You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview
I consider myself a competent developer, but I have no academic background as I am self-taught. While I have had a steady supply of work, because of this, I will most likely never get to work for a big company like Microsoft, Google or Facebook because I wouldn&#x27;t pass their technical interview. I lack the understanding of core computer science principles and I am okay with admitting that, I don&#x27;t think it makes me a bad developer or inferior to my peers who have computer science degrees. Most developers I know envy the fact I have no student debt and said if they could do it over again, they would go the self-taught route.<p>Technical interviews are broken because they favour developers fresh out of college or with academic backgrounds. Not every development task is a coding problem or puzzle, rarely do you ever need to write your own algorithm implementation in real world situations. The times you do, most developers (even the intelligent ones) will Google. My problem solving ability is decent enough I am at a senior level and always complete what is asked of me, but give me a code golf&#x2F;coding puzzle and unrealistic constraints like only being able to solve it on a whiteboard? I will fail. Ask me to solve problems on sheets of paper as quick as possible? I will fail.<p>Give me a laptop, an IDE and ask me to build something. Better yet, sit me down with one of the developers in your team, give me a simple Jira task and ask me to help solve it pair-programming style. I would rather hire a developer who can get things done opposed to being able to solve a non-real world programming puzzle I found on Google. Interviews seem to forgo the highly acknowledged fact that developers rely on Google&#x2F;StackOverflow than companies care to admit.<p>Problem solving is one percentage of the hiring equation, being a great developer also requires patience, cooperation, understanding and communication. I think above anything else, a developer who is a good communicator is a dream combination. I would take communication skills over coding puzzle solving skills any day of the week.<p>Even the much beloved FizzBuzz test is a scam. Any developer can memorize a FizzBuzz implementation 10 minutes prior to the interview. I never understood how this was a valid metric for determining suitability of a candidate, when candidates have come to expect a FizzBuzz test coming up. Maybe it worked in 1999, but not in 2016.