I once had a SW interview with a job that had a 2-hour long personality test. No tech questions. Just random questions to test my personality. It started out simple, like 'what was the last book you read' to more in-depth situations that had nothing to do with the job.
The manager interviewing me (who admit he basically just started managing a month prior) told me he just read a 'great book on management' and wanted to 'try this out'. I passed the first interview, but the second was going to be a 5-hour remote codeshare/whiteboard interview with the team. I declined the second interview.
I ended up choosing the job that had no whiteboard interview or personality test. It was just a simple conversation with the tech lead about my previous experience and if I had the experience to work on their current system.
It was the best job I ever had and they are still my client almost 5 years later.
Two years ago, I had a similar experience with Chainlink. I underwent hours of interviews and completed an extensive work assignment, only to be offered the job _after a personality test_.
Simultaneously, I interviewed at a startup. There, I spent about an hour discussing my experience and providing feedback on their current system with the person who would become my manager.
I chose the startup, and it has been the best job decision I've ever made.
Personality tests can disclose a lot of personal information. It's unclear where this data might end up or who might have access to it. I detest this practice and consider it a major red flag.
This reminds me when I tried incredibly hard to get a tiny scholarship to study abroad in country X and got rejected. In fact, there were several rounds and I didn't even make the first one. My Prof. told me to go to country Y and I hesitated because of the immense administrative burden to apply again and since I was de facto not qualified for a postgraduate scholarship. But application was easy, I got it, and they stuffed me with money.
I always remember the words of my Professor: "Don't you know that everything where you have to invest a lot (I assume effort, time, money, energy) nothing ever comes out?
So if your IT job requires a letter of recommendation from the pope and even if you are able to get the letter, you are unlikely to get the job. :-)
Corollary experience: the more effort/time/money/energy you expend in a successful transaction, the more likely it is they'll impose a shitty condition at the end of it, expecting you to be too invested to challenge it.
This reminds me of an investment maxim that has helped me a lot over the years:
You don't make a profit on the sell price. You make a profit on the buy price.
That's something I lot of people seem to not understand about investment, it's not about how high something can go. That's random chance. It's about how deep a discount you can find on something valuable. If you can't estimate what something might be worth, you're not investing, you're making a bet on things you don't understand.
The goal is to get the answers they want without saying it. They want people who will naturally know ‘the right thing’ to do to get paid by them, without them having to say it.
Folks on a spectrum are usually that way because they’re bad at already knowing that - or unwilling/unable to say it naturally. For various reasons.
Which is why the spectrum covers ‘disorders’ (aka things that make life suck sometimes/most of the time) instead of ‘awesomenesses’.
That said, there are advantages and utility where one can find niches and ways to adapt most of the time.
Being the same/reacting the same as everyone else, tends to get you the same results as everyone else. For better or worse.
Mixing in with the herd offers a lot of protection, as long as the whole herd isn’t being stampeded off a cliff by a smarter adversary.
You’re unlikely to starve either, but you’d better be good at eating grass other people have already crapped on/next to.
how well are you able to guess what the test wants you to say, and game the system?
i remember doing these like 20 years ago when i got out out of the military and just needed a bartending job.
corp chain, had you take a bunch like "if I see an employee slacking off I'm 1) very offended, 2) slightly offended, 3) indifferent, 4) okay with it, or 5) very okay with it
it was obvious what answer they wanted, and empathy had nothing to do with it
Personality tests are screening principally if you are Conscientious and Agreeable. The hack is:
Suggest you answer every question to imply you are orderly, hardworking, calm, stable and cooperative with others.
Notably, organizations are almost always led by disagreeable folks.
It’s a pain in the ass to lead disagreeable people.
Agreeable people are often terrible leaders, as they’ll as often lead a team off a cliff as say no. Or be unable to actually drive action among a group of disagreeing people.
leading often requires coming up with your own answer based on the circumstances you’re seeing - someone can’t ‘agree’ their way out of that.
That said, someone too disagreeable will just cause friction and internal issues all the time for no value add. Disagreeing with the right/proper thing to do is just being a pain in ass for the sake of being a pain in the ass.
Usually, the organization has settled on a middle ground somewhere for each level of it’s hierarchy.
Very top down organizations usually need very agreeable ‘bottom’ layers to do the grunt work. It has predictable consequences - good and bad.
There is a reason why militaries pride themselves on ‘breaking down’/‘rebuilding’ people in basic. And why officers almost always go through a separate process.
Part of being a grownup is coming around to the fact that if someone you just met clearly doesn't trust you, that's 95% about their issues, not yours.
Then it becomes a question not of whether you're 'worthy' of a job with these people, but whether you really want to walk into a place that is telegraphing this much paranoia.
I don't know how to gracefully bow out of the middle of an interview and I wish I did. What I do know is how to sandbag an interview, and I'm sure there are a few people out there who have poor opinions of me that are the direct result of my poor opinion of them.
Places with calm confidence during the interview process may be their own kind of delusional, but they may also be really great places to work, with a good sense of teamwork.
> I don't know how to gracefully bow out of the middle of an interview
"Hey, thanks for taking the time to talk to me, guys, but I don't think this is a good fit. Let's cut our losses and give each other some time back. Bye."
> I don't know how to gracefully bow out of the middle of an interview and I wish I did.
What I do is say something along the lines of "I believe that I would be a poor fit for this position and am withdrawing my application. Thank you for your time and consideration."
> Part of being a grownup is coming around to the fact that if someone you just met clearly doesn't trust you, that's 95% about their issues, not yours.
Trust is earned, not given.
part of the reason you feel as if you can trust them is because you don't have to trust them _fully_. You're protected by the system, life circumstances, etc. Put another way, it's easy for me to trust that someone I don't know will pay back the $20 they just borrowed because if they don't the damage to me is minimal, it's a hell of a lot harder for me to trust that someone will pay back $20k that they borrowed.
If someone isn't showing the level of trust you would expect it's generally two things.
1. That person is themselves untrustworthy and they view the world as if everyone is like them, or
2. That person doesn't feel as safe and protected by the systems in place as you do. Sometimes due to general anxiety, sometimes due to life experiences, etc.
Even someone in category 2 may show themselves to be untrustworthy because they're going to cross you due to a perceived slight or as a means of protecting themselves so 1 & 2 can often blend together.
But make no mistake, you don't trust them either, you just know they can't truly hurt you so it's safe to assume they're trustworthy. Trust is earned over time, not given.
For a personal anecdote, there's a developer here who had major problems with me, it got heated a few times to the point we both had to walk away from the conversation. He just took everything I said in such a negative light. We would talk it out and then it would happen again. And then it came out that he had medication for anxiety, my gf of 12 years has anxiety too so I understand it better than most I suspect.
Once I had that understanding I approached him differently and we have a great relationship now. Some if it was serious heart-to-heart conversations, some of it was my behavior changes. That combination and time has earned me his trust and earned him my trust. He'll very publicly challenge me and I never take it personally, I'll publicly challenge him and he doesn't take it personally either. Sometimes he'll contact me directly and tell me something I said looked bad to others and he helps me keep a lifeline into the team as a whole (I'm an architect).
I'm not saying it's all sunshine and roses but it's definitely a good working relationship now. I say this just to say be careful of dismissing people outright. Sometimes you have to but make sure you have to before you do.
Trust may be earned, but respect should be a default. These tests definitely don't respect you nor the company's time and values. But I guess someone had to feel useful (emphasis on "feel").
> I say this just to say be careful of dismissing people outright.
I'll give them the minimum amount of respect, but if I have to walk on eggshells just to do every day work communication, I'm going to trust them very little. I'm glad you worked it out, but most of the time you will never know their story (and you'd be cast as the bad guy if you pried to find it).
I got asked "what was the last book you read" in a SW startup interview once. I told them and then the interviewers started arguing amongst themselves about whether or not they liked the book, based on what I had told them about it, instead of asking me what I thought about it and what I learned from it. That was one of about thirty red flags. I left without completing the interview.
In imagination-land, it could've been a higher echelon of test.
Despite the dynamic in which you were the one being tag-teamed in an interview, would your catalyst presence bring the interview back on track, with subtle grace?
At the end of a series of "bad interview loop" tests, you learn that they secretly weren't interviewing you to be a coder, and now you are the next chosen-one CEO of Lego.
> Despite the dynamic in which you were the one being tag-teamed in an interview, would your catalyst presence bring the interview back on track, with subtle grace?
In my experience, tag-team or tribunal-style interviews are themselves a red flag. Usually it's a sign that the company doesn't know how to interview or whose opinions to trust, so they're just throwing everyone into the meeting.
And any company being so openly dishonest as to set up fake arguments for candidates react to . . . if discovered, that's the mother of all red flags.
This is not the case with new interviewers shadowing a single interviewer. That's actually a positive sign, that they know some of their people have skills and are actively trying to train their staff.
I've been part of a three-person panel for interviews at multiple companies. I think the idea of panels is first, to train people to be good interviewers. Second, to get the opinion of multiple people regarding the viability of candidate. Third, I bet there's a liability thing at a company level where they don't want a candidate who fails to be able to claim bias of one person.
One time, for an unspecified job at a think-tank-ish place, after passing the first phone screen, the recruiter lightly prepped me for a call with the hiring manager. So I get on the call that's supposed to be with the hiring manager she described... and the format is like a thesis defense in front of a room of people I can't see, taking turns asking me incisive questions, on topics of their choosing, over a speakerphone. At one point, one of the random people talking at me admonished, a bit sternly, "That's not what I asked you." I at least half-bombed it. (I did get invited to do a job-talk after, like for an academic job, so apparently someone decided I'd passed well enough or to give me another chance. But I was really peeved with the recruiter giving me worse-than-zero intel on what I walked into, and there were other demands on my time, with no job talk ready to go, so I declined.) Much later, I wondered whether that interviewer barrage was intentionally a surprise, to try to filter for people who wouldn't wilt if they were a think-tank expert suddenly put on speakerphone to room of clients on some matter.
The best tag-team interviews I recall were for an R&D unit role at a traditional financial institution, where I'd be interfacing with teams throughout the org. Some of them videoconfs (during Covid) were 2 or 3 higher-up people, representing different parts of the org. That actually worked in that case, and gave both of us parties an impression of what the other might be like in some of the kinds of interfacing between teams we'd be doing. I came away with a positive impression of smart, humble, and amiable people, who'd done big things, and would be good to work with. (I was fortunate to get that offer, and in hindsight should've taken it, at the time.)
The most recent tag-team interview was for an early startup (where the plan was I'd be a key IC, and later lead engineering/technology, as the multi-talented founder moved to focus only on CEO duties). One of the interviews was a videoconf with all three non-CEO engineers at once, and I got a favorable initial impression of them, but I had a lot more questions and felt like maybe I was being dumped on them without them having enough info about me. Later, as the founder put together an offer and bounced it off me, one of the diligence things I asked for was to meet one-on-one with at least one of the engineers from the tag-team, when we might speak more candidly than in a group, develop a little rapport, etc. Founder declined, and said something like, that wouldn't be useful. (Then other things came up on my calendar, and I'm embarrassed to say I accidentally ghosted them, so I never asked him what he meant, nor clarified why I still thought it'd be very useful to talk with any one of them one-on-one before signing on.)
