> I had one person start crying they put so much pressure on themselves, I had to take a two week break from interviewing after that.
This is a sign that the hiring process is broken. It's not testing skill level, it's testing anxiety level.
This is a sign that the hiring process is broken. It's not testing skill level, it's testing anxiety level.
People who break down and cry in interviews are rare but if they do it, they are best avoided and it was good that the interview revealed this. You cannot have that happening on the job but if they can't handle being asked to program something whilst up against a time limit or being watched, they're going to have breakdowns in other situations too.
For a given job most candidates actually don't get hired, often because they are not a good fit but many times because they are too nervous to think straight.
How do you know their level of nervousness? You can't read minds.
Is this actually true? It's been widely and frequently claimed over the years that "199 out of 200 applicants for every programming job can't write code at all. I repeat: they can't write any code whatsoever." https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
> frankly a bit insulting to people who learned to control their emotions
It's frankly a bit ignorant of human psychology to think that people can just "learn" to control their emotions. We're humans, not robots. Yes, you could go to a professional therapist, if you have both the time and money; it could take a lot of both. But if many people have to go to a therapist for the sole purpose of dealing with audition-style coding interviews, then maybe there's something seriously wrong with audition-style coding interviews. It's already bizarre that candidates with many years of experience in the field have to study intensely for job interviews.
> and work under pressure
I explained at length in the link from my previous comment that working under pressure is entirely different from interview pressure.
I've done hundreds of interviews as the interviewer. I've had people seriously panic maybe once or twice in that entire time. I've heard occasionally that the rates for other interviewers were higher (but still low), if that's the case then they just sucked at interviewing.
Where did therapists come into it? I've never heard of anyone going to a therapist to pass coding interviews, that would be ridiculous. Learning to control your emotions is something people are meant to learn as children. It's a standard skill you're supposed to have to interact with others, like basic politeness. If you're having breakdowns as adults then it's expected that the situation is really intense, like the death of a loved one, breakdown in a relationship etc. Job interviewing is a normal part of life and shouldn't be as stressful as those things.
"It's already bizarre that candidates with many years of experience in the field have to study intensely for job interviews."
The whole "cramming leetcode" thing is way overblown, or possibly a modern feedback loop in which crammers are making it harder to detect genuine skill and experience. Again I've done a lot of interviews and nobody ever mentioned having to prepare for them. That idea seems to be a relatively recent idea (last ~10 years or so) and is probably a result of so many people competing for very highly paid jobs at a small number of firms. Normal software jobs should ask people to demonstrate their skills, but it shouldn't be something that requires exam-like prep for any working programmer.
I think you're making too much of the example of the candidate crying. That is indeed an outlier case, not the norm. But the crying case is an undeniable sign that job candidates can get extremely anxious during an interview, in a way that affects their performance. The issue isn't "breakdowns" per se, the issue is that coding tests are testing anxiety level rather than skill level. Ironically, most job candidates are in fact "controlling their emotions", as you say: they may show no outward sign of breakdown or panic, but on the inside, their mind and stomach are churning heavily, and this makes it difficult to perform at their normal level. Everyone is trying to act calm and collected during an interview, but often it's merely an act, and they're actually not calm and collected at all. What you perceive from the outside as incompetence may be a whole different story on the inside for the candidate. https://www.engr.ncsu.edu/news/2020/11/11/tech-sector-job-in...
Anxiety isn't all or nothing. There's a wide spectrum between totally calm and crying breakdown. When there's a crying breakdown, it's easy to recognize, but anxiety is not so easy to recognize if there's not a breakdown.
> I've done a lot of interviews and nobody ever mentioned having to prepare for them.
Why would they mention it, even if they did prepare?
> That idea seems to be a relatively recent idea (last ~10 years or so) and is probably a result of so many people competing for very highly paid jobs at a small number of firms.
Regardless, we're living in the present now, under current conditions, not living in the past, so for the purposes of getting a job, it doesn't really matter when the idea originated.
