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Comment by arrakis2021 | Hacker News Reader

arrakis2021

It is unfortunate that “for some folks any form of a test/quiz can be triggering” as quoted in the tweet. And I’m not advocating for archaic coding interviews or on-the-spot exercises.

But our lives don’t always follow a project plan, work isn’t always planned well in advance, and our careers and experiences will always have a degree of randomness/variance.

Have we considered that Shopify wants to filter out people who can’t handle this type of experience? At some point “I have anxiety about X” is something this person may need to deal with if working at Shopify.

My point is Shopify can adjust work and policies all we want around peoples mental health but the company may not be able to guarantee that this person never encounters a triggering moment, and therefore they may have decided that is may be in their interest to “not be inclusive” of this type of personality.

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Author of the tweet here.

I don't think that companies do this consciously, but I think the problem with your take is that your comment seem to assume that performance anxiety is somehow related to being "triggered" when people do the actual work. I can recall no situations whatsoever when something like that affected my performance at work. I am on an on call rotation, I deal with various production issues and incidents frequently, here and there I'm working on the infrastructure where mistakes can have very bad consequences. None of this is in any way comparable to the interview.

Another point here is that I've talked to a friend working at Shopify and he said that if he puts me in the system they would skip the coding interview, because then they don't need to check if I really can code. So no, in this particular case I don't think that this was a way to filter out people with performance anxiety.

Also, this kind of anxiety doesn't seem to be connected with actual performance when doing the work, it's just about working with an audience that judges you vs working in private. Here is an article about an interesting study: https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/07/tech-job-interviews-anxiety/

Thank you for clarifying. I don’t mean to critique your work or your ability to complete the interview, i was specifically quoting the tweet you were quoting in your post. In that tweet it mentions the triggering aspect of such interviews. To your situation in particular, my point in a comment further down was that it’s possible that employers like Shopify still see the “on the spot coding exercise” as a natural filter for certain personality traits. Wether they do this consciously or not, i have no idea. Wether it’s good practice or not, also debatable. Probably not as it excludes a lot of potentially good developers. Nevertheless it is a behavior that continues to filter out the types of people who can’t/won’t do the exercise. Your ability to deliver great work is almost definitely completely unrelated to the exercise itself. It’s unfortunate that you didn’t progress as a result, and hopefully your friend can help you out with resetting the process.

Thanks for clarifying too!

Regarding progressing I think it's for the better. It was about two years ago I didn't have much issues with finding something else (I brought it up only cause Shopify was mentioned in a tweet that started the whole thing). Also, in general I feel uneasy about doing this kind of thing - why would I work for a company that would hire certain people only if they have connections there?

I think it’s less likely that companies like Shopify are purposely filtering out candidates who have interview anxiety and more likely that it’s simply not a factor they take into account.

Assuming that:

1. Companies like Shopify do not have a shortage of qualified candidates

2. The cost of hiring a “bad” candidate is outweighs the benefit of finding the best possible candidates.

3. Tons of people who aren’t qualified also apply

The optimal strategy is one that focuses on weeding out as many bad candidates as possible, even if there are some good candidates that get dismissed as a result.

This is of course a gross oversimplification, but the key takeaway is that there seem to be enough candidates that are both qualified and able to get through the stressful interview process, so there’s little incentive to change it.

However, I think starting a conversation about it as the quoted twitter user is doing I might change it. If companies start wanting to take (real) steps to be more inclusive, they might have enough reason to change their hiring practices.

I get what you mean but I think you’re missing the point of what I said

Shopify may not WANT to be inclusive of candidates triggered into paralysis by an interview quiz/prompt.

> At some point “I have anxiety about X” is something this person may need to deal with if working at Shopify.

The guy has 500 commits to Rails, do you know how rare that is? I find it very hard to believe he wouldn't be a good addition to 90% of teams there.

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