Comment by michaelt
1 day ago
> When you’re placed in a high-stakes, time-pressured situation, like live coding, your brain reacts exactly like it would to any other threat. The amygdala gets activated. Cortisol levels spike. [...] You forget what you just typed a few seconds ago. It feels like your IQ dropped by 30 points. In fact, it feels like you’re a completely different version of yourself; a much dumber one.
Did y'all not have to take a load of exams in high school and college?
I'm sure there are variations between education systems, but by the time I graduated college I'd done at least a hundred high-stakes, time-pressured hour long written tests. All of them substantially more difficult than summing the even entries in a list.
Is this not what everyone experiences, in every education system?
Not while performing in front of an audience, no, very, very little of that.
You know the trope of almost all students dreading going up in front of the class to solve a problem on the blackboard/whiteboard? A thing that I think I personally only actually did a countable-on-fingers number of times ever, and only in lower grades?
It's a trope for a reason, and it's because the vast majority of people do in fact hate having to get in front of an audience and perform. Hell, it's often a component of recurring nightmares.
It's like that but way worse because it's also far more high-stakes than that, the problems are far more complex, the point is explicitly for everyone in the audience to judge you and not just your assumption that they all are causing the stress, et c.
It's more like the stress from getting up at an open mic night, than any kind of stress I've ever actually encountered on the job. Even the dynamic in a meeting with clients where you have to diagram something out on a whiteboard or something is totally different—for one thing, you generally have people in there who are very much "on your side", and you don't have to worry if you misspell something that you're personally about to be/remain unemployed, or lose out on a huge raise, or whatever (nobody generally cares about minor mistakes on a whiteboard in an ordinary context, and maybe they don't in some interviews, but they do in others, and candidates worry they might in all of them).
I can't really explain why, but to me they don't feel the same at all.
I've always finished exams absurdly quickly. I used to finish 60 min exams in like 20 min and sleep the rest of the time when the professor didn't allow us to leave, because I had likely spent the previous night drinking and partying my way through college. I'd usually ace most of them.
Thing is, at those times we were working with freshly acquired knowledge that you've been practicing a lot. That's not the case with most leetcode interviews. As a senior/staff engineer, I'm not using double pointers to perform little math tricks on a daily basis, I'm troubleshooting cascading timeouts on distributed systems. I'm not worried about how fast I'm going to iterate over a batch of a couple thousand records on a list I'm worried about how much latency I'll accrue if I rely on a primary source of truth instead of hitting a cached answer.
Code interviews don't measure experience or competence. I don't even think they measure stress as the article mentions. To me, they just measure how much leetcode you practiced for that interview. Nothing more.
none of my school tests were one on one, completely open ended, covering unpredictable subject matter, or were the only thing between me and $100k+
Very rarely with people watching.
I've had only two oral exams, and they were awful, but even then they were far more conversational in nature, as opposed to a coding interview.
I do well on written tests.
I also do well in interviews, but I detest having people look over my shoulder while I code, and it absolutely tanks my performance. I only pass them because I'm experienced enough that I can be stressed out like crazy and perform really horribly compared to what I normally do and still do okay.
I've seen fantastic coders totally freeze up and be unable to do anything at all when being asked to write code in front of people, even though they have no problem talking through problem solving.
And I'm similar to that. I've held speeches in front of thousands, been on TV, held plenty of presentations, and can talk the ears of an interviewer with passion about complicated technical concepts, but have me write code while you watch, and I'd frankly much rather have a root canal treatment (I've been known to fall asleep during those).
> I do well in interviews, but I detest having people look over my shoulder while I code, and it absolutely tanks my performance.
Yeah, I basically forget how to use all the basic tools I use all the time and my mistake rate shoots up 10x when I'm just screen sharing in a chill context. I'm (told I'm) quite good at all the social side of the job, at keeping my cool in rough situations (social or technical), and all that, but specifically being watched while I work turns me into a sort of foolish klutz.
Which makes these kinds of interviews absolute hell, because that's their entire deal.
Getting 70% of total score during final exam is already good enough and I have at least 2 hours to finish it. Live coding bar is quite brutal because expectation is almost flawless and time is very limited.
I didn't have someone looking over my shoulder constantly while I was solving A-level Maths proofs. Which is what they are typically asking you to do.