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Comment by intpx | Hacker News Reader

I recently went through a round of interviews for a job where strong communication skills are vital. One interview was just me responding to simulated emails in a shared google doc so the interviewer could see me work through the responses. In addition to witnessing my real time edits, I guess they also had the benefit of a higher level of confidence that the product was my actual work effort.

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Dear lord, that sounds horrible. I understand the reasoning, but corresponding with people — especially in formal settings — makes me anxious, and I end up composing and re-composing (and sometimes re-re-composing) a lot of my messages. The end result isn't bad, but if I were being watched and graded in real time I'm pretty sure I'd fail.

Sounds a lot better to me than live coding on a white board.

Yeah, it's a super relevant skill and something that doesn't go away (for me) in the interviewing environment (the way technical skills sometimes can).

I would take the coding on a white board instead of answering fake mails to be honest. But the job doesn't sound too attractive if correspondence is mostly with customers. Internal mails are way more informal and quicker to write.

Sounds like that type of job might not be a good fit for you? You’d always be anxious!

It might be the fact that people are monitoring how the sausage is made with the explicit purpose of judging that process.

But when working with people in the normal job, nobody is watching them type they just eat the sausage.

I can relate. I don’t have anxiety generally with work and have been praised on my interactions with customers. But I feel anxious during interviews because they are actively trying to judge me.

It's my opinion that interview anxiety is almost entirely unrelated to: how well someone works with a team; how well someone handles an emergency; and how well someone can related to and work with clients. Source: I've been repeatedly told, over decades, that I'm good or great at all those things—and I enjoy all of those things, for the most part, even when they're tough—but interviews make me anxious as fuck and I hate them (though I'm actually good at the talking parts—I just tend to lock up when someone is watching me work and judging me). It's a totally different thing.

In my experience that is a lot less true with customer facing jobs or jobs where there is an element of external facing presentation (like the note above). The candidate is going to get the same treatment from every crowd or customer.

If someone is doing an internal facing role, especially engineering, it may only come up during things like team stand ups, or certain types of design reviews, or not at all. So less of a problem.

It would not, and I wouldn’t apply in the first place! But I could do it if I had to.

Sounds like the interview would effectively filter out candidates that would not be a good fit for a job that is mostly corresponding with people.

IMHO, to the contrary: crafting one's message is a valid process for effective async communication.

Not if the job entails writing 50 of those per day and you can’t manage more than 5

Exactly. I have a friend who was a directional drill operator, and then moved to white collar work, and was super slow with writing letters. I think it was a him problem more than a blue collar work problem though.

That's a fair point, however these 50 would mostly fall in 5 or 10 categories.

A few templates, a couple of text expanders, and a brief mentoring in soft skills, active listening, and written comms would resolve any major issues.

Granted, Gaussian distribution guarantees that the above wouldn't cover all cases.

Crafting a message well is important but more often, fast writing and decision making skills are more important. Why do you think so many professors and managers write extremely short, almost informal sounding replies. If you're an excellent writer who takes 20 minutes typing up a single email and then need another 20 minutes to destress because emails in formal settings make you anxious then you probably aren't a good fit for that type of job.

> Why do you think so many professors and managers write extremely short, almost informal sounding replies.

Because they're positioned with higher status in a hierarchy?

If a student makes a mistake, the professor merely points out the mistake.

If a professor makes a mistake, a student will at least be uncertain whether a mistake was made, and will have to go to much greater length to point out the mistake.

Short and fast emails could just as well be a sign of someone who is bad at communicating.

My guess is that they're looking to see if you complete it in a reasonable time period, your initial draft is at least in the right ballpark (anyone experienced in tech support, team supervisorship, project management, etc can answer common emails almost by reflex) and it appears to be you, and not someone helping you.

I would imagine that, if anything, seeing you pause after an initial draft, adjust some grammar and tone, pause...even re-write a sentence or paragraph - and then say "done"...would impress, not detract.

This is commonly referred to as Yerkes-Dodson Law [1]. This is typically where one's performance, whilst performing a task and being watched while doing said task, will result in decreased output compared to if the individual was not being watched at all.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes%E2%80%93Dodson_law

Thanks for the formal name, I always knew it just as the "I can't go while you're watching" syndrome.

this sounds closer to pairing, which IS a real-world skill & experience for many jobs, than your typical white-board programming nonsense.

As far as your technique, drafting then editing down is a totally legit way to write. I wish more people did that!

Depends on how they’re grading. If they’re just grading on final output plus looking at the work process for authenticity you’d be fine. But a lot of people would probably needlessly grade on process.

I don't know about the GP, but if I interviewed you I would see that as a strong point in favour of you. It sounds like you proof read your emails and edit the things that aren't well composed. It's hard to find people who do that.

Then again, maybe I'm biased because I write the same sentence multiple times in quick succession. And I go back and re-write previous sentences if they don't flow well with what's coming next. But when people have watched me do it, they have only expressed wonder and admiration over it, never negative feelings.

What doesn't work is when someone starts verbally editing my first draft the instant I've typed it out. Yes, I know it's bad -- it's the first draft. I just needed to get something on the page to see where I should go next.

The cure for performance anxiety is to do more performing until it goes away.

Or to find a position in which such performance is not required.

Adaptation only goes so far. More training won't turn a dwarf into a basketball centre, or a heavyweight bodybuilder into a champion marathoner. Sometimes you've got to work with what you have, both in terms of abilities and limitations.

Intellectual and psychological limitations may be less manifestly visible but are no less real.

Performance anxiety goes away with repetition. I have plenty of personal experience with that and so do many others I know. This is not a special skill. You don't have to be a champion. You just get used to doing the performance and the anxiety goes away.

