Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

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The problem is that interviews are high stress affairs. Stress produces adrenaline. One of adrenaline's known effects is to prepare us for "fight or flight", meaning that higher order logic is shut off, digestion is shut off, our senses sharpen, reactions improve. This is great when you've got to climb a tree to get away from a tiger. This is horrible if you are trying to demonstrate your ability to function mentally.

Different people differ in how strong this effect is for them in an interview. I'm unusual - I actually relax. Whereas the author of this article tenses up. And, of course, once you're tense and you notice that you just flubbed something obvious, then you tense up even more. Leading negative reinforcing cycle. And if you experience this in one interview, you'll experience it in the next.

It does not matter how reasonable your questions are. If this is what someone faces, you do not get an accurate picture of how good anyone with interview anxiety is. And a lot of people suffer from this. The author of this article to an extreme degree.

Sorry, but a negative reinforcement cycle of tensing up in a medium stress situation is exactly the kind of characteristic that I'm trying to screen out in an interview.

Stressful situations happen a lot more than never in the real world (and sometimes they even involve talking to people, like customers) -- I don't want to have coworkers who can't handle that.

For me, the interview has always been way more stressful than anything I've had to do on the job. I think lots of people feel the same way (partially based on what I've seen performing interviews myself).

I'm sorry to hear about how stressed you get during interviews, but unfortunately the stress you demonstrate during technical interviews is a useful heuristic when determining whether or not a candidate would be a good fit for a company. Is a good signal all of the time? No. Is it a good signal most of the time? Probably.

>Is it a good signal most of the time?

No.

Neither of us have statistics on that, so a yes/no battle here is pointless. I and many others find it to be a useful signal when someone demonstrates intense anxiety under pressure, you and many others do not. Agree to disagree.

If your programmers are having to work under pressure then you're doing it wrong. It is the job of the manager to create an environment where people are as effective as they can be, and creating artificial space for developers is part of that. (Read Peopleware for more on this.)

If you're only willing to consider people who can somewhat function under artificial pressure, then you're passing up a lot of top-notch candidates for very bad reason.

I really can't imagine what would lead you or anyone else to think that's a good signal. I guess maybe it could possibly be good if you're hiring someone to do cold calls or something.

Probably not a good signal because company interviews tend to slip naturally into the human tradition of group initiation rites, unconsciously testing things like social hierarchy, fitness, dominance, loyalty, in addition to the stuff that really matters like problem solving. Technical jobs today simply don't require the strong social interaction and group selection that hunting for food and fending off wild animals did.

You're so wrong it's laughable.

And that's coming from someone who enjoys interviews, because I'm almost always smarter than the other guy (and it's usually a guy) interviewing me. Every job interview I've had has resulted in an offer.[1]

But their unique and outlandish nature sets them so far out of anything experienced in a job situation, except possibly for sales. Trying to give them the meaning you're going for is rather pitiful given you're so earnest!

[1] For similar reasons, I generally decline to interview prospects, because I'm afraid I judge too narrowly.

Sorry, you're so completely wrong it's painful, unless one of your company's core competencies needs to be semi-confrontational meetings - if you're a consultancy, for example, or you're a wildly dysfunctional company. Social anxiety correlates pretty well with being in a STEM profession.

Same here. I'd rather do a full week of work at work than spend an hour in an interview.

>Sorry, but a negative reinforcement cycle of tensing up in a medium stress situation is exactly the kind of characteristic that I'm trying to screen out in an interview.

Then you're like the guy who punishes interviewees because they didn't estimate the number of sewer ducts in New York correctly. Interviews can cause anxiety and stress to an extent that a typical employee may never encounter in their work.

I have trouble with interviews, but I've had a much easier time interacting with clients. With a client, I don't feel like I'm defending myself, I feel like I'm helping somebody solve a problem of mutual interest. It's a totally different mindset.

Freezing up in interviews would probably be a red flag for a job where you're doing cold calls or something like that. I wouldn't accept that kind of job, let alone interview.

Once I started thinking about interviews in terms of 1) do we want to work together (not do they want me to work for them) and 2) how can I help them solve a problem, I found they went a lot better. In my cover letters, I'll often even say, "I think I can help" rather than "I think I'd be a good fit for this position". It makes me feel better about it anyway :-)

But it is different stress.

Stress in a job situation is like building a fortress over many months and getting invaded. You know the layout of the terrain like the back of your hand and you can focus on the problem.

Stress in an interview is like being air dropped into an enemy fortress. It is hard to know where to turn and you spend as much energy trying to suss out the layout of your new environment as you do reacting to your adversary.

I wish I could highlight your comment, and tell everyone in the thread to read it.

Right, you can't assume a friendly environment. You may be interviewed by a friend of another employee who the company is looking to replace, perhaps by you. It's a war zone out there sometimes.

Interview skill really has nothing to do with job performance (and I'm pretty good at interviews). It's a lot like standardized testing: "this metric is completely irrelevant but at least it's testable!"

I think your estimate of interviews as a "medium stress situation" is somewhat simplified and personal. Interviews push you into completely unfamiliar territory, in which you're simultaneously trying to solve context-free problems, defend your answers, and gauge the personality and preferences of your interviewer (an answer that works for one won't always work for another).

A client meeting, code review, or dispute with a manager can be stressful, but you can answer from a position of strength. You know your code, have reasons for your decisions, and have met some standard to get the job. Interviews may be less demanding, but for some people it's a huge problem that there's no solid place to stand.

> Sorry, but a negative reinforcement cycle of tensing up in a medium stress situation is exactly the kind of characteristic that I'm trying to screen out in an interview.

Then you are doing it wrong. There are different types of stress. Holding up well under "stress" is a misnomer, as someone can hold up well under one type of stress, and completely fall apart in another situation entirely.