I had a high school literature teacher that asked me what I thought about the assigned reading, and then told I was wrong. After arguing that the question was not "what did it mean" vs what I thought. I think think whatever the hell I want to think. This was pretty much the death knell of my desire to participate in literature, and freed me up to spend my time in math/sciences. yes, it was just an excuse for something I was going to do anyways, but still a total lack of bedside manner from a teacher can have devastating results.
I always had this issue with assigned reading. I got much worse results when I actually read the book compared to reading just summaries and conclusions on the Internet. If I read myself I came to wrong or irrelevant conclusions and ideas.
Hi Dylan, in this case, Justin probably wasn't worth the time spent to correct here. Everyone else in the world knows the phrase "bedside manner" and knows you weren't talking about what they thought you were talking about. After an attempt or two, it was probably more worth it to move on, whereas here you made probably half a dozen attempts to reconcile with Justin to no avail, leading you to feel frustrated, which caused you to reduce yourself a bit in this conversation, in my opinion. Have a nice week!
To be clear, I'm referring to your pattern displayed in this thread of aggressively taking words outside of context, and not doing a bare minimum effort to try to find reasonable context for them. In this case, it was probably not worth anybody's effort to explain the words to you; this is true. The fact that you're taking it personally as an attack is on you though, not me. Because I don't intend for it to be an attack, I'm simply stating that a lot of unnecessary time was wasted, and unkind words were slung for no good reason. None of it was worth it, because the value you've gotten from now understanding the phrase was not worth the amount of time it took to teach it to you. It's not even just because you weren't very receptive to the information, truth be told, we were maybe also poor teachers here. But I'll give you more information for your time:
A common theme among many English idioms is that a phrase is found in one discipline (ie. the medical discipline), in this case "bedside manner." Some deeper meaning is extrapolated, in this case it is "showing kind, friendly, and understanding behavior for people in your care." And then the phrase is re-used in other disciplines and contexts where the deeper meaning is what is intended to get across to the recipient hearing that phrase, rather than the literal interpretation (ie. the bed isn't necessarily involved at all.)
As another example: "curiosity killed the cat." There's no cat, and it's not necessary that people will die when this phrase is used. It just means "sometimes following your curiosity leads to bad consequences." Hopefully this lesson has helped you the next time you come across an idiom and wonder why they used that choice of words.
Hi Justin, the phrase "bedside manner" is very common, and was taken out of its original context for all kinds of uses because of medical drama TV shows. It basically means, "general human politeness for people you're caring for that are currently not in a confident position." This can apply to a medical professional that takes care of their patients, or a teacher watching over their students, or the person at Best Buy's Geek Squad explaining why your computer doesn't work. Rather than continuing to rile up the other user for no really good reason, perhaps you can accept that your lack of knowledge regarding common English idioms frustrated that other user, and forgive them for being mean to you. In the future, rather than make pedo jokes, maybe you'll give the phrase a look on Google to see if its been used before, because it likely has. Thank you for your time.
Thanks for taking time to explain things from your point of view.
I've seen the phrase used with medical professionals before.
Never with teachers or other situations though. The results and definition from the duckduckgo search (above) also only show it in use by medical professionals, not with others, and doesn't support your stated meaning.
Sounds like the phrase is used more widely in your part of the world. Good for you I guess. :)
Here's a tip: if you encounter this behavior in real life or online again you could simply not respond. It cancels the whole negative chain of communication.
You can just read literature. Academic literary analysis has always been a grift imo. Just completely useless nonsense. Doesn't mean that literature isn't enjoyable.
I recently read a book that would count as literary fiction (as opposed to genre fiction) for the first time in over a decade and I enjoyed it quite a lot.
Explain that to all of those suffering through the reading just to make a grade because it is part of the required list. If I read Scarlet Letter today, I would not enjoy it any more than I did then. I'm just not entertained by some love triangle in a religious uptight society. I get enough of that in my every day life, minus the love triangle. It's the same reason I don't want to watch Rosanne or King of the Hill--it's just too close to home
The book I read was Revelations by Erik Hoel. It was a mystery novel about consciousness researchers. But Hoel is a literature nerd as well and so wrote it in that style. Would perhaps come off as pretentious if not for the good execution.
This has been my experience as well. The more hoops a company made me jump through the less they were offering to begin with, and the culture was not great.
My last gig was great in that aspect. My client found my LinkedIn, we had a quick 15 minute call to discuss the project and I was working for them the next day.
Imagine the tens of thousands of dollars saved if you had a 15 minute (okay 15 is a bit short unless someone vouches for you or you're a well known open source contributor etc, maybe 1 hour or 1.5 hour, hell even 2 hour) technical conversation and the other engineer is like, yeah this person's worth bringing onboard.
Might not work in all cases, but really, if you're trying to sniff out a pretender vs someone who can write software, would not having a heavily technical conversation about details, challenges and other things not make it clearly evident after 15-30-45 minutes if this person is who you need? Rest of the time can be spent napkin designing something or peer programming to check off those to be sure.
I had a interview in 2021 where I had to do a 1.5 hour timed exercise, that apparently isn't sufficient, so their interview pipeline has 3x1hour additional live coding sessions with engineers. Over 4 hours of coding just to prove I can write code up to their standards. Then another 3+ hours of behavioral interviews, meeting the team. Multiply that by the ~5 candidates you interview per position multiplied by each position you hire for in a given year.
> Imagine the tens of thousands of dollars saved if you had a 15 minute technical conversation and the other engineer is like, yeah this person's worth bringing onboard.
When I was interviewing for both junior and senior positions, my typical tack was to look through their resume and look for something interesting that I have some kind of background knowledge of. Or, alternatively, just ask them "what's the coolest project you've worked on?" From there I'd just let it be a pretty organic conversation where I'd just keep asking for more details until we've either gotten to the bottom of the tech implementation or have gotten to the point where they can say "I don't know, someone else worked on that".
So far I haven't been disappointed with any of the outcomes from that process; there was one where my conclusion was "no hire" and then down the road they were hired anyway... and it turned out pretty much how I figured it would. Good surface technical knowledge with a super scattered implementation.
That's a pretty good one. Tells you what their idea of a bad project is and how much professionalism they can maintain while describing it.
"They made developers write unit tests!!!" vs "There were some personality clashes which unfortunately impacted on the team's ability to collaborate effectively".
“Ok, so the schema control tool we were using generated XML that SVN had a hard time merging correctly. We ended up with so many broken commits that we invented the Lock Rock. It was a rock that I picked up in the parking lot and you were only allowed to commit schema changes if you were in possession of the rock.”
I'm trying to install a webhook in TeamCity to send a notification to Slack whenever anyone across 16 time zones commits to specific paths in a Perforce depot.
Most 'pretenders' I've come across over they years have outed themselves by cheating in the most idiotic ways on screening questions and failed to answer the most trivial coding questions because they've been so bad that they didn't understand even the level that was expected.
So I'm inclined to think your 15 minute intuition is nearly enough - the worst people reveal themselves very quickly. And so does the best people. Where a little bit more time might be needed is sometimes in the middle, but it's rare for more conversation to change the initial judgement.
Over nearly 30 years, there have been borderline cases where we might have overpaid someone, and a couple I'd have preferred not to have hired, but who still could deliver, but I don't think we've ended up with anyone who were bad enough to justify these kinds of extensive hiring processes.
I tend to see these complex hiring processes more as tests to determine which candidates are willing to jump through hoops and prove their eagerness and loyalty. E.g. when a FAANG sent me a reading list.... I declined, pointing out that if I needed to study for their interviews they weren't testing my skills, but how desperate I was to work for the. Their recruiters called me back a couple of times to try to convince me again.
I can understand them doing so, because they can, and getting people to who will see it as an achievement to get past these barriers might be worth it to them, but to me it just felt like I didn't want to work in an environment where people were so eager work there that they'd put up with that.
I had a great manager who was a coding genius, always available to pair even if it took hours to explain something, and has been a friend for years after we both left that company.
But before that company I had a manager at a very small company who absolutely had no ability to do the work — and would have failed a personality test on top of that.
Indeed, while it might not work in all cases you'd probably save enough time/money to make up for those cases where it didn't work out. I've often seen jobs posted that stay open for 6 months or more because some hiring manager and their team can't make up their minds on who to hire. Meanwhile, the project they want to bring someone in to work on languishes, or people who are already stretched thin burn out and go elsewhere. There's such an emphasis now on hiring the perfect candidate that it's the enemy of actually getting things done.
One of the biggest blights on the industry is the insistence on matching tech stack. Most jobs need a handful of strict but broad requirements like "has worked in a garbage-collected compiled language" or "has used a SQL database" or "has used the .NET ecosystem", or they're looking for a specialist in a particular field like compiler design or distributed systems. Instead they've got a list of hard requirements: "Go, PostgreSQL, Azure, gRPC, 10 years of experience with RAFT (other consensus algorithms like PAXOS not acceptable), some obscure ORM," etc.
Not all hiring managers and not even all engineers understand that every requirement winnows down the available candidates. Eventually you're left with only the people who are desperate enough to apply despite not meeting half your list of requirements. Those candidates are on average not as strong as the ones you'd get if you just asked for software engineers with any experience in consensus algorithms and listed your tech stack as an FYI.
Similar to this is demanding skills in specific AWS services. It is incredibly grating because they end up fixating on mostly BS, non-transferable knowledge because it’s easy to test for.
This is very common where I am (Switzerland) and I agree entirely with your conclusion. It's not uncommon to see posts open for over 6 months and it often seems like this is because no candidate is good enough.
In the intervening time, a candidate not quite ticking all the boxes but with motivation and energy could have learned what they needed to and moved whatever the project is forward.
Do you think it might be because of the higher salaries? I live in Germany and they hire more easily, even though after usually 6 months it is harder for them to get rid of you than in Switzerland.
As a neighbor with the lowest salaries of the three countries (France) I can say that we have the same issue.
And for me it's clearly a people one.
It can be that the manager don't want to actually hire someone because they have personal interest of using consultants to do the job.
Or the manager lack confidence and is looking for a unicorn to avoid making any mistake (probably the most common).
Or the manager expectations are disconnected with the job proposal (they want a senior but the salary is for a junior or like said in another comment, they want someone with skills exactly aligned with the tech stack).
Here we have a trial period of at least three months so it's quite easy to get rid of someone if they don't fit but it's rarely used in IT and I don't understand why.
And once the trial is over, it's quite hard to get rid of someone.
But basically it seems that once your in, if the trial period is used as a quick exit it's mainly by the new employee and not by the company.
I didn't quite know how to answer but you've hit the nail on the head. Thanks!
I agree. In Switzerland employment law is governed by the code des obligations, or for the parent poster who asked in the first place, Obligationenrecht. There are various notice periods, 1 week in the first 3 months, 1 month for the first year and so on. An employer isn't required to give a reason for dismissing someone either.
> I had a interview in 2021 where I had to do a 1.5 hour timed exercise, that apparently isn't sufficient, so their interview pipeline has 3x1hour additional live coding sessions with engineers. Over 4 hours of coding just to prove I can write code up to their standards. Then another 3+ hours of behavioral interviews, meeting the team. Multiply that by the ~5 candidates you interview per position multiplied by each position you hire for in a given year.
... and then, after wasting thousands of dollars per candidate, many companies opt for RTO policies to "trim fat". Yeah, makes sense if you're an accountant / stock market analyst only focusing on capex vs opex and long-term liabilities (which employment contracts are everywhere but in the US with at-will), but from a holistic viewpoint it's all an utter waste.
