this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2025
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Programming
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I can see how this could be unfair, but working as a dev sometimes does require you to be on top of things in a high stress atmosphere. For example, what if you're proposing an excellent technical solution in a meeting but some jaded older engineer is hard to convince? If you can't outline your thinking in that scenario, your solution could be discarded just because someone was louder than you. As someone who used to have performance anxiety, I believe it's generally something you can and should practice for. On the other hand, if there really isn't a need for this type of skill, it totally makes sense to avoid creating interview environments where you are filtering candidates based on it.
I did stress test interviews for DevOps positions. I explicitly told them that and gave them a task and a time limit. I would watch what they did and there was nothing out of bounds as long as they were solving problems. For example, I would give them an account in cloud provider and then task them with spinning up a k8s cluster with a few basic services and make it scalable, then watch and heckle as they googled around and brought up services. The objective wasn't to complete the task though, it was too see how they approached problem solving. Good times.
Great example. We do the same but to spin up a single ec2 via terraform. Checking the real familiarity with tools. This immediately filter those who lied about their experience.
Good enough example, although I would've picked dealing with a live incident
That sounds fair. I hate "tests" that involve things you'd never do on the job.
Yeah, that too! When you have some non technical manager breathing down your neck, you might have a hard time not fumbling around even if you normally could resolve the issue in no time.