Just like being late to a physical interview is a bad signal (sure there was traffic but what does it say about your planning skills?) I feel totally justified "reading" into how people are on their zoom interviews.
Recently I interviewed someone and kept hearing another conversation at the same time. I finally asked him about it and he said "oh yeah that's my wife doing a meeting, let me go to another room." It's hard for me to imagine someone's throught process that led them to think it's fine to have the conversation with another meeting in the room when there was another option easily available, but it was a quick "tell" that this person has bad judgement, low empathy or simply doesn't care - none of which made me want to hire him.
To a smaller degree I judge people's technology. I am interviewing for technical roles and if you are a year+ into WFH and you are still having silly wifi issues or haven't figured out how to sound clear on your mike, it's a bad sign about your ability to troubleshoot and solve problems (or again, low empathy - if you care that your video constantly stutters and your colleagues can't make you out, you'd figure out a wired solution or upgrade your router or whatever)
An interview is an assessment of your capabilities and there's such a thing as basic competence. If you can't nail Zooming after so much time, the whole thing is a little suspect.
I'd take a very different attitude if I was hiring for a non technical roles where solving tech problems is far remote from the job.
Except that this "silly wifi issues" might be unexpectable temporary, but in short time unfix-able issues of your ISP which just popped up recently.
> can't nail Zooming
You kinda imply people use Zoom all the time but they don't, they might use video-conference systems all the time but not necessary Zoom, and Zoom is kinda well known to sometimes have arbitrary issues as long as you are not on a Mac with the native Zoom client.
When doing interviews recently Zoom was the only Video Conference software which sometimes had arbitrary issues which where far beyond "it's selected a non-existing microphone" or similar, i.e. short term unfixable issues. Worse they sometimes popped up out of nowhere even after doing other calls where it worked... (Other conference software which had been used included MS Teams, Google Hangouts, Jitsi Meets. All in the end providing a better interview experience then Zoom, even through zoom might be better if it works...).
So, for a series of video interviews I was conducting last summer through an outside agency, I decided to up my game and use my DSLR given that Canon's webcam software now supported my somewhat older model. Tested it and all. But when I did tech check with the agency they were having some problems with it (which they said were not uncommon) so I went back to my high-end Webcam which was fine.
ADDED: And things like this were the reason that the agency had half-hour tech checks with senior professionals before taping the interviews. (And still usually had us redo one or two segments because of glitches.)
I was also in a workshop last summer. Power was out for a couple of days. I used my cellphone but I have lousy reception where I live so it barely worked. Even drove to my local library to see if I could leach Internet from the parking lot but I couldn't.
I would encourage you to be a bit more open-minded when judging people with technical issues. Debugging WiFi or microphone might seem intuitive to you, but there’s a good amount of people out there that are experts at coding or data science, who haven’t had to deal with any of the scrappiness. Of course, if you’re hiring for a startup and that level of scrappiness is part of the job, by all means, continue to extract signal.
>> there’s a good amount of people out there that are experts at coding or data science, who haven’t had to deal with any of the scrappiness. Of course, if you’re hiring for a startup and that level of scrappiness is part of the job, by all means, continue to extract signal.
I guess in my mind scrappiness (or just resourcefulness, which maybe the same thing) is a requirement for any job I'd hire for. In this day and age of WFH, your internet connectivity is clutch to your ability to do work and whether it's intuitive to you or not, you have to figure it out (same as in the physical space, whether you like commuting or not, you have to figure out some way to reliably show up at the office.)
Even if you're not technical where troubleshooting wifi is up your alley, you could solve the problem with:
1. Money. Go buy the most expensive insane router and see what it does for you.
2. People. Ask your friends whether they have good wifi and how they got there. Pay someone to help you.
3. Brute force. Can't fix the wifi? Run a big dumb cable down your hallway into your office.
4. Get creative. Can you work out of a co-working space? Can you drop by your friend to use their basement?
At the end of the day, you need connectivity to do your job and if you can't figure that out you're gonna struggle at the job as well. So open mindedness is one thing but realism matters too. You just can't be successful in a WFH setup if your job requires meetings and your wifi can't handle it.
I think you could work on your empathy for the candidate. Sometimes the internet drops out for a minute and then comes back. Maybe that happens once a week. Is it worth going to a co-working space (during a pandemic) so there isn't a temporary issue during a Zoom interview? It's a fairly extreme position to take.