What you are testing for is the ability to handle the stress of interviewing. If anything, you are hiring for people who can more easily leave.

While it's appropriate to test for situations where stress is a factor, it's equally important to realize that talking to a customer and doing pre-sales and an interview are about as far apart as possible on the stress meter. One hardly equates with the other.

Frankly, talking to customers isn't nearly as stressful as interviews.

This is the fundamental point that gets made and debated, again and again. I just don't agree that the stress is the same. Speaking as a person who is very prone to interview nerves, nothing evokes quite the same reaction in me, so it's not a valid predictor. Despite my terrible nerves in interviews, I'm able to handle real-world stress just fine. In fact, the craziest example of this I have is live-coding demands from a client in response to a final deliverable. I had our codebase up in an editor on my laptop, and in response to client complaints, was making changes live and deploying to our UAT environment to prompt them to give the final sign-off. Literally, the difference between "ok, we will call this project complete and pay you for the last 6 months of your work" and "this is unacceptable, we aren't paying for this" was in my hands, over the span of an hour, with the client sitting right across from me.

This completely contradicts the argument that a candidate who has difficulty handling interview stress will not have the ability to handle any stress. I can't speak for everyone who gets nervous during interviews, but in my case it's due to the combination of the uncomfortable environment, lack of access to tools I've grown to rely on, and an awareness of how fickle people's opinions are.

Do not ignore empirical evidence - reality will always crush theory (in the collequial sense).

And empirically, we endlessly observe very nervous people at interviews that do not exhibit nervousness in meetings (after getting the job).

We know that people behave differently in interviews; I suggest using that behavior to predict behavior in non-interview situations is noisy at best, and probably entirely random.

I think that there are other problems here though; if you are going to be a part of an environment where you may experience adrenaline surges, you need to work through them. Skipping that part of an interview means that you won't be able to evaluate that response. One solution may be to include a high-stress part of the interview, but to weight it in the overall evaluation appropriately.

[>>>This is great when you've got to climb a tree to get away from a tiger. This is horrible if you are trying to demonstrate your ability to function mentally.

Climbing a tree won't get you away from a tiger; it's a cat.]

Adult tigers rarely climb trees even when chasing prey and need a significant running start to do so at all. Though they are cats their mass is importantly very different than domestic cats.

You fail the interview for not getting the a-ha question right.

Does the adult tiger realize that sooner or later you have to come down, and rather than risking injury, can just wait for you to come down?

Even though a tiger may be biologically more suited than I to stand starvation, if I'm sure of certain death on the ground I'll take very long to come down. And, who knows, I might just find a few eggs.

Remember: the tiger doesn't need to climb a tree well. It only needs to be better at it than I am. I am confident that a hungry tiger in hot pursuit will be better at it than I am, no matter how terrified I am (which will be quite a lot). And no, we're not going to settle it by experiment.

Remember, you don't need to be better than it is. Just better than whatever other prey item it could be considering.

Well, jobs are high stress affairs too. We often have to maintain production systems that fail in cryptic ways at the most inconvenient times. I postulate that such situations are more stressful than solving some binary search tree problem on a whiteboard.

Most of my developer jobs haven't been particularly high stress. Perhaps there is some selection bias here in that if you rely on the usual high stress interview process for developers you increase the chance of working with people who create systems that regularly need hot patching in production. Sounds like a dreadful job to me, so I guess that if there is any truth to this speculation that I should be happy about the selection mechanism.

Not at all. If I fix a production issue it's fixed. Either it is or it isn't. In an interview, I'm trying to impress another human. Who knows if I do a good job at that. Computers and their problems are simple in comparison. Judging a humans reaction, A LOT of developers are seriously bad at that. I'm pretty good at it myself but I hate it. I've had very few interviews that I didn't receive offers from but even I dislike the human part of interviews.

Im no neuroscientist or psychologist, but the stress of being sized up by other monkeys based on superficial first impressions that you know you dont happen to be very good at making, is WAY different than the stress that gets produced when a "cryptic" system needs fixing.

For me the former situation leads to lots of bad feelings including irritation and incredible anxiety. I have often considered the latter type of situation fun times. For a lot of programmers difficult puzzle solving stress is good stress.

From what I have witnessed from current in-the-box hiring practices is a lot of extroverts get hired who are good at spin and presentation. Quite a few managers never detect that they are actually not great programmers because they are brilliant at sucking up and putting on a show. Those skills dont always hurt, but they shouldnt be considered a deal breaker for a programmer who actually gets good work done.

Best practice I have ever encountered is when interviewers give out interview questions in advance to allow to the interviewee a while to think about the problem in quiet.

I love the idea of short term contracts for both parties to suss each other out.

Interviews are not the same as celebrating your first 5 million dollar month and your CTO nudging you and saying this had be right or we are both looking for a new month

(I was in charge of running the system that produced the bills and I think the CTO might have reported to Vint at one point )

I deal with that kind of anxiety feedback loop in interviews, especially when I feel like I have no other edge besides my interview performance and resume, i.e., no personal connection. At my current job, they gave me the questions on paper and left me alone to answer them. I did well with that. (I also had a personal connection.) Later, I did a phone interview with Google based on having come up on one of their LinkedIn scans, and it went terrible.

How a person does on a pressure interview certainly tells you something, but it would seem to put a high priority on a particular skill at the expense of others. It probably effectively screens out anxious types. I'm not sure you can generalize what you learn too broadly, though.

I've been meaning to read this http://www.amazon.com/Choke-Secrets-Brain-Reveal-Getting/dp/... hopefully got get some insight into my own "freezing up"

It's not just a born talent thing. Practicing interviewing and solving problems on a board in front of someone can do a lot to help you get over that anxiety. Yet most people never bother to practice and then wonder why they are bad at it.

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