Just like if you're nervous about driving on the freeway, or flying in an airplane.

Heck, I remember buying my first phone answering machine. I froze up repeatedly trying to record the message. After a while, that problem went away.

If you're in your 20s and experiencing this, perhaps.

If you're in your 50s and it's still a constant problem, quite possibly not.

Again, people aren't infinitely malleable, and don't all fit in standard packages.

Even seasoned stage performers often face crippling anxiety before performances late in their careers. Others take their own lives, often at a young age. Dick Cavett is among those who've suffered crippling depression and taken extended leaves due to it.

Depression is a different problem from performance anxiety.

I'd appreciate seeing your sources on that.

They're distinctly different emotions. You might as well ask me for a cite that being angry and being happy are different emotions.

That's an assertion, not a source.

I think you're pulling my leg.

I think you're wrong.

If you don't have a source, you can simply say so.

At this point, I'll simply presume as much and move on.

Only if your anxiety is reasonable in the first place and your emotional regulation is normal.

I've been driving more than 20 years and almost none of the anxiety I experience because of it ever went away. If I know the roads already it's a little better, but every single day I have to power through the anxiety to get to where I need to be going. It doesn't get better.

Hotels give me anxiety even though I actually lived in a hotel for six months.

My husband developed anxiety later in life doing things he has done for years.

What you're talking about is just normal human emotions, when people refer to "performance anxiety" they are usually referring to an anxiety disorder. Crippling anxiety that doesn't spontaneously resolve.

Reminds me of my gripe with interviews and tests, they neglect the reality of rapid corrective and evolutionary iteration towards the desired outcome by each employee.

Do we really have no way of evaluating candidates more holistically for an accurate signal?

    they neglect the reality of rapid corrective and 
    evolutionary iteration towards the desired outcome 
    by each employee

I've been in the industry for 20+ years and have done my fair share of live coding interviews.

Some of them were horrible. There was one where I had to code on a literal whiteboard while a pair of, uh, let's just call them "people with distinctly non-wonderful personalities" critiqued everything. I did horribly.

I've also had many that went well. There was a live coding environment, and they allowed for exactly what you said - correction and iteration. They also collaborated with me to an extent. I felt these sorts of interviews were excellent and I did well. They also gave me a great feeling of what it would be like to work with these folks.

It's perhaps also worth noting that I began a lot of these by saying, "These sorts of interviews make me nervous, but I'll give it my best!" or something similar. And you know what, a good interviewer knows and understands that. They know these kinds of interviews make 99% of the population nervous. So acknowledging that fact helped me to feel at ease.

So, done well, I think they can be great.

> I've also had many that went well. There was a live coding environment, and they allowed for exactly what you said - correction and iteration. They also collaborated with me to an extent. I felt these sorts of interviews were excellent and I did well. They also gave me a great feeling of what it would be like to work with these folks.

My best interview experiences were like this. I thought I did well and left those interviews feeling great, positive reinforcement, great performance of code, plenty of time left over! Just for a faceless and ambiguous rejection letter :) I started getting an aggregate view that people just didn't want to pay me that much, or that there's some external factor on a search engine or within the industry about me that I'll never be aware of, but I landed on my feet on the entrepreneurial side.

So guess I'll never know!

Did all of your positive interviews result in rejections?

Some of mine did. That always hurt. But, I mean...

1. A lot of companies follow the "it's better to turn away 10 qualified hires than to make one bad hire" adage

2. Even when I know I'm 100% qualified and would be a good fit, that might be true for 10 other candidates as well so I expect a 90% rejection rate even when things go well.

3. Even when I know I'm 100% qualified and would be a good fit, some other candidate might have some specific domain knowledge (maybe it's fintech, and they've worked in fintech before and I haven't) and it might be a tiebreaker in their favor

4. Even when I know I'm 100% qualified and would be a good fit, some other candidate might have some specific tool/framework/language I don't. If I have experience with 50 tech buzzwords, and so does the other candidate, but 27 of mine overlap with the company's requirements and 29 of theirs do, then that might be a tiebreaker in their favor.

Anyway, being an entrepreneur is better anyway. I'm glad you found success. I miss running my own show. Every day.

Right I’m aware there were potentially other reasons like what the very first chapter in all the tech career handbooks say, as you wrote, and they all concluded that I was wasting my time on a broken process, while surrounded by people bragging about the multiple offers they are able to line up in the same time frame somehow. Well good for them.

I was getting the short straw so I unsubscribed, good for me that was an option at all.

I feel like the process is broken in a looooooooooot of ways, but I can't feel that a low % of job offers relative to the # of interviews is necessarily a sign of brokenness?

For most software development jobs, I feel that collaboration is important and those sorts of interviews, when done well, are probably one of the least-terrible ways to get a feel for it.

Of course, there are also plenty of cases when this sort of interview is not ideal. Not all development jobs require collaboration. And there are brilliant developers who just don't interview well. Etc.

In the end, though, you won. Entrepreneurship is tough but ultimately I love it more than working for others. It's your life, why work for others if you can help it?

Apparently my coworkers interviewed someone a while back who got pretty far into the onsite interview panel before they realized the candidate was not the same person typing out the code they were seeing on CodeBunk...

How'd they find out?

As far as I know, someone noticed something fishy and told the final interviewer their suspicion to be sure. Like the way the candidate would only explain stuff after it was written. If you're on a video call and observant, I think you could tell if the typing didn't sync up with what you saw. I imagine it might be hard to notice at first, but if someone suspects it I would think a skilled interviewer could throw a few wrenches in their plan to see how the respond.

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