Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software skills

Date:
July 14, 2020
Source:
North Carolina State University
Summary:
A new study finds that the technical interviews currently used
in hiring for many software engineering positions test whether
a job candidate has performance anxiety rather than whether the
candidate is competent at coding. The interviews may also be used
to exclude groups or favor specific job candidates.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
A new study from North Carolina State University and Microsoft finds
that the technical interviews currently used in hiring for many software engineering positions test whether a job candidate has performance anxiety rather than whether the candidate is competent at coding. The interviews
may also be used to exclude groups or favor specific job candidates.


========================================================================== "Technical interviews are feared and hated in the industry, and it turns
out that these interview techniques may also be hurting the industry's
ability to find and hire skilled software engineers," says Chris Parnin,
an assistant professor of computer science at NC State and co-author of
a paper on the work.

"Our study suggests that a lot of well-qualified job candidates are
being eliminated because they're not used to working on a whiteboard in
front of an audience." Technical interviews in the software engineering
sector generally take the form of giving a job candidate a problem to
solve, then requiring the candidate to write out a solution in code on
a whiteboard -- explaining each step of the process to an interviewer.

Previous research found that many developers in the software engineering community felt the technical interview process was deeply flawed. So the researchers decided to run a study aimed at assessing the effect of the interview process on aspiring software engineers.

For this study, researchers conducted technical interviews of 48
computer science undergraduates and graduate students. Half of the
study participants were given a conventional technical interview, with
an interviewer looking on.

The other half of the participants were asked to solve their problem on a whiteboard in a private room. The private interviews did not require study participants to explain their solutions aloud, and had no interviewers
looking over their shoulders.

Researchers measured each study participant's interview performance by assessing the accuracy and efficiency of each solution. In other words,
they wanted to know whether the code they wrote would work, and the
amount of computing resources needed to run it.



========================================================================== "People who took the traditional interview performed half as well
as people that were able to interview in private," Parnin says. "In
short, the findings suggest that companies are missing out on really
good programmers because those programmers aren't good at writing
on a whiteboard and explaining their work out loud while coding."
The researchers also note that the current format of technical interviews
may also be used to exclude certain job candidates.

"For example, interviewers may give easier problems to candidates they
prefer," Parnin says. "But the format may also serve as a barrier to
entire classes of candidates. For example, in our study, all of the
women who took the public interview failed, while all of the women who
took the private interview passed.

Our study was limited, and a larger sample size would be needed to draw
firm conclusions, but the idea that the very design of the interview
process may effectively exclude an entire class of job candidates is troubling." What's more, the specific nature of the technical interview process means that many job candidates try to spend weeks or months
training specifically for the technical interview, rather than for the
actual job they'd be doing.

"The technical interview process gives people with industry connections
an advantage," says Mahnaz Behroozi, first author of study and a
Ph.D. student at NC State. "But it gives a particularly large advantage
to people who can afford to take the time to focus solely on preparing
for an interview process that has very little to do with the nature of
the work itself.

"And the problems this study highlights are in addition to a suite of
other problems associated with the hiring process in the tech sector,
which we presented at ICSE-SES [the International Conference on Software Engineering, Software Engineering In Society]," adds Behroozi. "If
the tech sector can address all of these challenges in a meaningful
way, it will make significant progress in becoming more fair and
inclusive. More to the point, the sector will be drawing from a larger
and more diverse talent pool, which would contribute to better work."
The study on technical interviews, "Does Stress Impact Technical
Interview Performance?," will be presented at the ACM Joint European
Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of
Software Engineering, being held virtually from Nov. 8-13. The study was co-authored by Shivani Shirolkar, a Ph.D. student at NC State who worked
on the project while an undergraduate; and by Titus Barik, a researcher
at Microsoft and former Ph.D. student at NC State.


========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by North_Carolina_State_University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


==========================================================================


Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200714101228.htm

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