Assume 30k of hiring costs related to filling any new position (and that's on the lower end), it makes zero sense to not grant existing employees even 2 grands a year in wage increase... but here we are. Financial games have ruined everything.
> I passed the first interview, but the second was going to be a 5-hour remote codeshare/whiteboard interview with the team. I declined the second interview.
Last year I interviewed for MongoDB. They proudly boasted that their hiring process consisted of a 7 interview marathon. I asked if that wasn't too many interviews, and the interviewer boasted that they already managed to streamline their process down from 12 interviews.
They also proceeded to point out that all FANGs follow the same process, except they really don't.
I respectfully dropped from the hiring process there and then. The extremes to which they take their cargo cult mentality is out of this world.
Ha, I had a phone interview with MDB for a (contract!) technical writing gig, and they told me the next steps include (1) a one-hour critical thinking test, whatever that means, and (2) a one-hour writing interview.
Not a take-home writing assignment, which would be pretty standard, but a live writing interview via Zoom screen share. Very unusual, but I don't have too many other things on the horizon right now, so I'll see where it goes...
I interviewed for a Sr Software Engineer gig there in 2022 and had a laughably negative live-leetcode experience where the interviewer was visibly zoned out almost the entire time and mostly just awkwardly stared at the camera while I found a solution - whether or not the most optimal, I guess - to whatever pointless never-going-to-actually-write-stuff-like-this-on-the-job thing they'd asked me.
I asked for feedback on the blurb or ways to improve it and got told, basically, "well you took so long" (~30 minutes?) "to implement this that we don't really have time for that", or something to that rough effect.
I got a relatively generic rejection email shortly thereafter, and frankly, only minded because I was unemployed at the time. I have no idea what whoever designed their hiring process thinks they're getting out of being overcomplex and generally cold, but I can't imagine it's anything good.
a) Outright cheating in the interview is probably a bad sign about the candidate (whereas the interviewers might be ok with, say, using GenAI, which is increasingly common in many sectors). But impersonating a candidate, or having a friend sit in with you, would always be a bad sign.
b) Not necessarily, some companies would care if their contract writer stole/copied/repurposed/reused content from a competitor/regurgitated copyrighted material. Think also GenAI hallucinations, fabricated citations, etc. But sure, most cost-conscious companies won't give a hoot, so they could probably get by with cutting corners.
Yep - companies will continue to use these bizarre hiring criteria/tests unless or until enough people refuse to participate; but as long as their is a line of people behind you willing to do 'whatever' for the chance at the job, not much will change.
Unfortunately companies have found a loophole: They just say "we couldn't find anyone who is acceptable for the role locally so instead we'll hire overseas for a fraction of the cost, darn"
Almost like the unnecessarily complex hiring processes are built that way on purpose.
I've worked with great offshore teams and terrible ones, I think the great ones were more expensive but still less than a local salary.
But the theoretical hiring manager here doesn't care anyways. All they want is to come under budget so they can max their bonus for being so cleverly frugal.
Intelligence / Competence more or less has the same distribution curve. With the access of knowledge now widely available, A country with 1.5B people will always have more competent people than countries that have 50 Million in population.
And these countries have cheap labor. US has always poo-pooed Japanese, Chinese and Indian workers as low quality. That's only because you didn't filter well
>Intelligence / Competence more or less has the same distribution curve. With the access of knowledge now widely available, A country with 1.5B people will always have more competent people than countries that have 50 Million in population.
That is only a fraction of what it takes to produce good software developers. You have to include quality of the educational systems, living conditions and all that. Any offshore developer worth their salt gets paid market rates or near market rates.
>And these countries have cheap labor. US has always poo-pooed Japanese, Chinese and Indian workers as low quality. That's only because you didn't filter well
It's not their nationality, it's the price they are charging for. I bet you can't find a quality US worker for $30K a year either.
I work with IDC folks a lot and just like you said there is no difference in quality but the time difference and being US centric makes a difference. The US side makes the decisions and the ither sides has to follow. I personally try to give as much independence as possible but it's just how it is based on where the money comes from.
Interviews are for weeding out poor candidates; what you have left are the good ones. Weeding out poor candidates is not possible with 10-15 minutes informal chats.
That's the whole point of resumes and LinkedIn...especially in technical fields. You self-select for the hiring criteria you're looking for. You then speak to the candidate to understand a bit more about their experience as it relates to the job you're seeking a candidate for. That's why it often makes sense for such roles, for technical people to interview other technical people.
"Oh, you have experience with XYZ technology stack, and you worked with it for a few years, awesome. That's what we use here, but could you please talk about some of the projects you worked on with said technology?"
But no, tell me how that's not possible to do quickly.
People lie about what they personally did as part of a larger team. They claim to have skills and expertise they don't actually have.
I'm not saying you need a gauntlet of tests. I liked the approach mentioned elsewhere of a technical discussion about what they did. But it takes, like, an hour or two to make sure they're not BSing and that they're actually as much of an expert as they claim to be.
I mean, of course it would be better to find the most qualified candidates every time with perfect accuracy. Does having a longer interview process help with that goal, or does it deter the exact candidates you want? Is it okay to end up with the guy who wrote the FrobNizzle compactor instead of the woman who wrote the FrobNizzle extractor?
The candidate may embellish and fuzz thing (both on the CV and verbally), mixing what they did with what the team did, color things to make themselves look better, etc. In certain parts of the world, that's just the normal behaviour in interview loops, and the loop takes it into account. Sometimes you remove the extra "marketing layer" and still have a good candidate --- sometimes not.
If you're Google or similar, you can afford to throw such candidates out even at the recruiter screening stage. But in other companies, probably even in the 3rd quartile, you may need to fish in these waters.
Example: does "shipped" mean it went into production and users were using it, or, does it mean you gave the source code to the client and then you have no clue what happened to it? Does "Airflow" on the CV mean you once played with it for a blog post, or you used it in production for 5 years? Does "Manager" mean you were managing the people and accountable for delivery, or you were in a lot of meetings?
You can weed out _some_ of the poor candidates in 15 minutes, but not _all_ of them, not even close. But the point of the interview loop is to weed out _most_ of poor candidates.
The fact that a somebody once got a job after a 15 minute interview is completely irrelevant.
Resumes can easily be bsed and 15 min can also be bsed using buzzwords. I know a person IRL who basically switches jobs every 3 months, but is excellent at using tech buzzwords, while not actually being able to code or think algorithmically, they know all the frontend tooling. More than usual frontend eng would know. So they appear stronger than an actual frontend eng. They can talk about webpack config and plugins, but they can't build anything.
They can make a thing that would take a day of work sound like some sort of fantastical world changing undertaking.
Aside from the fact that you'll eliminate a lot of good people, how does that let you screen out people who can't do anything but are decent bullshitters? In a 10-15 minute chat you might catch them contradicting themselves or say something you're lucky enough to remember is wrong (if you're lucky enough to know one of the things they claim experience with in detail), but that's not going to be reliable (and if you eliminate people who get product trivia wrong, that will also have a pretty high false positive rate).
> But no, tell me how that's not possible to do quickly.
I mean your low ball easy to answer question gives you exactly zero information other then yes they in fact worked on a team that did stuff. They just talk about what their peers did you've got such a short interview your not going to figure out they didn't actually do that shit.
I don't realize that. We know that there was a short chat, and that it resulted in filling a position. We don't know whether it's an effective way to filter out poor candidates. Have you done it? What's your success rate?
If you can't figure out someone is a dud in 60 minutes you are doing it wrong. If you can't figure out someone is a dud in 60 minutes, 360 minutes isn't going to make a difference. Why waste the extra 300 minutes?
You can ask for precise details about the implementation or the weirdest bug they had encountered.
Great tech guys are able to explain to you complex systems quite easily; not by making them overly complex, but quite the opposite, to keep them simple, and regarding the bug you can understand the depth of troubleshooting the person went through.
I do ask questions like this. You might be surprised to learn that there are a fair number of candidates who can answer stuff like this, but really struggle to write any code at all. I'm not totally sure how to account for it.
Different scales different approaches. You don't need to throw a distrubuted server to sort 100 objects.
I'm sure for a small and even medium sized company looking for a technical role it's fine to look at resumes, have a quick chat, and get them in. Not as safe to use when sorting through thousands of candidates at a FAANG.
Yes I have done it. My success rate has been fine. I can’t remember poor hires coming in this way.
That said I’m getting the feeling you’re more interested in confirming your world view than anything else here. Continue hiring however you wish. Continue believing it’s the only effective way of you wish.
It _does_ show that. It’s obvious that /u/intelVISA is presenting this as a success story. If /u/intelVISA decides the candidates were good enough then they were good enough. Who else is there to judge but the one making the hiring decisions? Who are you to second guess someone else’s hiring decisions knowing nothing of the role, the pay, the performance, or really _anything_ at all?
> I ended up choosing the job that had no whiteboard interview or personality test. It was just a simple conversation with the tech lead about my previous experience and if I had the experience to work on their current system
I miss interviews like this. We need to compile a list of companies that still do this. In fact, getting on that list could really help a company's recruiting efforts - which in turn could influence other companies to adopt this interview style.
I think they're gone because, within the limited time of an interview, it's hard to prove competence with chatting, for yourself, and especially in a way that can be communicated to others in the panel. Most places I've worked, firing is a bad bad thing. It means everyone involved with the hire failed, and morale is hurt by everyone that sees the person let go.
When I first started interviewing, this was the method I used. It turns out that most people have fanfic for resumes. "Designed a system" or "worked with a system" actually means "played an insignificant part in the design of a system" or "minimally modified some existing code". Getting to a point where this is obvious can take a significant portion of a 45 minute interview, and almost always comes from digging into the nitty gritty of the details, very close to code. Then, worried, you have them try to write some basic code as time runs out, and they completely flop, with that, and whatever small thing triggered your suspicion, being the only useful evidence you can point to for why you're saying no, even though others are saying yes.
So, I flipped it. I go for real evidence first, which gives me objective, repeatable, results, then any remaining time is left to talk and go into depth. I give them an easy work related problem, requiring realistic syntax. I've had people that were fantastic with communicating their ideas, and even pseudocode, but didn't know the syntax of a function or simple for loop, in the language of their choice. Take home code/screens can't be trusted, without basically goin through it line by line. Heck, video interviews can barely be trusted these days. I've many had people obviously, and not so obviously, copy paste the top google search result. I've even had people double team an interview, with the second person listening and typing the results on a second screen.
That said, I completely agree. My dream interview, either side, is just getting nerdy for an hour and a half with someone. But, especially for less senior roles, I can see why it's not popular, especially if you're stuck with short interviews, or are not the hiring manager, where you don't have to objectively justify things. Interviews are, unfortunately, a fairly adversarial interaction.
>Getting to a point where this is obvious can take a significant portion of a 45 minute interview
I mean, without the project being some huge OS thing it's hard to prove contribution it in any amount of time. I don't mind some simple system design questions to sus that out (and maybe relate it to a work experience to test some validity), but instead it turns into 4 rounds of Leetcode. A waste of time and STILL not making it obvious.
At least for our group, the problem comes in the required defense of the written justification. Coding is a better consistent and objective signal, than passing a free form conversation that's completely different for every candidate. A free form conversation also makes the whole process much more susceptible to bias, which is part of the reason we're urged to have the same interview for each person.
