Ask a Female Engineer: Interviewing and Company Culture
Part of the problem here is that I think we, in tech, have really forgotten how stressful it is to be given a technical exam at a whiteboard, especially with an undercurrent of finding charlatans who &quot;can&#x27;t even do basic programming!&quot;  Many people from other professions and graduate programs describe their oral exams as among the most stressful academic experiences they&#x27;ve been through, because it&#x27;s unusually embarrassing to fail publicly and people are afraid of &quot;freezing&quot;.  And that&#x27;s when there&#x27;s a pretty clear and well publicized study route, with an ostensibly consistently graded exam, with professors and&#x2F;or industry practitioners who are experts in their field, with feedback and mechanisms to ensure fairness and integrity.<p>We get all the stress, but none of the protections, in tech.  And we never really get to stop doing it.<p>I&#x27;ve been through the washing machine enough times that I am pretty resistant to it, though it does still get to me as well.  Early career, I did feel pretty humiliated after some of these experiences.  Sometimes, I think we lose sight of this.  When I described what it was like to &quot;interview&quot; at google and other places, people outside tech kind of shuddered.  Their interviews are more like conversations - yes, you need to know what you&#x27;re talking about, but you don&#x27;t stand in front of a committee, at a whiteboard, getting treated like a grad student going through quals (if only!) <i>every single time you interview at a new company!</i><p>I&#x27;ve heard some questions about whether this is just an inevitable part of being a programmer.  If it is, fine, but then please, let&#x27;s stop scratching our heads about why there&#x27;s a supposed &quot;shortage&quot; of programmers.  If an extremely unpleasant quasi-hazing is a necessary part of applying for a developer job (every single time), then let&#x27;s not be surprised when people decide they don&#x27;t want to work in this field anymore, don&#x27;t want to enter it in the first place, are reluctant to change jobs, or, alternatively, prefer careers in actuarial work, law, medicine, nursing, or other fields where they get to take their exams under conditions that are far more respectful of the candidate and result in a lasting, meaningful credential, respected in their field, so they don&#x27;t have to do it over and over.