Usually I will post about how I approach code challenges and how I solve them. While this is important to know, I think you should also be aware of the interview process and my struggles with it.

I am excellent at the initial interviews. I am a sweet, dedicated and hardworking person and I know how to make that apparent in my interviews. It’s the technical interviews that I struggle with. If you follow me on Twitter this may not come as a surprise to you. If not, maybe you are a little surprised especially since most of my blog posts have to do with technical challenges.

I suffer from anxiety, like most people. The medication I take for it makes me really sleepy if I take it at full strength. If I don’t take it I get crippling anxiety that makes it impossible to formulate any logical thought. So on a normal day I usually take a little less then the full strength so that I can still think and not be sleepy through the day. Now all that goes out the window when I take technical interviews. No matter how many times I practice I still get super nervous and panicky when taking these. I have tried breathing exercises, meditation, calming tea, essential oils, taking my medication at full strength, etc. before my interviews and none of those things end up working for one reason or another.

So, as someone who is familiar with anxiety medications because of my own issues and the issues of the people around me, I asked my doctor if she could give me something to help me calm down before these interviews but won’t make me too sleepy. I know they exist. However, when presenting this to my doctor she told me to just be a housewife. Yeah. Not only extremely sexist but also unprofessional.

Now, I didn’t create this whole post just to bash my now-former-doctor. But this is something women deal with on a daily basis. It is the reason I have anxiety in the first place. This doubt of being good enough, being viewed as a fraud, or maybe I have just wasted my time this past year and I should just be a housewife is the reason I fail these interviews.

I don’t know how to make things easier in the interview process for both the employer and the potential employee but it would honestly open the door to a lot of talent if companies did more Psuedo-Code challenges other than, “Does this pass all the tests?” You would still see the candidate’s thought process and their understanding of the language but without the pressure of making sure they complete the task in 30 min on a code editor they never used before.

For those that enjoy my usual posts, sorry for the rant. I needed to say all of that and get it off my chest. Your regular scheduled blog posts should resume tomorrow.

“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”

Martin Fowler