Yes look if they have one quick connectivity hick-up or things genuinely go badly in a one-off way, there's ways to handle that (eg reschedule.)
But if people have consistently shitty wifi and they don't bother to mitigate that even for an interview, that's a different story. A professional understands that success takes some prep - and if you have one hour to convey to someone that you're qualified for a job you want, but you don't line up basic things like good connectivity -- it's the same as not bothering to find a clean shirt to wear to a real interview.
>> So... 4 solutions which each amount to "have gobs of money to drop on maybe fixing an issue"?
I don't understand this attitude. If you're "working from the office," you need to make sure you can get to work. Which means moving within walking distance, moving where you can use public transit, or having a car. You can say all of those translate to "have gobs of money" but at the end of the day you need to make sure you're available to do work if you get the job.
In work from home scenario, your connectivity is a basic requirement for your "getting to the office." You are literally unable to do many jobs without it, so yes you need to get it fixed same as you'd have to figure out how to get to the office.
>> I'd hate to see your advice on dress codes.
My advice on dress code is to dress appropriately for the interview and not have your outfit be a distraction to the interview. Which is the same as my advice for having your wifi work.
Office work, for all its many pitfalls, has the value that the company is providing space, infrastructure, and furniture (in both physical and metaphorical senses), which puts all employees on an even keel.
One of the benefits of space, in the sense of a shared common space is that those who are present in it are present in it. Mediated conversations across space don't do that.
You talk of signal. The overarching signal I'm picking up is a distinct lack of empathy.
If your car breaks down, do you already know enough about cars to know where to start? If you get into legal trouble, do you already know a lot of law and procedure to know what to do?
The only reason you have this attitude is because you’re “into computers” so when something goes wrong computer related, you already know where to start. Most people are not into computers. Not even programmers.
The reason why you think it’s so easy to “just be resourceful” is because you have a huge head start and you already know things like what a router even is and what it does.
I can guarantee you that someone can grill you about a subject that you don’t know (being into computers has an an opportunity cost so that means you’re clueless at some other subject) and make a joke of you.
Can't agree with you more. If a candidate is taking responsibility for their internet, what chances do I have of them pushing a feature across a finish line? If it's "not their fault" that they're having an internet connection, is it going to be "not their fault" that they couldn't get an approval on a PR, or "not their fault" that they didn't speed to another team to work out an issue before a deadline?
I have a good office setup with generally pretty decent Internet. I have also had more than one day in the past 18 months when my Internet connectivity was absolutely up and down and my cell phone reception from my house is basically good enough for voice only. So I can fail back to that but really can't handle video over a cell connection.
Honestly, debugging WiFi issues is a nightmare I don't expect anyone to be guaranteed in doing a good job (except someone specialized in Wireless Access Points with specialized equipment).
I have seen more then a view cases where ISP provided Routers sometimes arbitrary caused havoc and in some countries you can't just switch out the Router and the issues might not be limited to WiFi but look like WiFi issues and if you are unlucky they are a temp. problem with your ISP and...
The best choice is to not use WiFi if you need to do Video Conferences, but sadly this is not always the case. (E.g. in my case I only have WiFi due to reasons I can't really change and while it works completely fine I would be very worried if I ever had to do a Conference around 1-3AM in the night, because my ISP tend to has issues (short for max. 10min) around that time from time to time, and all other ISPs I can buy go through that same ISP and have the same issue... Well it's in the middle of the night so luckily not a problem for me.)
If they're interviewing for a remote position, then their ability to use the equipment that allows them to communicate is part of the interview. There might be intermittent problems (internet outage, power outage, etc.) but if they are just entirely unable to manage videoconferencing during an interview then it doesn't bode well for them using it day-to-day.
I get where you’re coming from, but I personally can’t do anything about my bad wifi, because I rent a room in a shared flat and don’t have control over it. The router is in another room and I can’t run a cable there either.
There’s also going to be noise I don’t have full control over, because there are three other people here (who you can sometimes hear despite us being in different rooms), and it’s summer so I either need the window open (my room is on the ground floor near a noisy road) or a fan on.
I’d urge a bit more empathy before coming to the conclusion that people are lazy/incompetent.
