[dkarl]

This article repeats what we've long known about how technical interviews aren't great at evaluating technical skills and inadvertently filter for things that aren't important. But it doesn't offer a better way of evaluating technical skills. It talks about how to evaluate other things that do matter but aren't substitutes or proxies for technical skills.

Also, this argument is some grade school smarty pants "I'm too smart to show my work" bullshit:

> And because the interviewer can’t distinguish “skipped steps due to incompetence” from “skipped steps due to operating at a higher cognitive level,” they default to the interpretation that protects their ego.

I thought the days of hiring toxic "so smart I can't communicate" superstars was over?

[JohnMakin]

Someone like this may be skipping steps because to them the steps may be so obvious as to not need to be explained, and they are giving more benefit of the doubt to the interviewer than they should. your framing makes it seem like arrogance when in the vast majority of the time I’ve seen this, it’s the candidate making the assumption the person on the other side is their peer.

[seanmcdirmid]

There are many steps so you can’t show them all (each step has sub steps and so on). You prioritize steps, but when you are showing your work you focus on steps that are key for you and think would be key for your interviewer. It isn’t crazy that you would guess wrong about the latter given you don’t really know them.

A reasonable candidate can definitely make the mistake of not showing steps that they think aren’t important (and they can also go the other way and show way too many unimportant steps).

[Aurornis]

I helped out with interview prep and coaching a while ago.

One of the unexpected hardest parts was getting people to open up to the idea that they needed to improve something about their communication in interviews. It's so easy to comfort yourself with fictions about the interviewer failing to recognize your qualifications due to their own ego or other explanations. There are a million blog posts, Tweets, Reddit posts, and angry internet comments that will validate these feelings. Getting rejected and then going to the internet to validate your feelings of being wronged is so much easier than trying to reflect on how you could have done better.

Doing mock interviews for people was exhausting due to the time commitment, but it's one way to try to get around the defensiveness that comes from being rejected for a real job. Even with that, some of the mock interview candidates would get angry with the feedback and try to argue with you. It's weird to see. Nobody likes feeling evaluated and judged, so imagining an explanation that shifts the problem to the other person protects their ego.

[jghn]

I know this is an outlier, unpopular opinion by my experience has been that the percentage of people who can really talk in depth through technical details but can't write decent code is quite small. But the percentage of people who can talk the talk but can't write code or solve puzzles on the spot in an interview environment is much higher.

Everyone has their one favorite anecdote about the one person who slipped through the cracks and singlehandedly brought their company to its knees. But I contend that people spend far more energy defending against this use case than the reality warrants.

[Insimwytim]

> toxic "so smart I can't communicate" superstars

This is your framing, which is openly hostile to people, that you chose as your enemies. And that framing itself is a great demonstration of toxicity.

The whole narrative is just an attack on engineers, who do the job, coming from the side of the so-called "communicators".

[comfysocks]

An easy way out might be to just ask the candidate how they got from one step to another. That way you can differentiate between “toxic, so smart i can’t communicate” and “non-toxic, so smart that i honestly thought the step seemed trivial, but would be happy to explain if i was mistaken about that”.