If you have four people on the panel, and they're all trying to piece together something perceived as objective, then you could definitely end up with 4 rounds of leetcode. In our group, we have different people focus on different things, so this doesn't happen.
But, I think we're in agreement. I don't think a "conversation only" approach is good, because at the end of the day you have to make sure someone can actually code. A code only approach isn't good, because it severely limits the context that the person can show competence.
I would love to hear opinions on how I could interview better. I've never heard anyone claim that interviewing is easy, or solved, and I'm definitely not doing that here.
> the second was going to be a 5-hour remote codeshare/whiteboard interview with the team
I had a similar experience with Cisco. The recruiter, who seemed pretty inexperienced, said she wouldn't reveal the compensation range until after the 5-hour interview. I declined the 5-hour interview day and that was the last time I even considered a job that didn't post the compensation range up front.
From what I understand, Canonical culture isn't great, either. The whole process sounds a lot like what you are talking about -- just hoops to winnow out people for the sake of winnowing.
After that personality test, they ask you to complete a timed IQ test. After that, you'll reach a behavioral interview after which you get assigned a "take home" technical assessment, which then after submitting you can schedule to have technical interviews (potentially multiple). You can fail at any step along the way.
It was one of the more laughably ridiculous interviewing processes I've seen, and thankfully the only one I've seen recently that was so egregious.
Having seen Canonical's personality test, while it's impossible to verify without their marking methodology, it feels explicitly classist (which in the US probably means it produces racist outcomes too)
There are wealthy and poor people all across the country that do or do not participate or relate to any of those named things.
You have identified a very specific type of economic class, which has nothing to do with "race" and/or ethnicity. I also doubt Canonical is only seeking people who "summer" in Martha's Vineyard, regardless of their skin color.
Exactly. That said, some standardized tests have been accused of class or race bias merely by the demographic distribution of outcomes, which requires a lot more explaining than asking whether "Does Buffy's Jaguar leak oil?" has a potential class bias.
In the U.S. class, income, and race are correlated for various historical reasons. Obviously "correlated" means "on average", not a rigid relationship. But discriminating based on class is very likely based on correlation to produce a disparate impact based on race.
How disparate, and how bad that is and even I suppose whether it's bad, are hotly contested ideological questions.
Way too much emphasis on if you went to the "right" high school or college for something given to people with ten year's experience, interest in those that took a hyper competitive view to niche hobbies in their high school years, why they picked the third level institution they did (economic necessity did not seem likely to be an acceptable answer).
> Way too much emphasis on if you went to the "right" high school or college for something given to people with ten year's experience, interest in those that took a hyper competitive view to niche hobbies in their high school years, why they picked the third level institution they did (economic necessity did not seem likely to be an acceptable answer).
Do rich golf-playing Harvard graduates really apply for a remote 100k per-year positions at Canonical? Or what is the idea of such interview?
In the US the two are intertwined because historical discrimination produced reduced chances for black people to make it into the middle and upper class, and this is a generational effect. Consequentially things that discriminate against the working class will also discriminate against historically discriminated minorities.
I don't think there is a way you can assert hiring practices that discern based on economic status are de facto racist in the modern US. That seems to be quite a stretch. In fact, many of the practices at large organizations are designed expressly to favor historically discriminated populations - and in other cases historically discriminated populations don't need an artificial advantage and have outpaced other populations on their own merit.
> I don't think there is a way you can assert hiring practices that discern based on economic status are de facto racist in the modern US. That seems to be quite a stretch.
It meets the "disparate impact" criterion, which is the legal bar for racism.
Short whiteboard interviews have become LeetCode/take-home assignment/one vs whole-team-from-every-department interview marathons. So instead of those funny pictures, we'll have Rorschach tests followed by polygraphs soon.
Personality tests are stupid but I don't know if I'd be willing to join a company that didn't do any-kind of whiteboarding/live coding exercise.
I've interviewed way too many people who can't write a for loop. Fizzbuzz is supposed to be a joke not something people legitimately fail but it happens all the time.
I'm fine with a coding test, and okay with whiteboarding / live-coding so long as people are accepting of it just being roughing-out the code rather than expecting to produce something polished... but 5 hours of it? That's ridiculious unless you're paying people for the interview.
It's still such a weird contrast where I hear of talented, very experienced engineers who will still be ghosted by 90% of jobs, but then there's also experiences like this.
Like, how is this sub-fizzbuzz programmer getting interviews but someone with 10+ years experience gets trapped in the HR filter?
My area (data science) there is a problem with resume embellishment and HR/tech-recruiters not having a clue (I presume similar across different tech areas).
It has gotten to the point where people straight up lie about tech experience on resumes, so the HR filter may be worse than random (it filters for liars, not legit related experience).
Same. I've seen enough NBA shot location and covid dashboard examples on resumes to last a lifetime. Like it is obvious they did it in some online course.
Something unique goes a long way with me, even if it is something I could not care less about.
When I encountered sub-fizzbuzz programmers I think the job postings were all for junior developers. So the bar was already low-ish, you just had to have the right keywords on your resume and get past HR.
So probably a different pool than the 10+ year people.
That was the way that I interviewed. I never gave a coding test in my life.
I never made a technical error, but I think that I did hire a couple of folks, over the years, that didn't integrate into the team that well. Not sure the personality test would have made a difference.
Sometimes, the only way that you can tell how someone will do, is start working with them.
the first time I saw a pressure-interview for high skill coders was on campus at Apple, and the interviewing team was from Microsoft HQ. The project was audio-related and required excellent coding skills and knowledge of digital sound and associated mathematics. This was in the early 1990s IIR.
After complete astonishment at the focus on "performance coding" also known as obey my commands now.. by tech-bros from MSFT, the immediate thought was "this is a new style of engineering management that emphasizes the authority of the interviewer over talent and skill fitting"
Well, when I was younger, I would have been more responsive to that.
Not anymore.
I've been shipping (as opposed to "writing") software, for my entire adult life. That means start-to-finish, and continuing support, afterwards. In the last dozen years, I've had over 20 apps in the Apple App Store (but I deprecate them, so it's probably only five or six, now), done alone.
I can do the stuff, and I can prove it. I have a gigantic library of code, out there, along with a great deal of blog posts, teaching courses, and whatnot.
If someone wants to find out about me, they could get a really good idea, in about fifteen minutes of searching. I make it a point, to be public about my work (if possible -the app I just released is not open-source).
But it surprises me, that they are more interested in 50-line academic exercises. I've actually been told that "I probably faked" my portfolio.
> but the second was going to be a 5-hour remote codeshare/whiteboard interview with the team.
I've never understood why large companies do such long gruelling interviews. I always assumed it's because big companies get lots of low quality applicants at high volume but thats just a huge investment for both sides.
From my limited experience hiring you can spot the talented ones pretty quickly and the real test comes a few months down the road when you're working together and you see their output and ability to learn and adapt quickly to the team.
Work background and experience is usually plenty of information. Not sure what some toy tests in a remote call is going to tell you other than their ability to manage nerves and operate under public pressure.
Bad experience with too much undetected nepotism might be a reason they decided to start looking for slightly more objective procedures. When those then still get gamed, perhaps even harder, that turns into a slippery slope and in the end you get those systems where only those who memorize the entire secret dance routine ever get a position.
Or maybe it's like OP said, the HR guy read a book on hiring and now has a 2hr test because he thinks it will help. While the dev team is struggling to hire good people.
The thing I dislike, but not surprised about, is how so many dev teams will engage in this circus. The dev management guy is definitely okaying the 5th toy test thing. Which can probably be summarized by the stereotype of which devs seek management, if they are devs at all.
Anyway, I doubt FedEx is doing interesting programming work anyway. They'll get the quality and output they deserve.
Having worked at FedEx, I can say that there’s actually a decent amount of interesting work to be done.
First, the website gets a ton of traffic. Granted, it’s not google scale but it’s still significant enough to be interesting.
The more interesting bits are behind the scenes. The operations research challenges are enormous, routing millions of packages across thousands of trucks and airplanes. The sorting hubs are highly automated and frankly terrifying in their scale and speed.
I worked in fraud detection and infosec, and I can’t say much detailed about that. Suffice it to say that stealing packages is a sufficiently good motivation for criminals to develop some interesting strategies.
All that to say that it’s deeply disappointing that fedex is using dumb shit like this to screen talent.
I basically refuse to work for any company that chooses to employ IQ or personality tests.
I once walked into an interview and they presented me with a wunderlich test (the test they give NFL quarterbacks). It's not technically an IQ test but you can back into IQ ranges using the results.
For the math part I made sure I got the wrong answer on everything then in the in-person interview that happened immediately after I made sure to tell them I was very bad at math (my degree is in CS & Math).
I don't want to work in a place where they think these sorts of tests tell them anything useful.
The Wonderlic test only seems to work for the NFL because people study for it. I had to take it once for a hedge fund - if your mental math is good it's no big deal, but it definitely helps to practice.
Do they really want to be asking this? People's reading habits are highly personal. There are lots of questions you can't legally / shouldn't ask during an interview, and this is pretty borderline.
> The manager interviewing me (who admit he basically just started managing a month prior) told me he just read a 'great book on management' and wanted to 'try this out'.
Each one has a title like "Starter Not a Finisher", "Frequently Change My Mind", "Always Wonder Why", "Easily Offended", "Art Isn't My Thing", "Unstoppable", "Make Friends Everywhere", "Good Enough", "Not My Job", "Tend to Feel Sad", "Volunteering", "Believe the Best of People", "Hard to Start a New Task", "Loves the Social Scene", "Chats in Elevators", "Natural Leader", "Sometimes Thoughtless"
I interviewed at Burger King in college, the manager told me I was the only applicant in their system to get above 80% on the personality test. It was incredibly easy things like, "How many minutes are acceptable to show up late for your shift? 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, being late is unacceptable". Or "If you knew there were no cameras able to see you, and no other employees around, how much money is okay to take from the register? $1, $5, $20, any amount is unacceptable"
He said something along the lines of "I know some employees are going to try to steal from the register, but why would they admit that in an interview?
I took one once (at iZod, I think), which included some tripwire questions. The manager said afterwards that e.g. if you saw "a customer left $0.02 in change on the counter when they left the store, what do you do?" and you picked "I chase them down the block to give it back", that's a sign that you're bullshitting the questions too hard.
You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
Or, someone might also have a sense of karmic justice, whereby $0.02 is the same as $200 in the ethical context of returning a lost object to its owner.
The manager sounds like they'd be happy to steal your wages, as long as it was "only a small amount". You dodged a bullet there.
I mean, from the perspective of the manager, you really don't want an employee who's going to run out of the store to return an amount of money that won't matter to the customer. One can understand a peculiar value system, and also think that the conclusions it reaches are bad for your situation. (See also: "it's okay to take money from the cash register if I need it".)
I also think that going from that question to them stealing your wages can only be fairly analogized if it's a similarly insignificant amount. Is it wage theft if they underpay me by $0.02? Yes. Does it really matter? Not to me.
If getting on with your job when a customer has left $0.02 on the counter would be such a severe violation of your principles, you're likely unsuitable for jobs.
The question is hypothetical rather than practical, and in many roles (civil service, accountancy, law) demonstrated principles are a fundamental requirement.