Not disagreeing with your general point but, if bad wifi is a problem for you and you can't run a cable, consider:
A) plugging a better wifi router or AP into the existing router, or
B) Using a pair of powerline ethernet adapters, or
C) Same as A, but using a pair of mesh routers, with the main one set in 'access point' mode.
None of these require a cable run between two rooms. Unless the flat is huge or has concrete walls, one of these solutions will work. (I'm assuming the problem is with the wifi connection between you and the router, and not the connection between your router and the internet.)
It was table level. (Now my APs are near the ceiling though.)
Wireless traffic is super dense here. A lot of people are running multiple APs and I guess we’re no better. Some people are also stacking multiple APs on the middle channels.
The only Orbi I've used is the tri-band RBK50 2-pack. The hardware is good, but there's one annoying thing: you can't manually set the channel bandwidth to to 20MHz. This would improve signal strength and range, at the expense of bandwidth.
The 'coexist' setting is meant to switch to 20MHz when needed but, from what I've read, the setting isn't very effective.
If I lived in a place with a lot of wifi APs, I'd do what you did (string cables) or else use an Asus mesh wifi setup, which allows more fine-grained control of wifi settings.
The world isn't black and white, so if someone was in your situation and explained it upfront, I would be fine with it. It's the silent "I am just going to expect the interviewer to put up with all my issues" assumption that really bugs me.
It also depends on what role you are interviewing for. If your role is mainly going to be heads-down maybe it's OK. But if you're interviewing for a role where you'll have to be meeting lots of people all day, then the situation you describe above may actually be unfair to your coworkers.
> Just like being late to a physical interview is a bad signal (sure there was traffic but what does it say about your planning skills?) I feel totally justified "reading" into how people are on their zoom interviews.
Fun fact: depending on your cultural background, one person's "late" is another person's "giving you time to prepare".
It is my understanding that Anglo-Saxon and German education insist on starting a meeting at the time written on the calendar, while some other countries understand the time written on the calendar as the moment the main presenter (or interviewer, in that case) is getting ready, so if you arrive then, you embarrass them and/or prevent them from doing their work.
Coming from a Latin country, it took me some time to understand the unspoken rules for working in a US company. After ~10 years, I'm not sure I still know them all. All along the way, I have been judged for compliance with these rules that culturally make no sense to me and nobody cared to explain. There are dozens of examples I could quote, including different meanings of "Yes" and "No" or "I" or "responsibility".
Where I'm coming at is: please don't be too fast to judge people on unspoken rules, especially across cultures.
I've done business all over the world and understand that the meaning of time is very different between say Switzerland (on time = 5 mins early) and Portugal (on time = sometime same day).
But, that's not relevant to the point I am making as a US based employer who was interviewing for a NYC position. Show up on time.
You should type this up in an email and send it to candidates before interviews so they can judge whether or being judged like this themselves is worth their time. It would be the empathetic thing to do with respect to their time and money, after all.
Actually, it might be helpful for you to understand that an overwhelming majority of good interviewers are evaluating you on far more signals than just the literal correctness of your answers.
The interviewer's job is to assess whether you're going to work out and be an asset to the organization. They also assume that what you're showing in the interview is a much rosier picture of yourself than you'll normally be.
So if you're late for an interview, the interviewer has to assume you're gonna be late to stuff all the time. If you can't solve your connectivity problems, the interviewer has to assume you're gonna have all sorts of other problems that will drag down yours and the team's productivity. It also shouldn't surprise you if you bad-mouth your old employer, the interviewer is going to assume that you're insanely negative and divisive. etc. It's not "being judged" - the company has to make a high-risk high-impact decision to hire you, and your behavior may just "leak" the information that you're not a good bet.
You may think this is unpleasant but it's just fact of the decision making process. If you make it harder for people to say "yes" to you, you will get "no" much more often. Simple as that.
>> to do with respect to their time and money
I don't understand the "money" part. Are you paying companies to interview you? This is a sure sign of a scam.
> Actually, it might be helpful for you to understand that an overwhelming majority of good interviewers are evaluating you on far more signals than just the literal correctness of your answers.
That’s a two way street though. If a candidate gets the feeling that they’re being judged for things that are outside of their control, they might decide that you or your company isn’t worth dealing with. And in this labor market, the candidate might have more options than the hiring manager does.