You seem to be suggesting something totally unfalsifiable - that candidates who do a bad job aren't actually bad programmers, but are just nervous inside in undetectable ways. There's no way I or anyone else can argue against this notion because there's no way to prove a negative like that, but suffice it to say that the sort of issues I'd associate with nervousness - minor slips that they then notice and correct, stumbles, brief moments of forgetfulness etc - are not why people tend to fail interviews. They fail interviews because their coding skills suck.
Heh. It's only unfalsifiable if you ignore a person's previous experience and accomplishments, refusing to acknowledge anything other than your own interview as an accurate gauge of the person's skills.
Also, I'm literally telling you that it happens to me. (And I've heard many people say it happens to them.) So either I'm a liar, or you have to admit that it happens. Go ahead and call me a liar if that's what you want to believe, but I'm not even trying to get a job anymore. I'm happily self-employed now, and my customers also seem very happy with my coding skills.
The term "control your emotions" is somewhat vague. You can hide your emotions, but that doesn't mean you're not experiencing the emotions. An extreme example of that is if you "put on a brave face" after a personal tragedy. You may not cry and break down, but that doesn't mean the sadness doesn't affect you severely. The reason I mentioned therapy is that you'd probably need therapy in order to somehow train yourself to not even feel the emotions in the first place in situations where they arise automatically for you, i.e., to not have certain phobias at all.
> the sort of issues I'd associate with nervousness
Have you considered that you might not have a full understanding and appreciation for human psychology and the wide variance among humans?
Which is often the right thing to do unless you have very specific knowledge of that experience e.g. a referral, because so many people flat out lie about their experience and accomplishments. If you can't directly verify it, the accuracy is so low it's best ignored.
As for your experience, I'm glad to hear you're now happily self employed (so am I!). How are you proving your skills to customers, if you can't handle job interviews? Or are you making a product?
"Have you considered that you might not have a full understanding and appreciation for human psychology and the wide variance among humans?"
I have an average such understanding, having lived an average life. But the problem remains: someone who claims to be able to do a job fine but can't demonstrate that capability when asked, is from an employer's perspective best avoided. That isn't a flaw in the interviewing process, that's the point of it! The reasons why someone can't demonstrate it are irrelevant because there's no better alternative available, and anyway, someone who can't handle the pressure of a job interview is very likely to crack in other situations. You claim it's not true and there's something psychologically unique about interviewing, but, I don't really believe this and clearly neither do other people doing hiring.
You're missing the forest for the trees. This is not a job interview, it's just the two of us talking, and I'm stating that many people who are not stage performers experience "stage fright" in an audition-style interview, which severely but only temporarily hinders their performance.
If you acknowledge this fact, then you have to start to wonder whether audition-style interviews are accurately measuring skill level, or whether they're mainly measuring anxiety. And you may have to reevaluate whether a flubbed interview indicates that a candidate "can't code" and is a "faker", as opposed to just freezing from stage fright.
This is not even to claim that there are zero liars out there. But you have to wonder about the percentage of liars, if there are alternative explanations for poor interview performance. The level of paranoia in hiring programmers seems totally absurd to me.
> How are you proving your skills to customers
I am making a product, as well as contracting sometimes. But nobody wants to test me. They trust my experience and aren't ultra-paranoid that I might be a faker who can't code.
> if you can't handle job interviews
This is not accurate. I can handle job interviews. I'm not good at auditions. An audition is a very specific kind of interview, and rather perverse for hiring people who mainly work sitting by themselves.
> That isn't a flaw in the interviewing process, that's the point of it!
Disagreed. It seems that coders tend not to recognize how coding test interviews are not the norm in the world for interviews. They're quite unusual. Most people don't have to audition for a job. An interview is a two-way street: both the interviewer and interviewee are trying to determine whether the job is right for them, and whether they want to work together. A test is very one-sided.