Reply to post: Re: Statistics

You're testing them wrong: Whiteboard coding interviews are 'anti-women psychological stress examinations'

Terry 6 Silver badge

Re: Statistics

This bit of research is simply a bit of cherry on a well worn cake. (I love mixing metaphors).

It's perfectly well known that severe stress reduces cognitive performance. Classically exemplified by the students who fall apart in exams and write repeated words over and over again. Or less graphically, by my own daughter who threw up during her GCSEs, and got rubbish grades, did a non-A level 6th form course, got into a degree course that was almost totally non-exam, but with lots of practical assessment and is now a very successful paediatric speech therapist specialising in work with autistic kids.

All this study does is show that it still applies in the IT industry's latest, fashionable interview technique - as dreamt up probably by some damn fool "consultant". i.e. It's nothing new or unexpected.

It's also why I ended up working in special education, and not in IT. I'd inquired in IBM's office about careers in computers back in about 1974. I'd literally called in on my way past. They whisked me off into a room and sat me on the proficiency test. There and then. No warning. No preparation. Just wham. Adrenalin at the highest. So my performance was pretty much certainly not the best it could have been.

They came back with a result. It was good. But not quite good enough. I should, they said, work with computers, but not in computing. So I chose Psychology as my degree, specialised in Psychology of Education for my PGCE and fulfilled the prophecy to some extent by becoming the part-time/add-on trainer/support/technician for the local educational IT when it started to appear in the schools I supported in the mid-80- at one point I was running after school courses for heads and deputies of primary schools in using MS-Dos. All this alongside my proper job. And was still doing a fair amount of that when I retired.

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