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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

Measuring stress tolerance is an important when hiring.

A good employer takes care of their worker even if they have problems, but they also want to weed out as much of them before hiring. The value of worker is not revealed when they are at their best. Fragile workers with anxiety perform well only small amount of time.

Live interviews are generally excellent at revealing how individuals perform when placed outside their comfort zone. If you perform well in a live interview, be it for coding or any other skill, you are likely to perform even better reality.

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Live interviews are generally excellent at revealing that someone is comfortable with live coding interviews. I know plenty of people who excel at them and are unable to code on the job - and vice-versa.

I'm pretty sure there's no correlation whatsoever, after interviewing more than 500 people in a decade...

The correlation that I think _does_ exist is for _junior engineers_: Live coding interviews (particularly if you take typical CS problems) measures how much they're able to memorize and how much attention they paid in class (or in preparation). Which used to be a necessary requirement back in 2001, since it directly correlated to being able to learn by memorization. Unsure that's still a relevant skill since Google > Stack Overflow > ChatGPT, however...

> Live interviews are generally excellent at revealing how individuals perform when placed outside their comfort zone.

I suppose if by "outside their comfort zone," you mean in a potentially literal life or death situation (because, face it, most people can't live long without a job in the US), under an arbitrary and very short deadline, possibly using unfamiliar tools, and simultaneously having to explain every little thing they do, then yes, I would agree with this. I don't believe the sentence after this follows logically from it, though.

No. More like the ability to be around new people, have their work evaluated, getting frank feedback, being honest about their mistakes, defending their positions.

If interview feels like life and death, maybe you are not the right hire.

Interviews are not valid tests of those things due to the stress involved.

If you don't understand how not having a job in a place like the US is life or death, you're not the right interviewer.

You are making two assumptions that are generally not true

* In the US * Interviewee is currently unemployed

Even then, the general candidate we interview for Tech positions can usually survive quite well on a couple months.

A couple of months is one thing, but a typical time back to work after a tech layoff is currently more like six or eight months.

I'm speaking to what I know. Sue me.

>how individuals perform when placed outside their comfort zone.

Yeah that's why veterans have such a great time adapting to peaceful life :)

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