jonathan@researchcomputingteams.org
This resource first appeared in issue #33 on 17 Jul 2020 and has tags Hiring: Other, Hiring: Interviewing and Evaluating, Technical Leadership: Software Development
Does Stress Impact Technical Interview Performance? - Behroozi, Shirolkar, Barik & Parnin
Tech Sector Job Interviews Assess Anxiety, Not Software Skills - Chris Parnin & Matt Shipman, NC State
Whiteboard coding interviews are not widely loved by candidates. I don’t have interviewees live code but do I like watching candidates work through similar kinds of problems on a whiteboard. This study may finally make me rethink this.
It’s a small study (N=48) where interviewees were assessed on their coding skills and randomized into two arms. In one they were interviewed by a panel, having to live-code on a whiteboard and explain their way through; in the other, they privately worked through the problem on a whiteboard. And then they were evaluated for having passed the interview or not.
And the results aren’t great for whiteboard interviews. The in-front-of-people interview results weren’t strongly correlated with coding skills so much as stress levels of being in front of an audience. In particular, every woman who live interviewed failed the live interview, and every woman who did the problem privately passed.
I would like to see versions of this study run with larger N, though, and in slightly different situations (not a panel interview, but a single interviewer for instance). But the results seem to line up with anecdotal evidence.
There are absolutely roles I might want to hire someone into where presenting to a room full of skeptical decision makers is a job responsibility. Maybe I’m looking for someone to talk with funders or PIs of partner projects or to advocate for money from the VPR. I this case, the results of these interviews - does the person get stressed in that kind of environment - would be valuable signal.
But most of the jobs I’d hire someone for aren’t like that. It’s just not an important skill to have for our developers or sysadmins. In which case the results of these interviews would just be noise. And relying on that noise knowing full well that the women in this study do significantly more poorly seems clearly unjustifiable.
