboard
interviews passed.

It's too small a group to draw proper conclusions, but it definitely warrants
a larger study.

------
skohan
As someone who has interviewed dozens of candidates in the past few months, I
try not to frame it as a performance by the candidate, but rather as a series
of professional conversations with a potential colleague.

In this context, a white-board interview would normally come later in the
process, when we already have a rapport with the candidate, and the goal would
not be to "catch" a candidate with tricky questions, but rather to see how
well a candidate is able to reason through a problem collaboratively in real
time, which is something I would expect to happen in the team setting with
some regularity. It's even more of a team chemistry evaluation as a problem
solving test.

Probably earlier in the process I would ask a candidate to complete an
individual assignment in their own time. This would be the opportunity to see
what kind of work they are capable of producing.

~~~
kerkeslager
> In this context, a white-board interview would normally come later in the
> process, when we already have a rapport with the candidate, and the goal
> would not be to "catch" a candidate with tricky questions, but rather to see
> how well a candidate is able to reason through a problem collaboratively in
> real time, which is something I would expect to happen in the team setting
> with some regularity. It's even more of a team chemistry evaluation as a
> problem solving test.

If your goal is to see how they reason through a problem collaboratively, then
doesn't it make sense to actually _collaborate_ with them? I.e. instead of
asking questions, take a problem that _you_ don't know the answer to either,
and team up on it.

When I'm solving a problem I sometimes do use a whiteboard, but that depends
on the nature of the problem--if it's heavily data structure oriented, for
example, then a whiteboard is useful for drawing out the data structures. I
don't think I've ever written a line of code or pseudocode on a whiteboard
board as part of collaborative problem solving: that's just not useful when
you could be writing actual code on a shared screen.

TL;DR: While I agree with your goals here, I don't think the method we're
discussing actually achieves those goals.

~~~
skohan
I _would_ approach a whiteboard interview collaboratively. Generally I would
leave it up to the candidate to drive the problem solving in this case, but I
would expect them to ask questions and get input rather than just sit back and
let them sweat. If they were going down the wrong track I might also ask
questions to nudge them in the right direction. Seeing how they engage in this
kind of process would be precisely what I want to understand.

------
christiansakai
Every now and then in HN the topic of interviews come up, and usually bashing
DS&A interviews.

As someone who failed around 8 interviews (combined phones + onsites) for
FAANG/Unicorns I am still a supporter of DS&A interview. I finally now work in
one of the FAANG/Unicorns, after solving around 400 Leetcode questions.

For those who are against DS&A questions, tell me how you as a company that
wants to interview candidates, can afford to interview as many as possible as
fair as possible as straightforward as possible as little time possible and
everyone having equally strong skill set? You can't hire them all. You can
only hire few ones but reject the others. Without some x metrics that can be
seen easily you'll get into trouble rejecting other candidates.

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rdurbha
Most interviews (in any field) are broken because they mostly reduce to gut
feel of the interviewer. No matter how much we think our intuition is
sanctimonious, it is not. It does not matter what your IQ is or how successful
you are in the field, your intuition is useless (or lets say will be very
biased). Intuition works in very few places with specific conditions (Like
chess). Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate, writes about all this(based on his
research) in his book "Thinking, fast and slow"

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Ballas
Despite the horrible click-bait title, it was actually an interesting read!

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anm89
No

Edit: written when the title was: "whiteboard interviews are anti woman"

