Impostor syndrome strikes men just as hard as women in technical interviews

My goal is to not hire the bottom 50% of the workforce in a given discipline. IMO, you're better off building teams that make the average+ person more productive.

I'm pretty sure you're being hyperbolic, but that sounds hellish. I have GAD and dread interviewing so much that I'd forego unemployment and just work as a Task Rabbit or something.

To preempt the inevitable responses: Yes, I do have a family to support and, yes, I have worked as a Task Rabbit or done manual labor when faced with similar situations in the past.

Let me elaborate a little.

My dreams are none of an interviewer's bloody business. I'm here to work not share the things that give me hope in my darkest moments or the aspirations that shaped my adulthood. I find this question very creepy and extremely unprofessional.

I could maybe figure out a "lesser dream" to share, but then what's the point of this question? To find out the most intimate thing that I'd be willing to share?

Where I see myself in ten years is a meaningless question to ask after I've had, what, fifteen minutes of exposure to a company's culture? Maybe I'm the kind of person who sees themselves in management over ten years, but you've got such an amazing working culture that you could convince the most ambitious career builder to stick to engineering instead. Or vice-versa. Or do you really want to hire the kind of people who get an idea in their head, and then do it, even if it takes them ten years and it's really, really, really bad idea?

I've heard all sorts of ways to justify these things. That it's a way to see if a candidate can relate to you and evaluate their empathy -- if anything, this will say more about an interviewer's biases than about anything else. To see if a candidate can communicate about abstract matters -- as if there are not countless questions about ethics, aesthetics and epistemology in our profession that you need to start prying into personal things. That it's a way to see if they're "career-oriented", whatever that means, as if someone who writes amazing code but wouldn't hustle for a promotion is a bad hire.

So far, it hasn't turned out to be a bad idea.

Hey, I ask a lot of these questions in consulting. What I’m looking for is to tell if a) you can communicate a point clearly b) if you can talk generally about your career and are growth oriented.

If you said that field evolves rapidly bit above that would be a good answer. If you span it as a joke “surely writing angular 25, the last web framework ever” even better.

I wouldn’t ask the dreams question, but the coolest question is loaded with coolest, I would say “tell me about a previous project you enjoyed working on” and see if you have had a good project you are passionate about.

- Anyone who skips those questions are rejected outright. If you're not willing to put in a little time you're not interested enough to be considered. You'd be surprised how many people skip these questions.

- If you've done something crazy cool or interesting it's a plus but if not it isn't a negative.

- Can you communicate something that's a bit abstract?

- Relevant jokes are usually seen as a plus.

Talk about something that you can sound excited/relatable talking about. Friends, family, volunteer work, that all works.

Of course, I spent the first 14 of those years in Dallas and the first 9.5 of those at a poor choice of company. I spent years having applications ignored. I sometimes wonder if thinking like this had something to do with that.

> women leave interviewing.io roughly 7 times as often as men after they do badly in an interview.

That could indicate a more general difference in men and women that could be effectively targeted to keep more women in tech.

Nor were tech interviews (usually), until about 10 years ago.

What are the odds that everyone in your interview is dumb/inexperienced/busy or an asshole versus the odds that it's just you?

Doing this sort of interviews on programmers probably wouldn't work even if current programmer interviews do suck for both parties and they're mostly embarrassing, too.

I'm guessing here and might be wrong but all these professions have a rather fixed set of limited skills they have to know in order to qualify. Teachers have to teach a certain curriculum: on top of that they can be bad teachers or good teachers but basically what they have to achieve each year for each class is known and predicated. Firefighters have their training and as a baseline it's sufficient to be a good team player and just execute. Firefighters will have to improvise at times, and they will have opportunities to make some really good judgement calls based on their experience alone, but that's sort of extra. You're still a good firefighter if you just stick with doing it by the book.

Now, the same for programmers would be something like "Must know Java and we'll hire you". This didn't end very well in the IT bubble twenty years ago. Knowing Java inside out doesn't make you a good programmer, not even a good Java programmer, there's so much more to that. Would you hire an artist based on "Must know how to paint in oil, watercolor, and draw in charcoal"? That's where the real skills begin, not suffice.

If you're a Java programmer it doesn't mean you can just sit down and program anything for any company: there are hundred domain-specific skills and questions, all sorts of CS theory of which you know one or two fractions based on what you've worked on before, and a very specific mindset that makes a good programmer for a specific role. To some extent you can be a generalist and learn a bit of this and that but especially for heavy specialists it could take years to transition from one specific subdomain to another.

All programmers are cathedral builders but they will all make very different cathedrals and they are continuously requested to make cathedrals that have not been built before. Then there are other jobs where they follow the blueprints and produce a cathedral one after another, meeting the same requirements each time.

I'm not saying programmers are superb to these other professions when it comes to complexity and depth. It's just that a programmer's job can be about anything: the number of problem domains is endless and more so as the world becomes more software than hardware. You can do so much with computers and programming that whatever baseline there exists alone doesn't yet take you anywhere as a programmer.

There's the fizzbuzz level of a baseline, there's the skillset, buzzwords and qualifications baseline, and there are a lot of other baselines that need to be met. That's why you need to figure out a way to interview programmers that takes all this into account.

There's no single interview that could be used to qualify people for being hired as a programmer because the requirements are never fixed.

