Chris Parnin and Matt Shipman (via Hacker News, 2, 3):
A new study from North Carolina State University and Microsoft finds that the technical interviews currently used in hiring for many software engineering positions test whether a job candidate has performance anxiety rather than whether the candidate is competent at coding.
[…]
Half of the study participants were given a conventional technical interview, with an interviewer looking on. The other half of the participants were asked to solve their problem on a whiteboard in a private room. The private interviews did not require study participants to explain their solutions aloud, and had no interviewers looking over their shoulders.
[…]
“But the format may also serve as a barrier to entire classes of candidates. For example, in our study, all of the women who took the public interview failed, while all of the women who took the private interview passed.
I conducted a couple hundred interviews for my first FAANG employer, and I was constantly amazed at the percentage of candidates with years of Microsoft or Facebook experience on the resumes who apparently did not know how to program. I always thought, ‘huh, guess I know why they quit after 3 years, amazing that they all lasted this long.”
Then I interviewed for another company and utterly bombed. It became suddenly clear to me that I had been an idiot. Of course nearly all of those candidates were perfectly good programmers.
Those 200 resumes you got from Craigslist? Those consist of the one guy who happened to be good, but he’s only applying for a job because his wife wants to be nearer to her family, and the usual floating population of 199 people who apply for every single job and are qualified for none. And now you think you’re being “super selective” but you’re not, it’s just a statistical fallacy.
Somehow this classic hypothetical spread, and people got the idea that the majority of working programmers can’t actually program at all.
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