You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview
This is because the technical interview has completely degenerated into an arms race.  It started with good intentions.  It used to be just, here&#x27;s a problem, try to solve it and let&#x27;s discuss.  And at first it was fine.  But then knowing Big-O, algorithm, data structure, etc. became a way to &quot;show off&quot; and impress the interviewer.  So everyone started to focus on those to impress the interviewer.  Then the interviewers noticed and started to state they would only be impressed by more and more obscure algorithms and data structures.<p>And then the real downward spiral began with the publication of Cracking the Coding Interview.  More books were published, a whole industry to support this. Then came the sites like leetcode and HackerRank.  Now there&#x27;s a lot of money supporting and pushing for continuing this stupid process.  And the arms race just keeps getting worse and worse.  The interviewers expect more and more obscure algorithms and data structures and justify it with &quot;must avoid false positives&quot;.  This just increases the study time for candidates and they&#x27;re willing to spend time and money to do it.  And the tech interview industry (all the books and sites) are happy to push this arms race since it&#x27;s more money for them.  Now they have enough money to go openly defend the tech interview as the &quot;best practice&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s not even enough to get the right answer now.  You have to do it fast enough or you fail.  And now they care about syntax on a whiteboard.  None of this used to be true.  It all started as a way to see how you approach a problem and discussing it.  No expectations that you would correctly get Algorithm ABC and Data Structure XYZ.  No expectation that the syntax is correct, pseudo code was ok.  No expectation even on a complete working solution, the point was just to see if you can reason about the problem.<p>All that is gone, replaced by the tech interview arms race.  Now it&#x27;s just a massive speed pattern matching contest to see if you&#x27;ve studied enough to hopefully cover the obscure problem the interviewer will pick and if you can correctly pattern match in time based on the hundreds of questions you did on leetcode.  Completely useless and against the original intent of tech interviews.