The premise of the manager's hypothetical question was to determine whether someone is dishonest, which is flawed.
I mean, that's why the tests are BS. The real answer for 2 cents is maybe a quick "sir your change" but otherwise nothing. But some HR filters expect you to brown nose and act like you'll move heaven and earth to give maximum QoL to a McDonandls customer taking To-Go.
>Is it wage theft if they underpay me by $0.02? Yes. Does it really matter? Not to me.
well: being pedantic, 2 cents an hour done constantly adds up to $40 a year. If we're talking minimum wage, every dollar counts.
That's part of the issue, a lot of wage theft happens to those who need it the most. But they also tend to be the most exploitable.
It's been quite a long time (like, 20 years), but I think the choices were something like "take it for yourself", "put it in the register", "leave it on the counter", and "chase the customer down".
If that's your take you are not smart enough for the job. The workplace dodged a bullet.
No one cares about a persons 'sense of karmic justice' or things people make up in their heads to be clever, they are answering questions on a test.
If their IQ can't adapt to a simple question, how could they flip a burger? Their 'sense of karmic justice' or being clever might get in the way, and since they have no idea of reality they won't know what the job requires.
The pride people take in getting IQ tests wrong is quite perplexing.
Off Topic since answering basic questions is too hard for HN, but the "tripwire questions" are also/only? to open the employee to the idea of taking money, the next question might be taking $1 from the till.
Have you "thought about suicide" is to desensitize you to the real questions. If you think it's a dumb question then they have fooled you.
The manager was using the question in an attempt to determine whether someone was a liar, not a quiz on workplace protocol.
A well-developed code of personal ethics might not matter in the context of burger-flipping, but jobs requiring a high IQ usually also require someone to have principles.
In college I worked at Circuit City selling computers. Lots of similar questions. "Is it okay to take display merchandise if others are doing it?" type stuff. Definitely weeds out some people I guess.
Same here. I worked at Circuit City during college, and had a similar interview, although it was more like an interrogation. I was asked the same question multiple times: "Is it okay to take stuff home from work, even something simple like a pen?" The interviewer kept leaning into me, like a detective questioning a murder suspect, trying to break me. It was bizarre.
Maybe that was a while ago, because almost all of the personality tests that I've had to take are, question: "I enjoy the challenge of collaborating with my coworkers" answer: strongly agree, slightly agree, neither agree nor disagree, slightly disagree, strongly agree
With the questions all being like that with different wording, "I find myself getting frustrated in high stress situations.", "I enjoy high stress situations because they are exciting.", "Being around a lot of people all the time can be annoying", etc.
Over and over and over again for about fifteen minutes.
Well, I guess one way of looking at it is would you rather have the guy who truthfully told you that it was okay to steal $1 from the register, or the guy who lied about saying any amount was unacceptable?
I applied for a software development job at a regional bank and had to take a similar test. Questions along the lines of "When is it appropriate to sell drugs to your coworkers?" I get the feeling it was intended more for tellers and other low level employees given the nature of a lot of the questions, but it had one or two ambiguous questions that tripped me up because neither extreme of the multiple choice options seemed moral.
They never asked me to interview and I wonder if my "wrong" answers to the ambiguous questions disqualified me.
> "I know some employees are going to try to steal from the register, but why would they admit that in an interview?“
A lot of the time, it’s an unfamiliarity with “test taking as being a test of determining theory of mind of the test-giver”.
Rather than answering however they think the test-giver would want the answers to look like, they approach the test with alternative less useful approaches, ones like “holistic reframed hypotheticals” where they’re thinking of the situation in a modified hypothetical with a real world context introduced and with information that might dramatically change one’s answer, such as
“assume you’ve learned a coworker has taken some money out of the cash-drawer, how much money would be your threshold to snitch on them to management versus E.G. just asking them to put the money back?”, for which many people’s answer will not be “even one dollar”.
It is a trained skill to know this is a flawed approach and that broadly, “most tests don’t want you to make outside assumptions or reframe situations, and you should default to using strict and as-literal-as-possible interpretations of questions”.
"How much sawdust is legally acceptable to put in the chicken tenders breading? 10%, 25%, 50%, sawdust in the chicken tenders breading is unacceptable".
I really think in the best case, it's someone in charge of adding criteria to hiring decisions and they pick a personality test as a way to measure and fit a candidate into some box they've arbitrarily chosen for a role. In the worst case they're filtering out neurodivergent people but can't say that because it's illegal. They'll make up reasons like you're listing, but there's not much evidence to the efficacy of these test at evaluating those criteria.
Like 20 years ago, a company was taken to the cleaners because they used a test used by psychologists to evaluate mental health as a personality test in hiring. Now, people who make/use these tests are careful to only use them in ways that healthcare professionals don't. A side effect of that is that any test that would be useful for reliably measuring a candidate's personality/mental fitness would also be illegal. So a lot of these tests are bunk to begin with.
I've thought this of every personality test a job has offered. And in my experience it was never even a good job giving it - the last one I took was for a beer delivery driver 20 years ago.
The tests are usually so obvious, too. Like three awful traits and one good one. Coincidentally(or not?) I was rejected for that job for scoring too high overall - they said there's no way I'd stick around long, and they were absolutely right.
Clever honest people can be moderately successful, but can always be out-maneuvered by the clever dishonest people, thereby limiting how high they can climb,
A small percentage of "clever dishonest people" rule the world. Unless one hits the stratosphere quickly there will be a downfall, because time is the enemy of major dishonesty. In other words, most of the world-ruling class are dishonest, but most dishonest people (even clever ones) are not world rulers.
Compulsively dishonest people don't rule the world at all. If you can't resist stealing petty cash from the Burger King till then you'll eventually be found out and slapped down.
99% honest people rule the world because of the sneaky 1% of cases where they cheat and make it count.
Compartmentalizing by treating business as a “game” that honest people are simply playing poorly seems to be a place many start, if they want to be able to continue to see themselves as honest.
Once it’s just a game, and deception is part of it… why, you’re not even behaving unethically!
Empathy. Remove it. Don't necessarily steal willy nilly, but see people as pawns on a board to get you to the next stage of the game. You're not concerned with doing a good job, you're concerned with learning the players; their personality, their weaknesses, the power structure, etc.
Your goal is to move up the ladder and move quick. Get friendly with boss, the hold it over them. then get to the next step. maybe you need to pretend to fit in, maybe lie about qualifications. That's part of the board. Get powerful people to like you, get powerful tools and resources, and keep moving up.
Many stop around middle management since you start to need more money to push further, but it's a similar game as you go farther up, you just end up fighting against more players that may or may not be cleverer than yourself (and likely much more dishonest).
I think that's it really. You give up a great deal. Dishonest people don't realize how much they've given up. They surround themselves with equally dishonest people, and then wonder why they can't trust anyone.
maybe I'm cynical but I think it's selecting for moderately or reasonably dishonest, the dishonesty of the median. I think you'd have to be extremely honest to think huh, this is an absolutely bullshit test that if I answer honestly on just this part here means I won't get the job I want (assuming that you are only bad on a single metric) but I am going to answer honestly no matter what.
Hmm, but maybe they have that baked into the test!? If you slightly fail one of the bad metrics and none of the others they rate you super honest and hire you immediately! Science says we should definitely try to figure this out.
Realizing the desired outcome a company may desire isn't dishonest. Being agreeable enough to play the game by the rules isn't dishonest.
You'd rather clever enough but defiant employees?
Or not clever and some other combo?
Being honest is realizing your situation and making tradeoffs to prioritize what's important. Pretending that your ability to call out weaknesses in the interview process makes you the best candidate is dishonest. If you feel that's more important you are forgetting why you are part of this process in the first place. If the outcome is they get a better interview process because of your feedback but you don't get the role, you failed in your original purpose. You need to be honest with yourself why you even applied in the first place.
> Realizing the desired outcome a company may desire isn't dishonest. Being agreeable enough to play the game by the rules isn't dishonest.
Answering in a way that is not consistent with what you truly feel or believe is dishonest. I don't think it's an amoral dishonesty, as you say, you've been forced to play this dumb game. There are many cases where being untruthful is not morally wrong.
> Being honest is realizing your situation and making tradeoffs to prioritize what's important.
I wouldn't say that's 'being honest', it's being pragmatic.
> Answering in a way that is not consistent with what you truly feel or believe is dishonest. I don't think it's an amoral dishonesty, as you say, you've been forced to play this dumb game. There are many cases where being untruthful is not morally wrong
Thank you for this reply, I couldn't have said it better. It's important that people realize
1) Representing yourself falsely is dishonest
2) Dishonesty isn't an especially bad thing in many cases. In fact it's socially expected in many cases, such as in interviews.
That doesn't make it less dishonest. It means that a lot of our society is an engine that basically runs on dishonesty.
It took me a while to get that interviewers aren’t really looking for honesty when they ask stuff like “why do you want to work here?”
I mean maybe they are, but they’re gonna be very unhappy with the most-honest answer from 95+% of candidates for the vast majority of employers and jobs.
So of course, you’re supposed to be… quite a bit less honest. And I guess maybe there’s some value in filtering out people who don’t get that? Or who refuse to “play ball” on principle? IDK the reasons, I didn’t make the rules.
I was raised with and internalized honesty as very important, and adjusting to an adult world (mostly—almost entirely, actually—the business world) in which that needed to be judiciously tempered and certain kinds of dishonesty were expected and failure to play along punished, was quite a damn shock. I adjusted eventually but I’ve never really been happy about it.
I ask why people want to work here (or similarly “what do you want from your next position”) as a basic check of whether their and my motivations are aligned and how strong their motivation might be. Sure people can lie, but it also helps clarify if you both have the same ideas about what the role involves short or medium term.
There is not a right answer, but there are some wrong ones that indicate a disconnect that do come up sometimes.
The classic example of requiring dishonesty to pass the test is one I've seen a few times:
"Is it ever ok to steal?"
If you answer anything but "NEVER, and thieves should be publicly drawn and quartered", you won't get the job, even if you have no particular foibles with e.g. inmates in death camps stealing from their captors, etc.
Either you're too stupid to recognize the difficulty in expressing complete and coherent moral directives in 10 words or less, or you're sufficiently coerced by your economic circumstances to bend some of your own ethics.
Obviously, what they want is for you to infer "is it ever ok to steal from your employer?", but again, this is complicated, because every single company that I've taken one of these tests for had robust anti-union rhetoric as part of their onboarding "training, and "be completely ready to work when you clock in", "your whole checklist must be complete before leaving" and "you must clock in and out only at the designated time" in their stated expectations for all workers. In other words, making any attempt to receive all the wages you are entitled to under the law is considered "theft" by the company, and they'll frequently have such rhetoric in the same training packet as the anti-union rhetoric.
These personality tests are perverse-incentive city, and clearly nobody requiring them has a high enough opinion of the people expected to take them to recognize that.
Would you say the absence of humility always equates with dishonesty
If I can't see my mistakes and failures, I would say I have zero ability to be honest; maybe I'm not 'lying' as such; I'm so far gone I don't even know I'm lying
Both. The entire concept of "professionalism" is based around the idea that certain people should be dishonest about themselves in public, for the sake of others' comfort.
If a coworker can't handle a woman wearing pants instead of a skirt, can't handle a black person wearing their hair in a way that's comfortable, or can't handle a queer coworker dressing in queer ways... They're the problem. Not the person who's "unconventional".
