It is unfortunate that “for some folks any form of a test/quiz can be triggering” as quoted in the tweet.
And I’m not advocating for archaic coding interviews or on-the-spot exercises.
But our lives don’t always follow a project plan, work isn’t always planned well in advance, and our careers and experiences will always have a degree of randomness/variance.
Have we considered that Shopify wants to filter out people who can’t handle this type of experience? At some point “I have anxiety about X” is something this person may need to deal with if working at Shopify.
My point is Shopify can adjust work and policies all we want around peoples mental health but the company may not be able to guarantee that this person never encounters a triggering moment, and therefore they may have decided that is may be in their interest to “not be inclusive” of this type of personality.
I think it’s less likely that companies like Shopify are purposely filtering out candidates who have interview anxiety and more likely that it’s simply not a factor they take into account.
Assuming that:
1. Companies like Shopify do not have a shortage of qualified candidates
2. The cost of hiring a “bad” candidate is outweighs the benefit of finding the best possible candidates.
3. Tons of people who aren’t qualified also apply
The optimal strategy is one that focuses on weeding out as many bad candidates as possible, even if there are some good candidates that get dismissed as a result.
This is of course a gross oversimplification, but the key takeaway is that there seem to be enough candidates that are both qualified and able to get through the stressful interview process, so there’s little incentive to change it.
However, I think starting a conversation about it as the quoted twitter user is doing I might change it. If companies start wanting to take (real) steps to be more inclusive, they might have enough reason to change their hiring practices.
I don't think that companies do this consciously, but I think the problem with your take is that your comment seem to assume that performance anxiety is somehow related to being "triggered" when people do the actual work. I can recall no situations whatsoever when something like that affected my performance at work. I am on an on call rotation, I deal with various production issues and incidents frequently, here and there I'm working on the infrastructure where mistakes can have very bad consequences. None of this is in any way comparable to the interview.
Another point here is that I've talked to a friend working at Shopify and he said that if he puts me in the system they would skip the coding interview, because then they don't need to check if I really can code. So no, in this particular case I don't think that this was a way to filter out people with performance anxiety.
Also, this kind of anxiety doesn't seem to be connected with actual performance when doing the work, it's just about working with an audience that judges you vs working in private. Here is an article about an interesting study: https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/07/tech-job-interviews-anxiety/
Thank you for clarifying. I don’t mean to critique your work or your ability to complete the interview, i was specifically quoting the tweet you were quoting in your post. In that tweet it mentions the triggering aspect of such interviews.
To your situation in particular, my point in a comment further down was that it’s possible that employers like Shopify still see the “on the spot coding exercise” as a natural filter for certain personality traits. Wether they do this consciously or not, i have no idea. Wether it’s good practice or not, also debatable. Probably not as it excludes a lot of potentially good developers. Nevertheless it is a behavior that continues to filter out the types of people who can’t/won’t do the exercise.
Your ability to deliver great work is almost definitely completely unrelated to the exercise itself. It’s unfortunate that you didn’t progress as a result, and hopefully your friend can help you out with resetting the process.
Regarding progressing I think it's for the better. It was about two years ago I didn't have much issues with finding something else (I brought it up only cause Shopify was mentioned in a tweet that started the whole thing). Also, in general I feel uneasy about doing this kind of thing - why would I work for a company that would hire certain people only if they have connections there?
The problem is not that such interviews are “not easy”, it’s that they provide little useful indication of ability.
If I had someone with 500 commits in the primary framework in use (trivially verifiable - and they weren’t all fixing typos in comments or similar), I would advocate for not even asking them code related questions. The absolute worst case is it turns out they can’t do anything, and they get fired. One must at least take some benefit from work being primarily at-will in the US, after all.
By contrast I’ve seen many people who excel at “leetcode” who are functionally useless at anything beyond that style of coding, and for whom normal work is “outside their comfort zone”.
I'll take "all services are down, we need to fix it now" over any job interview. At least I know what the problem is, where to start looking for causes, and probably how it can be fixed.
