[nawgz]

> It's pretty rare outside of interviews that you have to code in front of an audience

But it is most certainly not rare that you will be expected to reason about possible solutions to problem domains you barely understand using techniques you have varying levels of familiarity to an audience.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe this is just my line of work, and if you're recruiting a person who pulls tickets and there's no expectations beyond that whatever. But I would be assed to hire someone who, presented with a question my team thought fair to ask in an interview, was unable to stand up and cohesively walk me thru their approach, reasonably attack some parts of that approach, and offer some insights to what pros and cons they see in their approach and others they might have passed up. How is that person ever going to help in a brainstorm if they are so socially anxious they cant speak to an audience? How are they ever going to help their teammates in a Code Review if they are unable to find their voice in front of a whiteboard-tier problem that every single other candidate is facing?

If your social anxiety is this debilitating, that you can't do your literal profession in front of a crowd who you purport to be on the same level as by virtue of interviewing with them, I think you have a problem yes.

[concreteblock]

Sounds like stress doesn't impact you, even in interview settings. Good for you! Too bad it seems like you also lack the empathy to see why other people might find interviews different from normal work-collaboration duties.

And no, it's not your job to worry about other people's issues, but if you think that 'being stressed in an interview setting' == 'unable to collaborate' (this is what I read from your ridiculous strawmen), you're going to pass on a lot of good people.

[nawgz]

> Sounds like stress doesn't impact you, even in interview settings

No, it sounds like you didn't read the top of the thread, where we're specifically discussing Whiteboard Prompts. I agree interviews are stressful; I disagree with the argument that "Whiteboard Prompts" are so much higher stress than the rest of the interview that we can't conclude anything from them about the candidate.

I further argue that if one can't perform in a Whiteboard Prompt, wherein the entire goal is to have the type of conversation about a problem that engineers are paid to have about problems rather than coming to a code solution, than one will probably be difficult to work with in any situation which involves some pressure. Some classic examples of equally high pressure situations as talking to an interviewer you don't know but who is probably on your level include things I do each week:

* speak with stakeholders about progress

* opine to stakeholders about complexity of features, timelines and methodologies of their implementation, and possible blockers

* work with my team & extended team members to give Code Reviews, where often they are my direct report or someone else's direct report

So, I conclude that if one is able to excel technically, but completely unable to handle this socialization aspect of interviews, than in a large corporation where you frequently have rotating casts of external stakeholders, this implies you will not be fit for any of the work interfacing or collaborating with colleagues outside the team. This implies this person will be a low performer if hired into this team.

Call it a "ridiculous strawmen" if you want, but I don't see why we should completely discard testing of someone's ability to interact in new situations, otherwise surely I could argue in the ridiculously reductionist way you are interpreting my multiple, specific comments elucidating my stance that TripleByte has solved the interviewing problem.

[concreteblock]

I did read the thread. Someone was saying how whiteboard prompts are scary and has a high false negative rate. You took that and turned it into "if you find interviews scary, that's a signal that you have unreasonable social skills and you are unable to think on your feet". In other words, you believe that the false negative rate is not so high, because you believe that the the stress induced by an interview is similar enough to the stress induced in other stressful situations that are common in the work place.

The only point I am trying to make is that yes, interviews are very different than the other scenarios that you mentioned.

Here's one reason: in an whiteboard problem solving session, the other person has explictly prepared something that they know more about than you. On top of that, you are both aware of this fact. This almost never happens in a normal work-collaboration. A collabaration happens because both parties have something to offer. If not, they'd be explaining to you, and not the other way around.

[nawgz]

> In other words, you believe that the false negative rate is not so high, because you believe that the the stress induced by an interview is similar enough to the stress induced in other stressful situations that are common in the work place.

No, not really.

I think people who have a weakness are most likely to attack, without evidence, things that expose that weakness as unfair. People in this thread are going so as to call the interview technique of whiteboarding a problem “practically inhumane”.

You are right that I think inability to talk thru ones train of thought on a new problem to them to be a signal of inability. I think whiteboarding exposes this kind of weakness. I also think it has many causes: extreme stress reaction, bad social skills, lack of domain knowledge, bad communication skills, and plain old stupidity.

So to read that “whiteboarding” should be disallowed from interviewing, because it is so much more high stress than every other part of the process, despite those parts also having equal importance in the overall stakes, really needs some elucidation. I accept anecdotes from workers who claim they are only low performers in the interview because of stress or anxiety, but I strongly doubt unmitigated social anxiety presents as a detriment to ones apparent job performance in interviews but not jobs at a high enough rate to give any credence to these claims without some sort of data driven backing.

[un3n]

I think you're missing the real world nuance here, anxiety isn't as on/off as you make it out to be. For me, a developer with social anxiety, there is a huge difference between an interview environment and talking out a problem or code review with a team I'm familiar with. The two main factors for me are one my anxiety just skyrockets around new people but quickly calms down after being around someone for a couple days/weeks and getting used to them. The second is one aspect of my anxiety be is an abundance of worrying about people judging me/what I'm doing/wearing/whatever and in an interview the interviewer is doing just that: judging my performance & worthiness to join their team.

Anyways that was a long winded way to say it is entirely possible for someone to be anxious and generally bad at interviewing while also being capable of being a productive team member.

[tsomctl]

Hi there. I have social anxiety. There's a fucking huge difference between performing in front of someone more important in a job interview compared to talking to peers in a casual setting.