[desdiv]

When I'm nervous, I don't communicate well.

When I'm nervous, I don't code well.

I don't know about other people, but for me personally, when you measure me under a high-stress situation, all you are measuring is just my level of nervousness.

[poikniok]

I must ask, did you get a university degree and if so how? Personally I have found interviews to be trivial compared to exams in school, so while I do get quite nervous for some of my math examinations I have never had this experience in interviews.

[desdiv]

I have a CS degree from a first-tier school. My experience with exams and interviews is almost the exact opposite of yours.

In exams I don't get as nervous because I know that if I know the material then I will pass, if I don't then I won't. You can't bullshit your way past the professor/TA grading your exam.

But in interviews I know that people who are far better than me have failed[0], and that people less competent than me could get the job. So it's not my coding ability or my experience that's being measured here, it's something else. And I don't know whether I have that something else or not. Maybe I do, maybe I just don't.

[0] https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768?lang=en

[javabean22]

I feel exactly the same way. The good thing is you keep doing the interviews for some time at some point you run into normal people and then it's easy.

[b0rsuk]

Last but not least, after you fail an exam you can usually see it with errors underlined and often have the teacher explain them for you. If you answer interview questions in a suboptimal way, you get no feedback. You don't know what was the error you made, if any. Maybe another candidate simply read about the logic puzzle that was used.

The canned response I got was "We're sorry, but we can't currently recruit you. Please try again in half a year or so, maybe we will have some new opportunities." If you press on, you just get evasive answers.

[Sacho]

Hmm sure, but companies that don't give canned responses are liable for lawsuits. A teacher's explanation can be wrong or misleading. I've also had some of teachers refuse to explain the alleged errors in my work, and I've even had to argue with teachers that they are wrong and I'm right.

I suppose if you went to a great school and then to some shitty interviews, you'd like the school more than the interviews, and vice versa. The difference however is that a teacher is only motivated by their altruism to help you, whereas a company has actual financial motivation to find good people during the interview.

[b0rsuk]

You're justifying company behavior, but my post was in response to the one who wondered how could a person pass exams but fail job interviews. I pointed out there are valid reasons that are not the candidate's fault.

I'm in the profession to write and debug computer programs, not debug people who like to keep me in the dark. This is frustrating.

[javabean22]

That's A Bingo. That's how false negatives are made.