> Hard disagree on that. “Triggering”, huh? I’m sure for some people, the idea of life not delivering to you exactly what you want, and when you want it, is triggering too.
I think that you're purposefully twisting the point here. The point is not that I'm afraid to go out of my comfort zone, the point is that I can't think clearly when I have an audience and I'm being judged on my performance. Which was never a problem when I was doing the actual job.
I have more than 15 years of experience, working on frontend, backend, doing infra level work, some SRE etc. In most of my jobs I've been also on an on call rotation and when I was at Travis CI I've been on a "support rotation". I've been fixing nasty memory related bugs that put the entire site with the time pressure, I've been dealing with restoring accidentally dropped databases, I've been doing big data migrations and cleanups that could basically fuck up the database if done incorrectly and I've been dealing with various infra level problems in the past. Not once I had a problem similar to the problems I have on interviews.
So no, the problem is not that I will need to get out of my comfort zone, the problem is that companies are filtering out people that would thrive on the job only because they have performance anxiety. And honestly, personally, for me, I don't care much. If I get fired tomorrow I could easily get a well paid job, probably better paid than my current one, I just refuse to interview if there is a coding challenge involved. What I care about, however, is that it's just a shitty practice that is so popular in the industry and people with less privilage than I have might have a hard time getting jobs where they would thrive, because they have this issue.
> I have more than 15 years of experience, working on frontend, backend, doing infra level work, some SRE etc. In most of my jobs I've been also on an on call rotation and when I was at Travis CI I've been on a "support rotation". I've been fixing nasty memory related bugs that put
I feel like you’re getting defensive, although I wasn’t attacking you. If that’s how I came off, I apologize.
Your 15 years experience doesn’t guarantee you’ll be happy or successful at Amazon, Google, or Facebook (companies I worked at). The cost of hiring the wrong person is exceedingly high, and therefore, we’ve resorted to phone screens and on site loops. Which you can love or hate, but I can guarantee you right that hiring is such a hard problem that if there was a more economical way (from a business perspective), to hire at scale, it would have been implemented or at least tested.
> I just refuse to interview if there is a coding challenge involved. What I care about, however, is that it's just a shitty practice that is so popular in the industry and people with less privilage than I have might have a hard time getting jobs where they would thrive, because they have this issue.
Let’s look at the economics. This will not change unless it negatively affects businesses. And so far, it doesn’t. You don’t want to interview? Well, someone else does, as it turns out. And there are enough folks who are able to get through to keep these companies functioning.
The nice thing is that there are companies who don’t give coding tests. You have the option to work there. But to say that because technical screens don’t work for everyone, that we should change the process entirely because here’s another group whose upset - I don’t buy that. At some point, we might as well not even do interviews. Any interview, even verbal behavioral questions, can be considered “triggering”. Or looking for candidates with 15 years experience, which you have, is also non inclusive with respect to everyone who couldn’t afford the opportunities you have.
> Let’s look at the economics. This will not change unless it negatively affects businesses
You're aware of the fact things change based on changing values/culture right? Or do you think corporations nowadays operate just like they have in the 60s or 90s?
Honestly if there's enough fuss and uproar about this, it will easily change. What will it change to I have no idea.
> I feel like you’re getting defensive, although I wasn’t attacking you. If that’s how I came off, I apologize.
I mean, you implied that people with performance anxity are just fragile people who will break down when an outage occurs and that they are afraid to get out of their comfort zone and then they are applying for a six figures job, you tell me if that's attacking or not.
> Your 15 years experience doesn’t guarantee you’ll be happy or successful at Amazon, Google, or Facebook
Not sure what's your point here. I can assure you I would not be happy at those companies, but not sure what that has to do with anything?
> The cost of hiring the wrong person is exceedingly high
Yes, but the current process doesn't guarantee hiring the right person either. You can hire someone who is great at solving coding challenges and puzzles, but who is terrible at working in a team, testing code, reliability, whatever.
> Let’s look at the economics. This will not change unless it negatively affects businesses. And so far, it doesn’t.