All of those things have been called "unprofessional" as a way to oppress minorities.
Covertly flirting with your female colleague in ambiguous ways after she asked you not to and then pretending you didn't do anything, asking your black colleague if he "knows any rappers", and wearing a dress to a company dress-up party when you are in no way trans then claiming to be "trans until tomorrow" and laughing loudly are also all unprofessional.
How is any of that related to the issues I raised? I never argued that any of that was acceptable.
I'm not arguing that anyone should be able to do anything in the workplace, and that is a bad-faith reading of what I said.
People are assholes. And assholes need to be dealt with. But the term "professional" is consistently abused as a tool to oppress people.
I am arguing that the general (American) expectations of "professionalism" are deeply influenced by hateful people, and we should question those standards.
My point was that general expectations are exactly what professionalism is and they reflect the broader society you're in, and there's nothing wrong with professionalism as a concept that isn't also wrong with everything else. We shouldn't question professionalism in isolation because there's no point to doing so: it's just a convenient mirror of broader society used to beat on workplaces for doing what everyone else is also doing.
That last one may well be professional enough to win you business awards, if you do it boldly enough - as in the case of Credit Suisse director Pips Bunce:
Yes, but the topic above was social filtering -- things people say and do -- not identity or minority status. When I say 'professionalism' in the context of social filtering, I am talking about the things people say and do to each other in the workplace.
I started the topic, and you chose to respond to it. The topic and contest is "the concept of professionalism is used as a tool to oppress people" (although I phrased it gentler). I said nothing about social filtering.
You chose to respond with something that just didn't address the issues I raised.
For you now to claim that I'm going "off topic" when you just ignored the original prompt, is absurd.
The first comment in this thread is about selecting images in FedEx's personality test, the second is surmising about what they are really testing for, the third is about whether dishonestly selecting those images constitutes lying, and the fourth is my question:
"Does social filtering constitute dishonesty or professionalism?"
Your highest comment is the fifth in depth, and everyone seemed to be confused about what you were getting at, because we were all talking about selecting images in a personality test during an interview, not talking about people's personal identity.
I entirely disagree with that being what the concept of "professionalism" is based on, but I'm also not entirely sure what you're alluding to here, so grain of salt.
Primarily, I'm alluding to it being considered "unprofessional" for queer people to be themselves in the workplace, as that is the particular thorn I've been pricked with.
But there are other fun ways "professionalism" has been used to oppress people - from the way Women are expected to dress, to Black hair being treated as unacceptable.
OK, so you aren't really talking about professionalism. You're talking about people using a phony excuse to enable outright discrimination -- which is itself very unprofessional behavior.
I think its insurance against discrimination lawsuits. There is no obligation for the employer to reject an application for failing the test, but if an applicant is rejected, there is a good chance they can use the test as something to point to that gave them doubt.
This is true of job interviews generally. It’s a game to see if you have enough sense to predict and give answer they want (not the unvarnished truth).
Those titles help a lot. I wonder whether the Reddit poster saw titles.
With titles, some people will be dim or troubled enough to give the wrong answer on obvious ones, like "Starter Not a Finisher".
The right answer on other questions are trickier. Like maybe the company wants a handler of packages to be willing to toss the packages around "Good Enough", and some manager thought some people are a natural at that, and asked for a test to tell them. (Like when a non-technical executive was suggesting that I should give coding exams to senior software engineer candidates, and the strongest point in the argument was "This will tell us whether they do unit tests!")
Could titles be tricky, like if "Loves the Social Scene" is paired with image of someone partying hard, so the company might think they'll have hangover absenteeism, OUI, or other risks?
Or risk of insubordination, or disruption to the hierarchy? A self-image of "Natural Leader" in a worker-bee role could be seen as problematic by a simple-minded company.
Maybe Fedex is gathering data on which combinations of answers predict a unionizing troublemaker. Or, in the scenario that a shop floor employee is injured, which employees are going to be murmuring about it with others, speaking with investigator, etc.
If a company wants to be especially evil about it, some of these questions might be good for weeding out candidates with depression. Or for arguing pre-existing condition, if an employee later claims that working conditions caused mental anguish.
Then there's the meta of filtering out people who are alienated by this test, or who are not captive. Especially with the odd images in this test, I think many candidates with self-respect and other options will simply walk away. It's not like Leetcode hazings, where they've been conditioned since school that this is just the ritual you do to get that very-well-paying FAANG job. This is some different thing, to which you're submitting for a chance to work at FedEx.
What other possibilities?
Some of that could be useful to a company, if not very ethically. Also, maybe this was sold to the company as more than it is, based on flawed or fabricated psychological research.
I swear Firefox (iOS, so could be a WebKit thing?) starts tabs scrolled down below the page header recently. Definitely happens on HN now and then (although typically I can't recreate it right now..) pretty sure I've seen it elsewhere too.
I wonder if that is a) actually true browser behaviour and not something the site itself is doing (or something I've managed to make up)
b) if a is true, the reason it hid the kinda-header-looking text representation of the images from OP
Unfortunately I'm at a loss for the keywords to search to confirm this behaviour, I'm only able to find unrelated scroll/header results
I get an ASMR-like response from taking tests/quizzes, even these sorta pop-psych nonsense ones.
Apparently I'm a "mentor" at FedEx. It resonates. :)
My current client had me sit one of these after 2 years on the job. That one labeled me "Debater". I argued with them out of principle. I think that if their HR people used it to screen me before I started, I would not have gotten the gig at all. :D
The test is pretty easy to game just by giving answers you think make you a good prospect - traits you would aspire to but don't necessarily achieve. I too got a Mentor rating whereas in reality I am retired and much closer to a lazy shy procrastinating individual contributor who never gets anything done!
This is a well-known problem with self-assessments in psychology in general. It isn't that hard for most people to choose to use a persona to provide answers to some quiz, even one quite divergent from their "real" personality (skipping the discussion on what that even is), and for some people with certain conditions it's almost impossible for them not to do this (e.g., the "Cluster B" disorders). Getting past this problem is the major task of creating a standardized assessment that has any value at all. You obviously can't just ask "Hey, are you a homicidal maniac who is unfit to stand trial?" but you also can't ask questions that are really quite obviously just that question in disguise like "If someone flips you off in public, do you think you're justified in immediately murdering them?"... and I exaggerate for effect, but the principle holds true.
I'd expect even in the case of this quiz if you told people to affect certain personas you'd find the results statistically-significantly shifted, even if the people involved couldn't tell you any rational reason why they changed their answers based on the persona they affected.
They tend to be not much past a slightly-more-sophisticated version of those idiotic ethics tests prospects for low-wage jobs sometimes have to go through.
“Gee, I wonder if ‘C. Let your friend have the goods for free, since they’re really struggling financially’ is the answer this retail store is looking for?”
I haven't looked at a corporate personality test since 2008, so this could be way out of date, but sometimes these tests have a trick question to catch people lying on the test. I'm not familiar with this test but some tests will ask something like "sometimes I feel tired" and if you answer "never" the test maker will conclude you are a liar since everyone is sometimes tired.
Im pretty sure the test being easy to game is the point. Theyre looking for someone who 1. Knows what the "right" answers are and 2. Is willing to give them whether or not they reflect reality.
Yeah you'd think everyone would save some time and treasure by just reducing the thing down to "Are you a jerk? Y/N"
...until I saw my boss's THREE HUNDRED page manual on how to interpret the results of these tests. There is apparently some entire industry behind these "tools". I've learned to limit my criticism of what is very clearly, to me, a load of weak-signal hogwash. They may as well throw chicken bones or read tea leaves from where I sit, but then again, I sit from a place of certainly smaller net worth than whoever is peddling this stuff, so round and round we go? :)
Hah, true. Feels like a superhero slash leader might be the type to realise they and their fellow workers can get the results they want if they work as a union
Seems like a fairly standard personality test. I just ran through it and got the same kind of answer I usually get on these tests.
I don't really see the value in these tests but, apart from the weird avatars, this one seems to be just Myers-Briggs with different words (for me, "thinker" instead of "INTP").
It seems fine until you find out that most companies then weed out certain personality types, particulary INTJ. Some companies in retail are even looking for only a few personality types that they think will make these employees easy to manage.
I thought this was ridiculous as an interview screening process. However, since you shared the test, I took it and I’m not sure it’s too unreasonable. I felt like it’s determination of me as a mentor was quite accurate.
Giving a personality test in a competitive context where it's expected that some traits are valued more than others makes the results void. It's a good example of goodhart's law.
Why would you let a potential employer know you're neurotic or disagreeable?
I know which answers they want but more then half of those are not me. How should I answer?
I'm surprised they don't have tests with "Prone to stabbing people" or "Likes doing work".
When I was first getting into tech, I interviewed at FedEx. The first interview went really well, but I totally bombed the second interview--some remote coding challenge.
After my poor performance, I didn't really pursue the position further because I knew I hadn't done well. You win some, you lose some.
8 months later I received an email with an offer letter.
> 8 months later I received an email with an offer letter.
This has happened to me at other companies too, and it boggles my mind. In sending out offers so late, you are literally filtering for people who either:
1. Weren't able to get a different job in 8 months
2. Will job hop in under 8 months.
Granted one of the two times this happened to me, the offer was for a $30k one year contract, so they were kind of scraping the bottom of the barrel anyways there.
"Well, I went to school with [interviewer, one of], and damn can you believe the amount of paste he ate? And he loved eating and flinging boogers. And there was this time when he got..... lice!"
Just start making shit up cause there's no fucking way you're going to be there.
I had one company spring this health screener on my with zero warning, which included such questions as whether I had ever been pregnant or made anyone pregnant, and whether I had ever been depressed and how so. Very weird stuff, so I challenged it and HR responded that it was a required test for health and safety at work.
It wasn't, it was some corporate type doing massive overreach into areas where they had no right to even ask.
I'm pretty sure the pregnant question is illegal in the US. It's an obvious discriminatory question. If we had a regulatory body worth a shit, they would get punished for it.
I've had the same thing happen. I challenged it on principle - why does a dev need a medical? But went to the centre anyway because I wanted the job. Once I saw the questionnaire and the consent to disclose form, I nope'd out. It wasn't a Dr evaluating me and saying 'fit' or 'unfit' for duty, it was a massive list of very invasive questions including questions about my parents' health, subtle pregnant or not questions, etc. Best of all, it was all forwarded to the company. Said no thanks and moved on.
That sounds pretty bad as you present it. I have seen a state uni do a similar sounding kind of employee survey -- the point of which was not to violate individual privacy but to produce an aggregated survey to present to health insurance companies bidding on providing employees that benefit. I imagine there's a pretty huge incumbent bias there; the current provider has exact data on claims and they aren't sharing with the competition. And especially in the insurance industry, there's a concern about adverse selection and asymmetric information that I imagine could be cured or at least reduced with additional data.
Long ago, when searching for my first swe job, I was invited to this group interview things, when they put us all in a room and asked us to complete tasks like building a spaceship out of LEGOs.
After the first task, we were asked "what do you think about the task?". I raised my hand: "it's humiliating", and left the room.
I didn't had any other offer at that time, and got a call from them a day later, telling me they'd like to talk with me. Replied that I don't think it'd be a good match.
I later learned that role was for the infamous "binary options", a gray market betting website.
