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Comment by chris11 | Hacker News Reader

> It sounds like the study points to the idea that "talk through your reasoning" is a bad interview approach.

That idea definitely makes sense to me. And I think some devs do definitely underperform in interviews.

Though I'm not sure if there's great alternatives. As an interviewer I feel that seeing someone work through a problem and debug issues gives useful information. I don't know if there's a better, less anxiety-producing way of testing those things.

I do think take homes can be really useful, but those have their own problems. Maybe leaving someone alone onsite to complete the problem would be an option. But I think leaving the discussion to the end would give less info about the candidate's communication skills.

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Just give them an initial five minutes or so to digest the problem themselves before asking them to communicate. Or even a few couple-minute long breaks throughout the interview where they're not under the microscope. Or some other way to lower artificial pressures.

This unwillingness to experiment with the existing interview format, the intransigence to consider any alternatives, is simply maddening.

It strikes me as odd that interviews aren't collaborative. I mean, the really valuable information that interviewers want is whether or not the candidate is going to work well with other people there, right? So interviewers could work with candidates to solve some problem (maybe problems structured so that it's naturally convenient to divide them into two parts where each contributes). An external service could provide problems and software for shared solving to prevent interviewers from knowing the problems in advance (which would revert to them "testing"). And the shared problem-solving could be recorded so that interviewers could review it afterwards to decide more clearly how it went (maybe they felt like the other person did a lot during the shared problem-solving, but when watching it afterwards, they realize that the interviewer carried the weight of solving things).

I think this kind of context change would be tremendously empowering for candidates such as myself who get very anxious about situations in which they feel people are "testing" them but who actually love working with people. It would also be nice as a way to see what people are like to work with, from both the perspectives of the candidates and the interviewers.

PvE interviews instead of PvP interviews.

Very excellent point and good ideas for a solution. Funnily enough, I've recently had the same thoughts, been wondering what it would be like if interviewers were asked to work with interviewees on problems they were equally as unfamiliar with, so they are on equal footing.

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