That's just your guess/assumption. You don't know how it affects the business and neither those companies do. Until there is a research or some kind of data comparison your guess is as good as mine. And my guess is that it is bad for business. I know a lot of good programmers with a similar problem. Even in the quoted tweets you have Piotr Solnica and Ryan Bigg, one of the best rubyists out there. If missing out on people like them is not bad for business, I'm not sure what is.
I'm not sure why everyone here is so focused on the word "triggered". Some kind of an obsession? Yes, it's in the quoted tweet, but I haven't used it anywhere and you're responding to my comments.
And then, in a typical HN fashion, you're totally missing the point. The point here is that Shopify is rejecting people whose code it uses in production every day on a basis that they can't code. It's not necessarily about whether it's triggering or not. For me, personally, I wouldn't say it's triggering, I just can't think straight in such situations. But again, that's besides the point.
And to clarify. I'm not also saying that they should hire everyone that ever contributed to Rails or any other Ruby code they use. I'm all for interviews and checking if the candidate is a good fit. But it's silly to do a coding test which people that clearly know how to code fail. Like, check the work of other people in the quoted tweets who say they fail these kind of coding challenges: Piotr Solnica and Ryan Bigg. I guess maybe it's fine for you to reject people like them cause they apparently can't code, but I'd argue it's bad for business.
No way of interviewing is inclusive. Whether you choose a test, just a conversation, working through a practical problem together or something else. There will always be people who will be great employees but struggle through your particular interview process. The way I see it I would do very simple interview and then just sort it out during the probation period. It's easy to see after a few weeks if someone knows what he or she is talking about.
Failing any interview is a real kick in the balls, particularly if you happen to be out of work at the time. But somewhere down the road you're going to laugh at the fact that you failed telling them about yourself. Like they would know.
> Failing any interview is a real kick in the balls,
I used to think that, but then I got laid off. That was a real hit to the ego, let me tell you.
The fact is that the right job is a matching problem across so many dimensions that change over time (sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly) between many parties (employers are not monolithic!).
Pretty much, interviewer clicked more with other candidates I guess. That does sound extremely frustrating to go through the whole ordeal just to have some guy weed you out because you don't look or speak like he expects.
If you EVER feel that you aren't able to put your best foot forward in an interview, just STOP, politely tell the interviewers what's going on, and inform the interviewers that you're going to stop then interview, and will reschedule at another time. Apologize for starting any inconvenience this causes them. The interviewers will be thrown off by this, because likely nobody has done this to them before, so you may have to overcome their objections, but stick to your plan.
Then re-evaluate the interview. What made you nervous? Were you just having a bad day? Not enough sleep? Low blood sugar? Dehydrated? Did something about the interviewer(s) put you on the defensive? Try to come up with a plan to avoid this situation in the future. Reschedule the interview if you feel like it.
I had somebody stop an interview like this once. I asked them how they could write a computer program that counted things (typically looking for a hash table with count values) and they immediately stopped and said they weren't expecting a leetcode interview. They later complained to my manager out of band. We offered them a chance to return, but if I'm gonna hire my boss, a head of computation, they are going to be able to use a hash table.
Interesting, I suggest that people not be rude about it or go above people's heads, but be polite and explain the situation truthfully.
But now I'm curious, if the person was having a bad day, and thought they would do bad with either the hash table, or some second question you're likely to ask next, and they left the interview, and you offered to let them come back, and they rescheduled at a later date, would you still consider it a bad signal?
If that's the case, then I think my advice still stands, but it's better to move on to another company's interview process once you stop the interview. There are a lot of companies hiring out there.
we politely offered to reschedule the interview and they declined. later, they "failed up" to a role at another company that didn't interview as carefully.
28 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 73.9 ms ] threadBut our lives don’t always follow a project plan, work isn’t always planned well in advance, and our careers and experiences will always have a degree of randomness/variance.
Have we considered that Shopify wants to filter out people who can’t handle this type of experience? At some point “I have anxiety about X” is something this person may need to deal with if working at Shopify.
My point is Shopify can adjust work and policies all we want around peoples mental health but the company may not be able to guarantee that this person never encounters a triggering moment, and therefore they may have decided that is may be in their interest to “not be inclusive” of this type of personality.