Some of the things you’re talking about are well within the normal bounds, such as timeliness. But some of the stuff you’re talking about edges up to the “not your business” line. If I felt that an interviewer got annoyed at me for an internet issue, I certainly might come to the conclusion that they’re unreasonable and take a pass.
(I also think your comment is a bit patronizing. I suspect that most people who have interviewed are aware that they’re being judged on more than just their answers)
I live on a houseboat in Seattle. I’m a software developer that’s been working remote even before the pandemic.
It’s great generally, but the worst thing about houseboat life is the crappy internet. I somewhat recently upgraded to 40mbps down, but that isn’t super consistent.
Internet problems don’t always have easy or reasonable solutions. I’m wired in but still sometimes have to drop from calls because it lags and stutters.
Judging someone for their internet problems doesn’t make any sense to me.
>> Judging someone for their internet problems doesn’t make any sense to me
but also:
>> sometimes have to drop from calls because it lags and stutters.
That sounds insanely unfair to people you work with. If you're in a role where meetings are infrequent and unimportant, maybe this flies. But if you work with/for me and you constantly drop calls so the entire group has to wait for you while you freeze, can't hear what you're saying, etc etc etc - that's not a dynamic I want to inflict on my organization.
There's some inherent tradeoff between how you want to live and what jobs you can take on. Back in the work-from-the-office days, you had to limit your housing options by where you can reach the office daily in a reasonable time. With WFH, your ability to connect to the internet is analogous to your ability to get to the office.
If your choice of living on a houseboat means that you can't reliably connect to key meetings, it means you're not able to take on jobs where meetings are key. It's as simple as that and is a totally reasonable tradeoff to make, as long as you're making it consciously.
I just don’t understand why you’re taking such a crazy harsh tone with this.
“Insanely unfair” to your coworkers to sometimes have a problem that causes you to drop from a meeting? Chill out man, life happens. The job gets done.
Coworkers living on land in various neighborhoods across Seattle have their power go out multiple times a year. It’s not “insanely unfair” to me when that happens. It happens. So what, you deal with it.
And since I’m sure you’d expect them to all get generators (based on the other thread), I sure as shit wouldn’t bother if it was just 2-3 times a year, myself.
Yeah. I mean "It's hit or miss whether Joe will drop on a given call" is one thing. "Joe seems to have a day where his Internet is glitchy every month or two" is something else.
Same thing with power, which is more reliable than my Internet. I might have a power outage every year or so and a more extended one significantly less often. I've actually thought about getting a generator but it hardly seems worth it. Only thing that makes me consider it is I live where it gets cold in the winter.
Also can't agree enough. I have someone on my team who lives on a farm in a remote part of India. His area has power outages 1-2 times a week. Does he just let video calls end when the power goes out? No, he got a generator.
It's his choice to live in that area. The amount of money he saves by not being in a major city more than enough covers the cost of a generator.
As an IC it seems like a small inconvenience, but as a manager having other team members and other departments complain about so-and-so for being unresponsive and cutting out of calls constantly is just one more problem I have to deal with.
Yeah, and look no surprise from your profile that you lead an org. It's so funny to me that people are arguing in this thread what should be tolerated from candidates without considering for a second what is actually needed to get the work done and have the team function.
There's such a thing as reasonable accommodation. When we all went to WFH when Covid hit, it was totally understandable that people had bad setups, family complexities, etc. and all companies (that I am familiar with) were totally cool with that, and supported employees through it - eg provided equipment or WFH stipends.
But now it's like a year down the road, and it's basic competency of a professional to ensure that they are able to work productively. Mid 2021, there's no excuse for having consistently bad video meetings if video meetings are at all central to your job. It basically means a combination of you not caring about your productivity, not caring about your colleagues, and not being able to solve problems - which for any medium-seniority and above role is frankly not a good sign.
Your point about the Indian dude with a generator is a good one. I bet he also keeps weird hours so he can overlap with the team (assuming the rest of the team is based outside of India.) It's basic stuff, if you want flexibility of remote work from wherever you want, you also have the responsibility of making it feasible.
Infrastructure isn't something that individuals have the option to fix on their own. Housing across the US, let alone in Seattle, is at absolute crisis levels. And the rise of internet-based voice comms is a recent development (< 5 years) relative to housing and infrastructure development cycles.