Good on you for standing up to this bullshit in your first career job. I'm not sure I would've known better, and I sure wouldn't have had the guts to speak out about it
It's legal for companies to make hiring decisions based on the results of personality tests. It's legal for them to make other personal decisions, such as promoting, firing, giving raises etc. It's legal to make these kinds of decisions based on personality tests that have poor scientific evidence in their efficiency. It's legal to ignore the tests and not make decisions based on them. Largely companies use this as a cover-your-ass tactic. The employer is buying ammunition for future legal fights over employment.
There's really only one set of personality traits (The Big 5) that has a strong scientific backing. Of those only being high in conscientiousness is a signal for being a good employee. Employers screen for that all the time via proxy, such as having a college degree. They don't need to test for it directly. There are however many not-big-5 popular personality tests that are sold to companies. I don't want to call out any specific one, but you should be highly skeptical of their validity.
At best these tests are management by covering your ass. At worst these tests are actively filtering against populations that it is illegal to filter for. For example, the IQ test was once given as part of the immigration process for the United States. Considering that the tests were administered in English they were mostly used as legal justification to turn away non-English speakers.
Ok so you’re partly right and partly wrong. In California it’s flat-out illegal (Tit. 2, § 11071) and attempts to perform more diluted assessments have been found to infringe upon California’s right to privacy.
As for other states, the ADA is likely the biggest threat to these practices and it’s not hard to imagine that a lawsuit will eventually find aspects of many of the current practices to already be illegal. But you’re right that for the “average” person there are generally no protections.
> the IQ test was once given as part of the immigration process for the United States.
This is a myth. There were some attempts at IQ testing in the 1920s but they failed due to language barriers. What was adopted was a trivial wooden puzzle to screen for severe cognitive impairment. That said, the purpose of this test was eugenicist, aligning with the politics of its day.
>I'm confused, I thought I was very critical of these tests in my comment.
It wasn't until the last sentence of your 2nd paragraph where you make any negative remark about them. Up until that point, your comment reads like it is justifying the tests because they are legal. At least that's how I read it.
Glad to see feedback from real users. My company was pitched by Paradox [1] to use their chatbot and this bizarre questionnaire to hire SW.
Their solution target mostly McDonalds workers and other bluecollar, where I believe it's "okeish to put human beings thru the mud first".
They claim [2] there is science behind it, but me and my partner's feedback was it will never work for IT workers.
Selecting people with low self-worth that can be easily broken. You don't want a free thinker with vocal opinions and entitlement (warranted or not) working at your McDonalds - you want a drone that is just good enough to do the job.
Hiring process often is a reflection of work culture. Shitty process will remove candidates that won't fit the culture.
I think most of the jobs that use this kind of filtering are also low wage / low prestige where churn and training represent a significant fraction of the labor cost. So they are probably simply selecting for a certain degree of precarity & economic desperation, trying to exclude people who are looking for a little extra money to meet personal goals or fill periods between better paid work.
I'm trying to phrase this neutrally but IMO this motive is just as bad.
I too miss when a job could just be agreed upon labor for income and not this attempt to shackle a worker to some quasi indentured servitude.
There's that meme of "no one wants to work anymore" and meanwhile these entry level labor jobs act like they want to test for government clearance just to flip a burger or deliver mail.
I took a more general test at a job agency, as there was warehouse work, cleaning, assembly line and so on available.
I argued at the end that I had 100%, since 295 × 3 (or something) could not possibly be the answer given on the answer sheet, as the last digit wasn't 5.
They eventually found a calculator and found their answer sheet was wrong. Supposedly, no-one had noticed before, though now I wonder if it's possible it was a test of personality.
Probably not, as many people probably would find that question difficult on a test with questions like "Put Smith, Jones and Patel in alphabetical order".
these MBTI tests are basically astrology for people who think they're too smart for astrology.
I recall losing one of my most gifted colleagues once over such a test. they brought in an outside company specializing in "HR solutions" and for some reason the results demanded that there can't be another individual with the same indicator as the CEO. so they sacked him and another guy who also was a poor social fit to the rest.
Yeah I’m calling out that “personality assessment” as 100% snake oil because the responses are based on the individual’s interpretation of the images but are scored as the test designer’s interpretation. It might as well be an ink blot test.
Before Covid I went for an interview at a remote-only company, which was a huge plus. We had the first interview over zoom (or zoom equivalent at the time) and everything went well - Then I get a follow-up email about github access and they send me a huge github repo where they want me to complete an example web application that can do x,y and z based on some of the example models included, and want it done in a week to be eligible for hiring. I kindly declined the offer to code for free - and then was messaged a few months later that they had removed this whole section of the interview process and invited me to re-apply. Needless to say I did not apply agin.
I find it so rare for a company's leadership to actually listen to feedback and be willing to improve based on it... I'd absolutely talk again to someone who had the wisdom and humility to correct the errors of their ways.
I was once on the other side. The hiring manager told me to design an open-ended take-home exercise for potential candidates. The exercise was to be flexible: you can take an hour to complete the bare minimum, or you can easily take many hours in an attempt to reach perfection.
I was so preoccupied in designing the test that I did not stop to think whether we should. In hindsight, it wasn't a good idea because of how open-ended it was: some candidates, we later learned, spent at least 20 hours on it.
Bizarre really don't capture how other-worldly (other than the lets-not-be-racist purple people) this test is.
Take the fourth image, of the person (or two people) with two emotions on the couch. How are you supposed to identify if that image as a whole is "me" or not? I would be baffled at how to respond to that. Some of the images I can kind of understand (watching TV while you have laundry to fold? LAZY!), but how am I supposed to respond to "generic image of puzzle"?
You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
What was the question? I'm sorry I wasn't concentrating. I was just wondering how your cigarette looks so unbelievably juicy and tasty. Mind giving me a cig?
For real though, why does the cigarette look so...comforting?
You are instructed as to who you are and what you look like at the beginning of the test, and there is a title disambiguating (mostly) the scenario at the top of every image.
Coincidentally, was listening to the latest episode of 'You are not so Smart'[1], interviewing Charles Duhigg on his new book. One of the anecdotes brought up was how NASA changed their astronaut interviewing approach in the 80's when they wanted to start vetting candidates to stay on a space station. Turns out that screening for personalities becomes a rather important aspect when you're going to trap people together for an extended period of time, and occasionally put them into high pressure situations.
It seems like similar considerations might apply to a number of team based jobs, even if the team isn't locked in a pressurized tube miles above the earth.
To be a Regal Cinemas usher (i.e., minimum wage entry level) you have to take this sprawling personality test during your online application. My daughter took a pass on'em.
I received a three question geometry quiz inside of a google form as a screening for a backend nodejs a couple weeks ago. Apparently it was critical for the role that I know the relationship between the circumference and the radius of a circle.
Yikes. I mean, on the one hand that’s literally elementary—as in elementary school, if only just barely—knowledge. On the other, I’ve not needed to find the circumference of a circle given the radius ever in adult life, and I’m quite sure I’ve forgotten more than a handful of “elementary” things due to lack of practice, over the years, especially in math (for which needing to reach for knowledge or techniques beyond about 6th grade is very rare, at least in my life).
… I am pretty sure I’d be fine on that particular example, but there are surely others about as “easy” that I’d flub because I’ve not used that knowledge in 20+ years.
Maybe we should be giving these tests as part of college admissions. I'd like to know if I can't pass these tests before taking out a six figure loan only to find I have the wrong personality for employment.
I had a 1.5hr personality test for a tech job back in 1998 - the only question I remember was “if you were walking on the beach and saw a dead whale, would you cry?”
Clearly to check whether you're a replicant. It's the Voight-Kampff test.
"The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that?"
Not had to deal with the crap in these images, but got a personality test sent over for a position last time I applied for a job. Already was unsure if the company was for me, got two questioned in before I sent the recruiter an e-mail to point that 1) it was bullshit, not based in any science, 2) I could not possibly answer the questions honestly because the multiple-choice contained answers with more than one assertion per choice and none of the combinations applied, 3) I had no interest in the position if I had to take the test.
Got a message back telling me the tests had been "imposed" by some VP in the US and to disregard it because everyone hated them.
In the end the company kept proving me right to be skeptical because while maybe the hiring manager was trying to change thing, he was surrounded by a dystopian accretion disk of the output of worthless management self-help books and 1970's-style management doctrine.
Which made me really appreciate how lucky I am to have consistently been in a position to be picky.
I once took an IQ test(?), I think it was called Wonderlic or something. I was desperate and it was my first engineering (unpaid) internship. Somehow I was a “genius” and they kept my test record as an example for the next couple years after my internship. I would probably walk out of an interview if someone handed me one today.
It's an IQ test but does it help evaluate NFL players?
Ryan Fitzpatrick went to Harvard and was said to have gotten a perfect socre of 50. It turns out he might have only got 48 which is still really high. He bounced around 9 teams and threw tons of interceptions. He would go from amazing to horrible "Fitz-Magic" to "Fitz-Tragic"
In contrast Lamar Jackson is said to have scored a 6 which is laughably bad. He just won his second Most Valuable Player award last week.
Ah yes Wonderlic. I took that test once, half was seemingly an IQ test (predict the next shape, logical reasoning, etc.), half was a standard MBTI-style personality test. They sent me the results of the personality portion only. I assume my IQ test results are out there on the corporate dark web and companies will be judging me by it from now on.
I took one of those (Alva labs) multiple times for different companies. My “intelligence” (or whatever they call it) score was 7/10 first, then 8/10, and then 9/10 I think in the last one. Just got better each time I took it. And the results for the personality test kept changing dramatically for each take too. Total pseudoscience.
These quasi-IQ tests have to be designed to carefully maneuver around Griggs v. Duke Power to be eligible for use in hiring decisions, but the more you mess with them the more you degrade their usefulness. Actual IQ tests have very high test-retest reliability.
I don't know if there is some secret agreement across software companies that stipulates that they all need to make the application process as painful as possible for retention reasons. Last time I was applying at companies, I noticed it was taking about 10 hours per company of interviews. It is so grueling that I don't want to go through that again so I stay put.
I took a personality test at one company. I hated the interview process so I told them I would not move forward with future interview rounds. If a company thinks processes like this are a good idea, just imagine all the other bad processes and policy you'd have to endure after landing the job.
Aside from it being supremely strange, it's just stupid enough that you risk overthinking each image to the point of answering it inaccurately. The person who approved these images has no business assessing personality types if they cannot understand the multiple ambiguous ways that many of these images can be interpreted. You have to try to infer what they probably meant by the image, and discard other valid interpretations.
The tragedy is that the test giver's job is communication and handing complex and subtle interactions, and they're already failing at it.
Personality tests like this are par for the course in domains like retail. They have right/wrong answers, no matter what the test administrators tell you. When given the option, always Strongly Disagree with anything that might worry your boss and Strongly Agree with anything that would make your boss happy. A single wrong answer could mean you're a risky hire; two or more may disqualify you on the spot. Don't mess with Mr. Inbetween; Agree, Disagree, and Not Sure are wrong answers.
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I've gone down the interview process on a couple of these just to see where it went. I was fortunate enough to not need a job at the time, so I wasn't worried about it.
There was one test with 18 statements and I was asked to sort them from like to dislike or good to bad. It was obvious that the statements were paired up somehow like "Nuclear war is a good thing" and "world wide peace is a good thing" (yes, some of the statements were that extreme).
