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by IggleSniggle
1736 days ago
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It's interesting, because I do my very best work (and am happiest) in an environment of time-pressure, but something about the interview setting causes me to freeze up, lose my tongue, and lose my brain, all at once. If the question is very very easy, the effect is far worse. I've been on the other side of the interview process, and knowing how it might appear just makes this feel all the more traumatic. The brain focuses on the scenario of the interview, instead of the scenario of the question at hand. I've had successfully interviews where everything flows, and I've had awful interviews where my head inexplicably seizes up. All I'm saying is that the anxiety of interview pressure has very little in common with the anxiety of time-pressure, as far as I can tell. I would take it more as a signal that a person should not be put into negotiations (because that's what an interview really is), rather than that they do not perform under time-pressure. |
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Last week I was doing a video interview, and at the end they asked me to solve a simple problem and they were going to record it. I felt an incredible pressure to do it right and fast, which lead to basically screwing it up on the first attempt on account of not actually reading the question carefully (or at all really; it was a piece of code where I had to fill in some things, and I misunderstood because I barely skimmed the comments in the perceived pressure). I then a had state of near-panic where I almost just ended the call, from which I just barely managed to recover to stumble towards a solution. It's the closes I've ever come to an anxiety attack by far, which was an entirely novel experience and very much unlike me. I did end up solving it in a reasonable amount of time, but the way I got there was ... roundabout.
The question was to square a value in-place with a pointer: not very hard at all, literally one line of code. In the moment however I was genuinely doubting if I even knew what "squared" means; I really blanked in a way I don't recall ever having done before in my life :-/ I don't know why, but being watched by someone judging you just makes a huge difference for some reason. I've actually never had to write code while someone was watching before in an interview setting (plenty of verbal questions, "take-home tests", and the like, but never any actual code writing).
I had my second interview already with the third planned, so I guess I didn't do as dramatically bad as I felt I did after the interview, but still... If it had been the wrong day I might have outright failed.
It was a very weird experience and I'm not yet sure what exactly to make of it since it was fairly recent, but I gained some new appreciation on how some people might flunk simple interview questions I didn't have before.