Comment by fsckboy
1 day ago
do the Olympics measure stress, not athletic skills? when your muscles reach their limit, they let you know with unpleasant sensations. when your brain reaches its limits, it also lets you know. these are the unpleasant feelings of being tested. but those feelings indicate your limits, not the limits of the test.
a test where everybody taking it feels happy and a successful winner? that's showing the limits of the test. live coding interviews test your limits.
I’d say the Olympics and a technical interview both test the needed skills for everyday performance and the ability to harness those skills under high pressure.
As for the stress side, there are physiological and psychological differences among people which impose certain difficulties for some to deal with high stress. Learning to work under occasional heightened stress is also a skill, though. Just don’t choose to work somewhere that’s always a high-stress environment unless you’re capably suited to handling the stress.
if the job goals entail lots of coding to get the code out the door, that's a live coding test, or it's falling behind with your coworkers annoyed with you. if you find that stressful, you definitely won't like the job.
the issue here is the pernicious idea that this is unfair, and that the conditions need to be changed to suit the people not getting these jobs. Now: that is a perfectly good POV if your hypothesis is that there are alternative ways of achieving equal quality and productivity, by hypotheses require testing. let the market decide, let different kinds of companies and employees flourish and thrive side by side. but the relentless assault on and bitterness toward the impatient non-nurturing approach reads like sour grapes.