There are multiple extant comms technologies which are well established, widely distributed, and work quite well at vastly lower bandwidth than IP telephone or videoconferencing. Look inward to see those who are rejecting the use of technologies which are equitably available, distributed, and adequate to task.
I hear you and if we were talking about poor people interviewing for retail and warehouse jobs I'd agree with you completely.
However we are talking about tech jobs which pay several hundred thousand dollars per year in many cases, and these jobs require a certain level of connectivity, not out of gatekeeping but out of practicality.
Are you hiring programmers or IT tech support personnel?
It’s like naming someone that doesn’t know anything about cars who hears some strange noises coming from the car as “unresourceful” because they don’t magically know what to Google to figure out their problem. Even that person makes $500k/year does not magically give them all the background knowledge needed to start troubleshooting.
Flawed analogy. If I am reliant on my car for a living (eg limo driver) then I can't let my car not work. Doesn't mean I need to fix it myself, does mean I need to find a mechanic, trade it in, whatever. Resolve the problem in some way.
No, it’s analogous to your car making this weird sound but it seems to largely work so you haven’t figured it out yet but you’re still driving people around.
They surely can, but if the interviewee knows his current setup from his/her existing income means the connection may not be stable. The interviewee can
* Email upfront to inform about the situation
* Trying to go to other places with more stable connectivity.
and others.
As xyzelement said, an interviewer, which I am as well, evaluate multiple signals at the sametime, how resourceful, or how the candidate solve a problem, is one of the soft skill that is required.
Yeah, I would be hard pressed to come up with something that I wouldn't be more than happy to accommodate if a candidate emailed ahead of time to let me know.
That's actually my point. There's an overall competency thing about how prepared you are.
A few months ago, I was interviewed over BlueJeans which is a video conf software I'd never used before. I made sure the client installed and detected my mic/camera well ahead of the interview, as well as playing around with various settings for optimal experience.
I cared about the interview and it seemed the least I could do to prepare in this way. It doesn't make sense that someone wouldn't do that - and if they don't do it and the tech blows up on them, that is a bit of a data point for the interview.
OK, but you are going to miss good people over silly IT stuff like this. Google made "techstop" because they want people focusing energy on real work not helpdesk self-support.
Again you are completely missing the point. It's not about "do you have the IT skill" it's about "you have a major problem (connectivity) - can you find some way to solve it"
I think you're missing the GP's point. What you call a major problem (connectivity that doesn't interrupt a video call) isn't a major problem for many (perhaps most) people. Your hiring process seems to favour candidates whose streaming setup is above average; so you're more likely to hire people whose hobbies include YouTube streaming than people who use email to send git patches.
I am on video calls a lot and have even been doing (obviously remote) video recordings. I have "good" Internet, which is to say it is "occasionally" glitchy which is to say less than often but more than rarely. Not often enough to persuade Comcast that something in wrong.
Murphy's Law suggests that that one of the times it glitches will be during something important. (It has done so during a couple semi-important things over the past 18 months.) Absolutely nothing I can do about this although I try to fall back to cell phone--although doesn't really work for video.
I appreciate that, this is always the pattern with recruiting/hiring/comp topics.
It seems like there's a well meaning percentage of the population that has a strong view of how things ought to be (eg "connectivity isn't 100% your fault so you shouldn't be judged for it") without realizing that it's completely untenable ("how can I possibly hire you if I can't hear anything you say because your connection is bad.")
Recently I interviewed someone and kept hearing another conversation at the same time. I finally asked him about it and he said "oh yeah that's my wife doing a meeting, let me go to another room." It's hard for me to imagine someone's throught process that led them to think it's fine to have the conversation with another meeting in the room when there was another option easily available, but it was a quick "tell" that this person has bad judgement, low empathy or simply doesn't care - none of which made me want to hire him.
To a smaller degree I judge people's technology. I am interviewing for technical roles and if you are a year+ into WFH and you are still having silly wifi issues or haven't figured out how to sound clear on your mike, it's a bad sign about your ability to troubleshoot and solve problems (or again, low empathy - if you care that your video constantly stutters and your colleagues can't make you out, you'd figure out a wired solution or upgrade your router or whatever)
An interview is an assessment of your capabilities and there's such a thing as basic competence. If you can't nail Zooming after so much time, the whole thing is a little suspect.
I'd take a very different attitude if I was hiring for a non technical roles where solving tech problems is far remote from the job.