Technical Interviews

How much I hate thee, let me count the ways ….

Hey kids! I have been in some pretty messed up situations in my life, but let me tell you that technical interviews take the cake.  🎂

I would rather ride the subway in New York City at midnight.  🚇

I would rather poke my own eyes out with a fork.  Twice.  🍴

I would rather sit in the sun ☀️ all day without SPF on the equator … and I am very pale. 

I would rather walk 10 miles in the rain 🌧️ to mail a rebate form that sends me $1.00 in 6 weeks. 

I would rather have my tonsils taken out as an adult. 💀

Technical interviews bring out your worst fears and insecurities, pull the innermost anxieties you didn't know you had, and slap you in the face.  Over and over and over.  All that for a job you may or not even like?

Software engineers are the only people subjected to this misery, as far as I know.  We get hammered on definition memorization and syntax usage that you may or may not have ever used, or will ever use, in your career.  The questions you get asked will not be anything related to any work you do if you are hired, besides "tell me what an interface is".   Things you may have learned 20 years ago hypothetically in school that aren't relevant to your prospective job at all. And you are asked 'gotcha' questions on purpose. Interviewers TRYYYYYYY to give you impossible questions to make you feel like a moron. Why would a prospective employer or manager want to subject their soon-to-be employee to mental torture for funsies?? It makes absolutely no sense.

 Also, when I look back on the interviewers that obviously enjoyed terrorizing me as an interview candidate, if it was my direct manager or senior developer doing the interviewing - those were also the jobs I ended up hating the most. Working with someone daily that wanted to be a jerk before even meeting you is not a good thing. I now know this, so at least I'm able to gracefully walk away, dodging said bullet.

Let me ask this - why does anyone want to know if I can memorize definitions and syntax I can just Google if I legitimately forget it while I'm working? I am never going to be able to memorize the syntax for 10 coding languages on 5 systems that change constantly over my 20+ years of employment, which also have libraries and plugins built for them to help do some of that dirty work for me. I'm quite sure that if I didn't know what I was doing, I wouldn't be able to get and STAY employed for long, and surely not for over 20 years.  Shouldn't my resume speak for itself? Plus, now I can just have Claude, or CoPilot or Gemini or OpenClaw or Cursor or Replit write it and/or check my syntax now anyways. No StackOverflow even needed these days!

So, why is it other professions experience is taken at face value from the resume and a discussion, but there are crazy complex tests on a whiteboard or with an impromptu coding challenge in front of 10 strangers staring at me? How is this normal? This type of interview process can keep a lot of really talented engineers out of your company, as well as the industry itself. And people wonder why we, as mostly introverts, all have imposter syndrome and severe anxiety .....

The industry needs to do better to gauge our individual knowledge base against the needs of the company hiring.

So what does "better" actually look like? I don't have the 'holy grail' answer, but I have some ideas on things we can try.

I've had some great interviews in my career that didn't make me want to fake my own death before the second round.  You know what they did differently? They asked me about real problems I was able to solve during my career.  Actual scenarios I'd run into on the job, not "recite the difference between an abstract class and an interface from memory" but "here's a situation with our code structure, how would you approach it?" or "We want to add this feature to this existing application. Tell me how you complete the feature work and push everything to production without introducing bugs." We talked through it like two people who actually work in tech.  Imagine that. A few of these interviews did not end up in a job offer, but I still remember them for being a good experience and that matters. I would apply to those companies again if they were hiring and I was in the market. ❤️

Talk to me about my projects.  I have a resume full of things I've built on teams and solo, problems I solved, fires I put out at 11pm on a Friday.  Ask me about those.  Ask me why I made the decisions I made.  Ask me what I'd do differently now.  Ask me why I hate Entity Framework and use the term Microslop. That conversation will tell you much more about how I think, how I communicate, and whether I actually know what I'm doing, rather than watching me sweat through a linked list problem on a whiteboard while six people silently judge my (bad) handwriting. I would love to tell you how I mentor new developers, why I drill in on certain lessons, what I focus on teaching them, what was missing from my mentorship when I first started, and how I try to close that gap for the next generation.

And for the hiring managers reading this - yes you - I get it.  You have to filter somehow.  There are a lot of people applying, especially now with all the layoffs and downsizing happening in tech and not every person can do the job you're hiring for.  But the whiteboard circus isn't filtering for skill.  It's filtering for people who are good at whiteboard circuses.  Those are not the same thing.  The best engineers I know would bomb a surprise algorithm quiz and then go build something incredible on Monday morning, just so they don't have to import another stupid Excel spreadsheet for Debbie.

There are better ways.  Real-world problem discussions.  Portfolio walkthroughs.  A take-home challenge with actual time for the candidate to put some thought into it, that isn't a 10-hour exercise you require to be done in 2 days while they are still working full time.  A conversation about how someone approaches a problem they've never seen before, because THAT is what the job actually is. Give me a new person to explain a concept to, show them real resources they can use that are helpful, and peer program with a real code repository and connections to prove out the concept in a real IDE with Intellisense.

Just a thought.  💜

Do you have a technical interview horror story, or have a good experience to share? Drop it in the comments, I want to hear about it!

Are you a hiring manager? I would love to hear your thoughts on the interviewing processes in this industry and if you think things should change or not. Let's have a conversation

Cheers! 🥂