I mean I've been working there for nearly 8 years now and haven't gotten fired yet so it should be alright. But still. [/impostor syndrome]

Still is capitalism here...

In one conception, "a job" means that your boss sets out a list of tasks for you to do, and you do them, consistently and reliably. As long as you do what you are told, you will be paid the salary agreed upon. If you do it long enough, you will be promoted. Under this conception, there is no reason for a job interview to do anything other than ascertain whether you are qualified to do the tasks listed in the job description.

In the other conception, "a job" means that you're responsible for looking around the organization, identifying ways to either generate more revenue, make customers happier, or eliminate inefficiencies, and then go do them. Your boss's job is to remove roadblocks and introduce you to coworkers that can help you. The specific tasks you will be working on are unknown at the time of hire, and it is part of your job description to discover them. If you generate value for the organization, you will be promoted. Under this conception, it makes sense for a job interview to push you as far as possible, because if it turns out you're more qualified than the position, the position can be extended so you have more impact and get correspondingly higher compensation.

When people with the first conception apply to jobs with the second conception, they wonder why their employer demands so much of them, why there are no clear guidelines, and why they don't advance while people hired after them shoot right by them and end up becoming managers. When people with the second conception apply to jobs with the first conception, they get bored, step on other peoples' toes, make political enemies, and end up getting kicked out.

Adding to the complication, your boss is many companies is far more likely to hold the second conception of what a job is, because that's how he got promoted. Good managers can adjust their managerial style to make both types of employees productive, but bad managers assume everyone is just like them and complain about how employees are so lazy these days, while those employees complain about how their manager doesn't know what he wants.

Also complicating things, the first type of job is dying out. In many cases, they're being replaced by automation, and the jobs themselves disappear in favor of machines. In other cases, their boss is being replaced by an app, and those jobs become contract positions for Uber or Postmates or DoorDash or Amazon.

I'm pretty sure, most of us have come across folks who pretend to know something, you ask them easy, little, but esoteric questions, that prove whether or not they even have knowledge in something.

At least for big firms, this isn't out of the realm of possibility. Small companies... I get it. They have to then base it off experience, references and gut feelings.

I've probably exceeded 20 before if you count lunch and meeting VPs/directors toward the end.

I've been brought in as an "expert" on all sorts of things, with hardly any interviewing. Just show up and be given the keys to the kingdom.

Granted I've almost always been able to deliver, but they mostly took my word for it up front.

Still, after dropping out, it was hard to avoid constant feelings of inferiority. Even though people obviously didn't mean it this way, I was interpreting every statement as having an implicit suffix of "and you're stupid because you dropped out". It took me years to realize that people really aren't that much of jerks, and a surprising few actually give a crap about you dropping out.

I do think that, for engineering, a year of experience is worth just as much as a year in school if you are willing to spend evenings self-teaching.

My interests tend to be a bit more academic (which don't appear to be willing to overlook a lack of a bachelors), and since there's not a single Math professor in the NYC area that will take me on as a PhD student without a degree (I think I might have emailed literally all of them), I've actually started back in school, so hopefully that'll kill the complex.

So, as is normal in life, I expect it is complicated.

That's cleared by recruiting, HR, and legal from the SF startup I work at. I did it today.

One of the many unintended consequences of anti-discrimination law

Interviews are subjective, and what I've seen recently is the expectation is that you solve Leetcode questions within 10-15 mins with the optimum solution (yes, this was told to me my several recruiters). Sure, so basically you're asking me to memorize as many Leetcode optimum solutions as I can.

No thanks, if you want to hire Leetcode monkeys go ahead and see how that works out. On top of this, when you add concious and unconcious bias what are your chances of being hired?

That is, I think this somewhat describes me too. However, I don't know as that I can give the advice of "ignore practicing interviews."

That's not easy. I work remote, and live in a place where there just isn't a network available. That would leave online and I usually just hang out on HN.

People should really stop using that place as a credible source of information. The very nature of Reddit skews the posts that show up in favor of either over-the-top success or major depression. You never hear about the middle ground (the guy/gal that gets a so-so job in CS but still has time to spend with his/her kids on the weekends).

As for the student thing, this is industry's fault. It's an evolution of "no one got fired for buying IBM". In this case, they're buying the interview techniques of the big players (Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc) since they are perceived as bringing in top performers. So someone at or near entry level is going to have to deal with bullshit HackerRank tests until the industry changes its hiring practices.

You should never study for interviews. If the company isn't asking questions relevant to the work or you can't answer those types of questions then it's best to not work there.

General interview skills are different than studying CS problems.

As for not being able to risk rejection, what is there to risk besides time? I've heard of people practicing for 3+ months. In that same time period, one could probably get 10 onsite interviews and a lot more phone screens in. The fundamental problem is the lack of feedback on rejection (although it's possible to get randomly hired while doing this type of "practice").

If you had very low self esteem and someone asked you what the result of 1 + 1 was, you would probably still be 100% confident that the answer is 2.

If your emotions or self esteem gets in the way of your logical reasoning, then your reasoning skills were probably not that great to begin with.

But why is it a big deal to anyone else besides those folks' friends, family, etc.?

(And, perhaps, to some hypothetical peddlers of self-help books targeted at those with impostor syndrome; my unentrepreneurial mind can't see any other way to profit from it, but you get the idea.)