Asynchronous Technical Interviews: Reducing the Effect of Supervised Think-Aloud on Communication AbilityDistinguished Paper Award
Software engineers often face a critical test before landing a job—passing a technical interview. During these sessions, candidates must write code while thinking aloud as they work toward a solution to a problem under the watchful eye of an interviewer. While thinking aloud during technical interviews gives interviewers a picture of candidates' problem-solving ability, surprisingly, these types of interviews often prevent candidates from communicating their thought process effectively. To understand if poor performance related to interviewer presence can be reduced while preserving communication and technical skills, we introduce \textit{asynchronous} technical interviews—where candidates submit recordings of think-aloud and coding. We compare this approach to traditional whiteboard interviews and find that, by eliminating interviewer supervision, asynchronicity significantly improved the clarity of think-aloud via increased informativeness and reduced stress. Moreover, we discovered asynchronous technical interviews preserved, and in some cases even enhanced, technical problem-solving strategies and code quality. This work offers insight into asynchronous technical interviews as a design for supporting communication during interviews, and discusses trade-offs and guidelines for implementing this approach in software engineering hiring practices.
Mon 14 NovDisplayed time zone: Beijing, Chongqing, Hong Kong, Urumqi change
16:00 - 17:30 | Human/Computer InteractionResearch Papers / Demonstrations at SRC LT 51 Chair(s): Saikat Chakraborty Microsoft Research | ||
16:00 15mTalk | How to Formulate Specific How-To Questions in Software Development? Research Papers Mingwei Liu Fudan University, Xin Peng Fudan University, Andrian Marcus University of Texas at Dallas, Christoph Treude University of Melbourne, Jiazhan Xie Fudan University, Huanjun Xu Fudan University, Yanjun Yang Fudan University DOI | ||
16:15 15mTalk | Asynchronous Technical Interviews: Reducing the Effect of Supervised Think-Aloud on Communication AbilityDistinguished Paper Award Research Papers DOI | ||
16:30 15mTalk | Pair Programming Conversations with Agents vs. Developers: Challenges and Opportunities for SE Community Research Papers Peter Robe University of Tulsa, Sandeep Kuttal University of Tulsa, Jake AuBuchon University of Tulsa, Jacob Hart University of Tulsa DOI | ||
16:45 15mTalk | Toward Interactive Bug Reporting for (Android App) End-Users Research Papers Yang Song College of William and Mary, Junayed Mahmud George Mason University, Ying Zhou University of Texas at Dallas, Oscar Chaparro College of William and Mary, Kevin Moran George Mason University, Andrian Marcus University of Texas at Dallas, Denys Poshyvanyk College of William and Mary DOI | ||
17:00 7mTalk | MultIPAs : Applying Program Transformations to Introductory Programming Assignments for Data Augmentation Demonstrations Pedro Orvalho INESC-ID, Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon, Mikoláš Janota Czech Technical University in Prague, Vasco Manquinho INESC-ID; Universidade de Lisboa Pre-print | ||
17:08 7mTalk | PolyFax: A Toolkit for Characterizing Multi-Language Software Demonstrations Wen Li Washington State University, Li Li Monash University, Haipeng Cai Washington State University Pre-print |