[JesseAldridge]

I always find it strange that people who talk about tech interviewing inexplicably overlook what seems to me to be a core defining characteristic: they are highly traumatic. You take some poor bastard and have him struggle at coding puzzles in front of someone he very much wants to impress and then watch as he fails miserably. They are left feeling like they are biologically inadequate to their job. It's a direct assault on egalitarian sentiment - a load bearing pillar of civilization - even if it is more or less a noble lie.

By definition, they only take the top 1%, and 99% of people get to eat shit. Inspiring existential resentment in the vast majority of people who interact with you is obviously not a recipe for good karma.

[rachofsunshine]

Stress I'll grant you. But what's your alternative to selectiveness? Is your expectation that companies, who are spending a substantial amount of money to hire someone, should not try to hire the best person they can get for their buck?

Like, I'm enough of a leftie to agree with the idea that one's ability to contribute in the workplace shouldn't determine your ability to live a decent life. But that doesn't mean companies should hire someone who can't do the job, it means being unemployed shouldn't be a virtual death sentence, which isn't fundamentally a problem of hiring processes.

[JesseAldridge]

I do not have an alternative and agree that this type of screening is necessary.

I just think the fundamental problem here is not procedural as the post seems to suggest - but rather social-psychological. Making the experience less painful to the losers is the key problem to solve.

That would fix the candidate pipeline problem because people would be less terrified of failure.

I don't know how to solve it.

To quote Leonard Cohen:

  It's coming from the sorrow in the street
  The holy places where the races meet
  From the homicidal bitchin'
  That goes down in every kitchen
  To determine who will serve and who will eat

I do not envy anyone in the position of making this determination!

[rachofsunshine]

Yeah, the psychology of it is rough. Mental health is something I care a lot about, because in another life it damn near killed me [1], and it's something I plan to write a lot about at least. I'm not sure I have much of a concrete solution, though.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40493572

[JesseAldridge]

I remember once I worked at a company that was being acquired by another. As part of the screening we all had to go over to the other company to do an algorithms interview. Everyone - including my boss. Our company had a pretty softball interview process and most of our engineers hadn't been through a real gauntlet before.

I knew what to expect, had practiced these things, and made it through. I tried to warn my colleagues that they were in for something a lot more difficult than what they were expecting. But yeah, as you might expect, almost everyone failed.

I remember my boss talking about it, shaking his head slightly, his mouth screwing up into that familiar chagrined smirk so many people get after performing poorly at these things. I told him that these technical interviews are purposely difficult, that most people fail. That it's much better for them to miss a good candidate than hire a bad one. That failing is normal. I could see some of the tension in him subside after I said that. I repeated, "It's normal." He calmed down some more. The word "normal" seemed to help a lot.

I wonder if bringing in elements from psychotherapy might help a surprising amount here. I've found that software engineers highly value rational thought - to a point that they neglect the emotional side of things. A little development of their softer side can go a long way.

Like having a pre and post interview counseling session with a therapist would maybe be a little absurd. But maybe something along those lines would work. Maybe GPT4 could do it.

[rachofsunshine]

None of this is a surprise to me, but the specific framing of trying to build these things into the interview is really interesting. It's already something I wanted to write about a lot, but it hadn't occurred to me to put it specifically into the process.

Honestly, having mental health people writing some content doesn't sound like a bad idea at all. I'm sure they hear it all the time; work is one of the biggest stressors in most peoples' lives.

I'm gonna think on this.