Assuming that:
1. Companies like Shopify do not have a shortage of qualified candidates
2. The cost of hiring a “bad” candidate is outweighs the benefit of finding the best possible candidates.
3. Tons of people who aren’t qualified also apply
The optimal strategy is one that focuses on weeding out as many bad candidates as possible, even if there are some good candidates that get dismissed as a result.
This is of course a gross oversimplification, but the key takeaway is that there seem to be enough candidates that are both qualified and able to get through the stressful interview process, so there’s little incentive to change it.
However, I think starting a conversation about it as the quoted twitter user is doing I might change it. If companies start wanting to take (real) steps to be more inclusive, they might have enough reason to change their hiring practices.
Shopify may not WANT to be inclusive of candidates triggered into paralysis by an interview quiz/prompt.
I don't think that companies do this consciously, but I think the problem with your take is that your comment seem to assume that performance anxiety is somehow related to being "triggered" when people do the actual work. I can recall no situations whatsoever when something like that affected my performance at work. I am on an on call rotation, I deal with various production issues and incidents frequently, here and there I'm working on the infrastructure where mistakes can have very bad consequences. None of this is in any way comparable to the interview.
Another point here is that I've talked to a friend working at Shopify and he said that if he puts me in the system they would skip the coding interview, because then they don't need to check if I really can code. So no, in this particular case I don't think that this was a way to filter out people with performance anxiety.
Also, this kind of anxiety doesn't seem to be connected with actual performance when doing the work, it's just about working with an audience that judges you vs working in private. Here is an article about an interesting study: https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/07/tech-job-interviews-anxiety/
Regarding progressing I think it's for the better. It was about two years ago I didn't have much issues with finding something else (I brought it up only cause Shopify was mentioned in a tweet that started the whole thing). Also, in general I feel uneasy about doing this kind of thing - why would I work for a company that would hire certain people only if they have connections there?
The guy has 500 commits to Rails, do you know how rare that is? I find it very hard to believe he wouldn't be a good addition to 90% of teams there.
If I had someone with 500 commits in the primary framework in use (trivially verifiable - and they weren’t all fixing typos in comments or similar), I would advocate for not even asking them code related questions. The absolute worst case is it turns out they can’t do anything, and they get fired. One must at least take some benefit from work being primarily at-will in the US, after all.
By contrast I’ve seen many people who excel at “leetcode” who are functionally useless at anything beyond that style of coding, and for whom normal work is “outside their comfort zone”.
> Hard disagree on that. “Triggering”, huh? I’m sure for some people, the idea of life not delivering to you exactly what you want, and when you want it, is triggering too.
I think that you're purposefully twisting the point here. The point is not that I'm afraid to go out of my comfort zone, the point is that I can't think clearly when I have an audience and I'm being judged on my performance. Which was never a problem when I was doing the actual job.
I have more than 15 years of experience, working on frontend, backend, doing infra level work, some SRE etc. In most of my jobs I've been also on an on call rotation and when I was at Travis CI I've been on a "support rotation". I've been fixing nasty memory related bugs that put the entire site with the time pressure, I've been dealing with restoring accidentally dropped databases, I've been doing big data migrations and cleanups that could basically fuck up the database if done incorrectly and I've been dealing with various infra level problems in the past. Not once I had a problem similar to the problems I have on interviews.
So no, the problem is not that I will need to get out of my comfort zone, the problem is that companies are filtering out people that would thrive on the job only because they have performance anxiety. And honestly, personally, for me, I don't care much. If I get fired tomorrow I could easily get a well paid job, probably better paid than my current one, I just refuse to interview if there is a coding challenge involved. What I care about, however, is that it's just a shitty practice that is so popular in the industry and people with less privilage than I have might have a hard time getting jobs where they would thrive, because they have this issue.
I feel like you’re getting defensive, although I wasn’t attacking you. If that’s how I came off, I apologize.
