Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshwcomeau | Hacker News Reader

What's frustrating for me is I tend to choke in high-stress situations like this.

Obviously you can't trust a generic todo app in someone's GitHub, but some people have a very unique set of projects and it's clear that it isn't Stack Overflow copy and paste. By not looking at their GitHub at all, you're ignoring a huge signal as to the applicant's coding ability, as well as organizational skills, git fluency, etc.

EDIT: that said, even on my worst day I can handle basic fizz-buzz problems. As long as the screener is basic enough, and only step 1 in a larger process, I have no complaints.

View on HN

What's frustrating for me is I tend to choke in high-stress situations like this.

I'd rather find this out in an interview than during a critical sprint. That's part of the reason I do it this way. I'm interested in your work habits and personality as much as your code. I make my interviews as "low stress" as possible. A coder who can't code for me for 15 to 30 minutes is a big red flag.

you're invalidating months/years of open-source work

I'm not "invalidating" anything. I'm just doing my job as efficiently as possible, which is to assess your ability to contribute to my team.

> I'd rather find this out in an interview than during a critical sprint.

I think that's a false equivalence. Crunch isn't like an evaluation.

There's already a joke about this, where the interviewer is verbally abusive to the interviewee to "test if they work well under stress." (Not to say that you're doing anything wrong, just that I don't think your gleaning the correct information from such a thing).

Yeah, as another commenter said, an interview is not the same as a critical sprint. I don't mean that I find coding stressful, I mean that I find the social aspect of being interviewed stressful, and it's hard for me to get in the problem-solving state of mind when in that situation.

I don't think you can argue that you're not invalidating someone's experience (within the context of their suitability for the position) if you don't look at any of the code they've written outside an interview process, because it's self-evident that there are candidates that are talented programmers who cannot demonstrate those skills effectively during an interview.

You can argue about how insignificant of a minority that is, though. I'm a senior developer who has been offered most of the jobs he's applied for because I _have_ been able to prove basic code literacy during an interview (and have typically surprised employers by how effective I can be, when not in an interview situation). So if the _screening_ bar is low and if you're taking steps to ensure that the handicap of social anxiety is diminished, it may be a negligible percentage of candidates.

> I'd rather find this out in an interview than during a critical sprint.

There is no relation between those.

> By not looking at their GitHub at all, you're invalidating months/years of open-source work

I disagree. Nobody is invalidating anything. Those contributions still exist, people still benefit from them and you still retain your experience. That being said, while they don't directly contribute to your employment chances in this case, your experience does.

Yeah, I mean that they're invalidated in the scope of "material used to evaluate whether a candidate is suitable for the position".

Definitely no arguments that open-source work has merit far beyond its impact on hireability :)

Practice, he just said fizzbuzz is a good example, if you choke up implementing fizzbuzz and consider it high stress situation. You don't deserve to a job, not even as a junior. I can understand if you were told to implement a red-black tree or some esoteric algorithm.

You misunderstand. I don't mean that fizzbuzz is so challenging that it causes stress. I mean that I have social anxiety that causes my brain to not work during interviews.

Doesn't matter how good you are at coding if you're having a panic attack.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com