> But if you can't communicate and think while under a bit of interview pressure, then you're not likely to be able to cope long-term in a development job.
This may sound logical and like common sense, but it is flat out wrong. Pressure in interviews is not the same as pressure in a job. I've been the one to fix something in 5 minutes during a global outage with 10 people watching behind me, when the previous solution would have taken hours. I've been the lead on calls with 20 partner companies across 5 countries as the largest spike of traffic per year hits us. I can handle pressure.
I've also had panic attacks in interviews. I've shut down completely. I've had my heart rate jump to 150. Not every time, but enough for interviewing to be a really big problem for me.
Whats the difference? For me, it's the perception of conflict or adversary. Some interviewers LOVE to put it out, like they're some shining knight protecting their company from the slithering fake programmers. They're looking for reasons for you to fail. They're looking for whether you're a "cog", as you use the word, and more often than not when looking for that you find it. When I'm on a team who all has the same goal, I shine plenty bright. I would ask that you reevaluate your biases.
It's not wrong in the slightest. There are multiple parts to performing at a development job, but one of the parts that you can least afford to screw up on is communication with members of your team. If you can't communicate effectively when nothing is actually at stake, then I would never trust you to communicate effectively when everything is on fire. A job interview is not an adversarial confrontation. It is an assessment of what you've done and how you communicate your ideas.
You having an adversarial perception of a normal question and answer session says far more about you than it does the interviewer.
It sounds like you've had the good fortune of never running afoul of a harsh interviewer. I don't believe I've had either, but certainly stories abound. And I've definitely encountered interviewers who were checked out and seemed rudely unfocused on the interview.
While interviews might not be inherently adversarial, they are at least inherently confrontational, there is a power asymmetry. One is being evaluated. The fail state of rejection is present and the other party is willing to use it against you if you fail their expectations. Whereas at most companies with non-toxic cultures, your coworkers do not consider doing that to you. As such, interviews are always inherently different social environments from day to day work.
No, I've had the life experience of being a professional recruiter as well as a developer.
There's no inherent power asymmetry in interviews outside of your own employer. They have a job to offer. You want the job they're offering. They either offer you the job or don't, you either accept the offer or don't. You are determining whether the employer is a fit for YOU and what YOU want out of your career just as much as they are deciding whether you are a fit for them. It takes two to agree. At the end of the day, you owe each other nothing but the courtesy one would normally have for someone you are about to spend an hour or more with. On either side of the desk, I interview for jobs much better than most because I always keep that in mind. Most people claim to understand that on a conceptual level but they don't actually process it.
As the interviewer, I'm mostly interested in gauging the talent level of the individual and their interest in the problem domain that we are trying to solve for. As the interviewee, I understand that the worst anyone can do to me is waste my time because either our values don't align, the project isn't interesting, my skills aren't a fit, or there are simply better candidates out there. These are all okay.
When I took my first job after being the sole developer at a company for a decade, it was going to be the first time I worked with a team of devs. The first time I worked with a version control system in a professional setting. The first time when I was not going to be the main point of contact for any flaws or failure in the system. The first time that I wasn't going to be the main designer of the system's components or front end. The first time I would ever work with Angular. I told them all of this.
Know what got me the job?
I could tell you every technical detail about everything I had ever done, but also fully admit where I was lacking. I left no grey area and offered to elaborate where necessary. Either I did something and was confident that I could reproduce it (or explain the business / design decisions behind it), or I had no on-the-job experience but expressed confidence that (a) I could learn, and (b) that I was enthusiastic about learning about the problem domain. And I got along with everybody I talked to because my aim was to be a part of a team and not some weird data processing oracle.
Managers want a combination of talent, technical expertise, interest, and team fit. This shit isn't rocket science. You are totally within your rights to cancel an interview if someone tries to make you be a whiteboard monkey and regurgitate data structures that you will either never use or have widely-used open source libraries that are available, or if the interviewer is disrespectful to you, or if they aren't respectful of your time.
As a matter of fact, I recommend it. But at the end of the day, if they don't hire you, you've lost nothing of value but the time it took to interview.
> As the interviewee, I understand that the worst anyone can do to me is waste my time because either our values don't align, the project isn't interesting, my skills aren't a fit, or there are simply better candidates out there.
There's also the matter that a rejection could mean you're deprived of a potential livelihood. That's high stakes since it's connected to your survival. This might be an exaggerated stress, but the connection to motivation is there.
And as in all situations where one is being judged, one's ego is also being tested. To many, an interview rejection might not mean anything. To others, it could call into question their skills, their status as an engineer, their very person into being. Again, that is an exaggeration, but it is valid. Software has become a very competitive industry, and the corporate rhetoric that floats around ("doing the best job of your career", "make your job your life"), can have a very totalizing effect on people's self-perceptions.
Even on a mundane level, because software interviews are notoriously opaque and most places don't provide feedback, candidates are left guessing what they did wrong afterwards. It's not necessarily a big puzzle, but having the uncertainty of knowing what one's flaws are is an inherently anxious feeling.
You seem to have a very strong opinion of your experiences, of your capability as an interviewer, and your organization's interviewing process. That's great! Bully for you. But you absolutely cannot extrapolate your own experiences for the entire industry. If all interviewers were as anxiety-reducing as you say, then this discussion thread wouldn't even exist. You are not the industry.
I really recommend you read my comment again before responding because I don’t think you ingested any of it. You’re literally saying that anyone anxious in an interview is both incompetent and a cog, and that anxiety in an interview is directly related to ability to communicate on the job.
This may sound logical and like common sense, but it is flat out wrong. Pressure in interviews is not the same as pressure in a job. I've been the one to fix something in 5 minutes during a global outage with 10 people watching behind me, when the previous solution would have taken hours. I've been the lead on calls with 20 partner companies across 5 countries as the largest spike of traffic per year hits us. I can handle pressure.
I've also had panic attacks in interviews. I've shut down completely. I've had my heart rate jump to 150. Not every time, but enough for interviewing to be a really big problem for me.
Whats the difference? For me, it's the perception of conflict or adversary. Some interviewers LOVE to put it out, like they're some shining knight protecting their company from the slithering fake programmers. They're looking for reasons for you to fail. They're looking for whether you're a "cog", as you use the word, and more often than not when looking for that you find it. When I'm on a team who all has the same goal, I shine plenty bright. I would ask that you reevaluate your biases.