Your 15 years experience doesn’t guarantee you’ll be happy or successful at Amazon, Google, or Facebook (companies I worked at). The cost of hiring the wrong person is exceedingly high, and therefore, we’ve resorted to phone screens and on site loops. Which you can love or hate, but I can guarantee you right that hiring is such a hard problem that if there was a more economical way (from a business perspective), to hire at scale, it would have been implemented or at least tested.
> I just refuse to interview if there is a coding challenge involved. What I care about, however, is that it's just a shitty practice that is so popular in the industry and people with less privilage than I have might have a hard time getting jobs where they would thrive, because they have this issue.
Let’s look at the economics. This will not change unless it negatively affects businesses. And so far, it doesn’t. You don’t want to interview? Well, someone else does, as it turns out. And there are enough folks who are able to get through to keep these companies functioning.
The nice thing is that there are companies who don’t give coding tests. You have the option to work there. But to say that because technical screens don’t work for everyone, that we should change the process entirely because here’s another group whose upset - I don’t buy that. At some point, we might as well not even do interviews. Any interview, even verbal behavioral questions, can be considered “triggering”. Or looking for candidates with 15 years experience, which you have, is also non inclusive with respect to everyone who couldn’t afford the opportunities you have.
You're aware of the fact things change based on changing values/culture right? Or do you think corporations nowadays operate just like they have in the 60s or 90s? Honestly if there's enough fuss and uproar about this, it will easily change. What will it change to I have no idea.
I mean, you implied that people with performance anxity are just fragile people who will break down when an outage occurs and that they are afraid to get out of their comfort zone and then they are applying for a six figures job, you tell me if that's attacking or not.
> Your 15 years experience doesn’t guarantee you’ll be happy or successful at Amazon, Google, or Facebook
Not sure what's your point here. I can assure you I would not be happy at those companies, but not sure what that has to do with anything?
> The cost of hiring the wrong person is exceedingly high
Yes, but the current process doesn't guarantee hiring the right person either. You can hire someone who is great at solving coding challenges and puzzles, but who is terrible at working in a team, testing code, reliability, whatever.
> Let’s look at the economics. This will not change unless it negatively affects businesses. And so far, it doesn’t.
That's just your guess/assumption. You don't know how it affects the business and neither those companies do. Until there is a research or some kind of data comparison your guess is as good as mine. And my guess is that it is bad for business. I know a lot of good programmers with a similar problem. Even in the quoted tweets you have Piotr Solnica and Ryan Bigg, one of the best rubyists out there. If missing out on people like them is not bad for business, I'm not sure what is.
The world doesn't have an obligation not to "trigger" you.
And then, in a typical HN fashion, you're totally missing the point. The point here is that Shopify is rejecting people whose code it uses in production every day on a basis that they can't code. It's not necessarily about whether it's triggering or not. For me, personally, I wouldn't say it's triggering, I just can't think straight in such situations. But again, that's besides the point.
And to clarify. I'm not also saying that they should hire everyone that ever contributed to Rails or any other Ruby code they use. I'm all for interviews and checking if the candidate is a good fit. But it's silly to do a coding test which people that clearly know how to code fail. Like, check the work of other people in the quoted tweets who say they fail these kind of coding challenges: Piotr Solnica and Ryan Bigg. I guess maybe it's fine for you to reject people like them cause they apparently can't code, but I'd argue it's bad for business.
And then I failed the "life story" interview.
I used to think that, but then I got laid off. That was a real hit to the ego, let me tell you.
The fact is that the right job is a matching problem across so many dimensions that change over time (sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly) between many parties (employers are not monolithic!).
Then re-evaluate the interview. What made you nervous? Were you just having a bad day? Not enough sleep? Low blood sugar? Dehydrated? Did something about the interviewer(s) put you on the defensive? Try to come up with a plan to avoid this situation in the future. Reschedule the interview if you feel like it.
But now I'm curious, if the person was having a bad day, and thought they would do bad with either the hash table, or some second question you're likely to ask next, and they left the interview, and you offered to let them come back, and they rescheduled at a later date, would you still consider it a bad signal?
If that's the case, then I think my advice still stands, but it's better to move on to another company's interview process once you stop the interview. There are a lot of companies hiring out there.