I answered reasonable as possible, with the extreme statements closer to 1 or 18, and the pairings equally distant from the middle. The mild statements also mirroring each other toward the middle.
There was another part to that round, but it was more along the lines of that 4 quadrant personality test (can't remember the name for it) -- nothing crazy, or at least it was more mainstream.
I did not make it to the next round. There was no way in hell I was going to work for them, but I was still disappointed to miss the chance to look over their brand of craziness a little.
Whenever interviews come up here I always ask: What makes your interview technique good? What if instead of whatever you do, you just grabbed a resume at random and hire that person - are you really use that you did better? How about enough better as to be worth however much time you spent.
Note that my random resume is easily resistant to all claims of discrimination - you didn't know anything about any candidate until you opened the random envelope, so you clearly didn't discriminate against anyone. When you say your system is better, is it enough better as to be worth the potential discrimination lawsuit if you don't interview or hire a minority? (some interview systems have scores that if you can prove are objective, but many of you are proposing something that doesn't seem to be)
I have my own company, have my own products and also develop products for clients. Maybe this explains the difference. Obviously before any clients use my services we have some kind of interview / negotiations. Normally I am being asked what kind of stuff I have developed and how did I solve such and such problems. I do not remember ever being asked to pass any tests. I do know that if they ever do I will simply refuse. I have very good decades spanning portfolio along with references from my client companies. If potential client is not interested in checking my real work and would rather switch to some bullshit test we are better off without each other.
These kinds of things that are basically substitutes for an IQ test (versus tests that purport to measure a specific type of specific technical aptitude) should be banned for employment screening, IMO. Where do we draw the line?
The dirty little secret nobody wants talk about is pretty much all of IT hiring, and certainly FANG, is filtering for IQ or other intrinsic character traits lol.
If they can't tell whether you'll be a good fit after the screening interview, the tech panel interview, and the interview with the hiring manager and who else, then that says more about the company than about you.
After I had been at my job for about five years we suddenly all had to do personality tests. A couple months later, turned out we were getting acquired. I don't know that the acquisition was related but I suspect it was.
These sorts of Voight-Kampff tests are definitely a red flag. But like leetcode questions, they're just one more think you need to learn the correct answers to for today's interview environment.
I’ve interviewed for a couple roles recently that had me undergo both a personality test and a general intelligence test. Was a very odd experience to say the least.
I especially find the general intelligence tests confusing as my roles over the past decade have all been senior level - I have a hard time imagining someone could have my resume without demonstrating the same problem solving skills that were tested.
It makes me wonder what the motive for both types of tests are, and if they are quite different than what us non-HR people would think.
I have strong doubts about working for any company that thinks this is the most efficient way to gleam this information from potential candidates. From looking at the images in the reddit post, I'm not sure how that is supposed to better gather this information than just having a human talk to the candidate.
If I encountered this while interviewing; I would politely state that we can stop the interview process here and would gladly tell them why if they were to inquire about my reasoning.
This is great context. Unfortunately I don't think the test taker had the neglect here. The instructions for this test do not mention the captions, and they clearly don't fit on the screen and are hidden by default on their phone!
To me the neglect here is on the developers of the test for only half supporting mobile, and on FedEx for using such terribly designed test.
This is setting aside whether or not someone thinks personality tests are good or valid tests in the first place.
I'm fine with it. It's their crappy process; if it weeds me out because it's crappy, they're the ones losing out. I'll just go get a job at a different, less crappy place.
A lot of the time stupid hiring requirements are due to the company having government (or other) contracts, and those contracts stipulating certain hiring requirements. For example, drug testing is basically mandatory if the company has government contracts.
When done right though, this can be quite helpful. As a hiring manager I had very good experience with a test that tried to identify behavioural patterns.
At that company, we used it to have a discussion with the candidates, not as a hiring criterion —- moderated by an experienced HR colleague who was trained in how to interpret the results.
Gave much more insightful discussions than the usual “describe a conflict” type of questions.
SAP had a weird personality tests which they made everyone take a day or two after applying. got one when applying for an internship of all the roles there. the system was very quick to send an automated reply rejecting my application (an evening during the weekend in local time).
meanwhile IBM asked for a coding test for a data scientist role, while they got dedicated IT/data engineering roles in the same team.
It’s been argued that the Meyers-Briggs correlates with 4 of the Big Five and that MBTI terminology functions as a gentler, more socially-acceptable euphemism that avoids the frankness of the Big Five: https://dynomight.net/in-defense-of-myers-briggs.html
This's the worse way I've seen to do a Big 5 personality test, I highly recommend this real assessment Understand Myself https://www.understandmyself.com/ the accuracy of it truly helped me to understand my own personality.
Since I think personality tests are just dangerous snake oil, my personal policy is that I don't take them. Companies that use them are companies that I would not likely fit into, so the policy serves me well and it serves those companies well because I'm not wasting their time.
I had a major vector db startup require a take home leetcode (4 questions in an hour and a half), as well as a in person leetcode (hour and who knows how many questions)... and I thought that was bad because it had nothing to do with the job.
i don't get why a lot of people in tech want to be more computer than person. it seems people tend to forget that our role as PEOPLE in an organization of PEOPLE is to do deliver solutions for PEOPLE. a little bit of psychological screening to determine someone's' personality to see if they're a good fit for the department/corporate culture is not necessarily "weird" or off-putting or a net negative in many ways. i received a very similar test interviewing for my first "real" job nearly 10 years ago.
I interviewed for a role at FedEx about two years ago. It was absolutely the most confusing and just junk process although blessedly I did not have to take this personality test. I ended up bailing out of the process mostly in confusion.
I recently withdrew an application for the first time, after a recruiter connected me w Fidelity, bc their initial "interview" was a 1-way video screen that expected me to devote an hour of my time and gave me 24 hours to do that.
Normally an interview is supposed to enable you to find out more about how the company operates, but honestly that alone was pretty telling.
Job interviews must go both ways. When I'm the applicant, I'm interviewing the company just as much as the company is interviewing me. If the communication is so one-way that I can't do that, then I have no basis on which I could decide to accept any offer, so going further with the process is just a waste of everyone's time.
Oh dear, I haven't used any FedEx APIs in a while. but when I did it was XML based (maybe SOAP) and the ordering of some of the fields mattered!! This was of course not documented anywhere.
I completed interviews with my intended manager and HR about work conditions and salary, we had agreement on the particulars including dates, then the organization (multinational corporation purchased a Europan unit I applied to) mandated aptitude test, composed of some sort of mental abilities test and a personality test. "All employee must take the same test and reach a threshold". All from some external party sold their aptitude test services, used by the company for about 2 years as I understood (being a recently researched and perfected technique as I recall). I had a chance to see a practice test before completing the real one. The mental abilities test had generic IQ test like 'complete the sequence' but about half was 'calculate the sales figures of the hypothetical organization based on given situation' kind of tasks, in overall way too much for the allocated time, impossible to complete (testing the endurance against stress, ability to balance accuracy and pace I take, but I only reached about 1/4 being unpracticed in the topic). What?! Engineering position is tested by fast financial calculation? Then came the personality test, similarly with quicker than comfortable pace selecting most relevant answer of the three choices. But all were important depending on the circumstances (which was unspecified) and actually could, and in most cases should coexist (like what is more important to you, choose one: honesty, completing allocated tasks, client satisfaction).
I contacted HR saying that this is not a test that could measure me reliablty considering I have no practice in very fast financial calculations (can do slowly, but they emphasized the importance of pace with accuracy) and that I am forced to give random answers in the personality part, depending on what is my mood at the moment (basicaly mad about these idiotic tests). They told I must complete it and this is 'the base of allocating responsibilities and determining advancements in the company'.
I chose to withdraw my application instead (despite being without job for some months and the position looked promising). I do not want to work somewhere where they make this kind of across the board uniform and abstract tests the base of my evaluation (even if they just claim they do, since it is very difficult to imagine they could reliably do so).
At least you got an interview! My last interview was before the holidays 2023, just rejections since (or I get ghosted). Competition is insane at the moment. Here are exaples:
) trying to apply within the first hour the job was posted is usually too late. I find openings claiming, eg. "posted 21 minutes ago, 28 applicants" and within a few hours the number of applicants shoots up to 300 or more.
) The first email I recieve by HR is usually promising, like "we liked your profile, etc can we schedule a short intro call?". After my response it's crickets.
Is it just me or is the tech/IT jobmarket on a very bad downswing?
It's a big five test which is a real personality test but in the same category to Myers Briggs as far management pseudoscience and ability to predict performance/career outcomes.
Personality testing in applications is hardly a new phenomenon. It was first popularized in the 50s, and has been resurging in lower paying or less technical industries for years to decades. William H Whyte's opus "The Organization Man" (1956) will be very informative to anyone looking to learn about why these tests are appearing in our jobs (especially with the current market), especially I think the fifth section, "The Organization Scientist", which is about research and technical workers interfacing with the broader corporate bureaucracy, even though in the context of the time it focuses on chemical and engineering researchers. This interview summarizes the broad strokes of the book: https://www.thirteen.org/openmind-archive/sociology/the-orga...
The Appendix, "How to Cheat on Personality Tests", should also be required reading for anyone entering the career hunt. This is one of its opening paragraphs to see its usefulness:
>By and large, however, your safety lies in getting a score between the 40th and 60th percentiles, which is to say, you should try to answer as if you were like everyone else is supposed to be. This is not always too easy to figure out, of course, and this is one of the reasons why I will go into some detail in the following paragraphs on the principal types of questions. When in doubt, however, there are two general rules you can follow: (1) When asked about the world, give the most conventional, run-of-the-mill, pedestrian answer possible. (2) To settle on the most beneficial answer to any question, repeat to yourself: a) I loved my father and my mother, but my father a little more. b) I like things pretty well the way they are. c) I never worry much about anything. d) I don't care for books or music much. e) I love my wife and children. f) I don't let them get in the way of company work.
It could be updated a bit for the culture of 70 years later, but the general pattern is clear and easy to follow. Looking at the book and interview again, it's striking just how simultaneously insightful and down-to-earth Whyte was; the universal appeal comes from his investigation being both concretely practical "to the nth" and humanistically aspirational "to the nth". He didn't allow his important work to become either a watered-down compromise or an off-kilter harangue, and was too exacting to be unduly impressed either by the "death-rattle" sloganeering of his time's protestors ("Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate" to "The Ascent of Stan","Love is all you need", etc) or by the benevolent assurances of the time's testers ("The Pipe Line", "The Fight Against Genius", "Society as Hero"). His prose is also excellent. They just don't make social scientists like they used to, and the field is worse off for it. Physics envy and/or the paper mill may have distracted from an old societal good that could be a huge boon today.
> SWE is a common abbreviation for Software Engineer
This only started in the past 10 years or so, and I don't think I've ever actually seen it in real life. I don't live in SF though -- I assumed it was something Google did and all the SF types slavishly copied.
The manager interviewing me (who admit he basically just started managing a month prior) told me he just read a 'great book on management' and wanted to 'try this out'. I passed the first interview, but the second was going to be a 5-hour remote codeshare/whiteboard interview with the team. I declined the second interview.
I ended up choosing the job that had no whiteboard interview or personality test. It was just a simple conversation with the tech lead about my previous experience and if I had the experience to work on their current system.
It was the best job I ever had and they are still my client almost 5 years later.