> Surprising numbers of engineers look great on paper but can’t write working code when tested, even accounting for interview anxiety.
How have you accounted for interview anxiety?
How have you accounted for interview anxiety?
1. I try to make the parameters of the interview as friendly as possible — language of their choice, don’t have to worry about code style or computational complexity, or talk while they’re coding, just write working code that solves the problem. They can use google freely. I’m there as a resource to talk through their solution, answer questions, and help them get unstuck if needed.
2. The algorithm to solve the question doesn’t require a trick and there are many viable solutions so most candidates can verbally explain to me a working algorithm quickly, +- a couple edge cases.
3. Candidates often get visibly flustered or hung up on irrelevant details, or unsure what exactly I want for them, and I focus on noticing this. I try to guide them down a correct path if they’re close and tell them not to over-architect if they start doing that.
Despite all this, too manly candidates do not have a dependable metaprocess for writing working code - a common scenario is they write code, it gives the wrong result, they drop some print statements to debug, but can’t effectively trace the program to figure out why they’re getting the debug output and so they guess and try to fix the wrong thing, causing further problems. I know that some of this is nerves but it can’t account for all of it.
Why not?
If you've never experienced severe situational anxiety, you may not know how debilitating it can be.
And then, maddeningly, perhaps just minutes after the interview is over, you return to your "normal" self, and start to think about what you would have done in that situation if you weren't nervous.
It's basically stage fright, which can be terrifying if you're not used to the stage.
Still, I do have some EQ. A lot of candidates exhibit visible anxiety and then get into a rhythm and calm down when they start coding. Or they visibly calm down once I start asking them questions about how they're thinking and coax them towards viable implementation. On the flip side, a lot of candidates actually exhibit overconfidence running in the wrong direction, which I try to lightly mitigate but can't prevent in all cases without giving an unfair advantage.