Thread by @DaliaShea

One of the companies I interviewed with ended up restoring my faith in technical interviews.

Before the interview, they had me check out a GitHub repo in my language of choice, get familiar with the code base and asked me to show up with the repo loaded to my favorite IDE.

1/n

During the interview, my interviewer opened up a storyboard, picked a story to work on and we paired on it - with me taking the lead. This made a ton of sense to me because that’s closer to what I’ve done in my day-to-day job which ended up making me feel comfortable.

On the other hand, I’ve traditionally done bad in whiteboard/leetcode style interviews despite getting great reviews at my previous jobs and graduating with a Software Engineering degree with a high GPA.

Honestly, the thought of doing tech interviews brought me so much anxiety that I almost canceled this interview before it even started because I didn’t want to go through one more interview experience that left me questioning myself and doubting my skills.

I’m really glad I didn’t cancel the interview because it ended up being such a positive experience and I ended up getting great feedback which I attribute to the process being realistic, collaborative and overall comfortable.

I wish more tech companies would adopt a process that is closer to what developers do day-to-day instead of the traditional whiteboard interviews.

I think it’s possible to find out if a candidate has skills without putting them through a mentally and emotionally taxing process.

Just to clarify, this happened when I was interviewing a couple months ago. I ended up getting an offer from them which I sadly declined (they were so nice!) and accepted my other offer from Microsoft.

I’ve gotten questions about who the company was. It was @thoughtworks. They’re a great company with many awesome folks I had the pleasure of speaking to during the interview process, including their wonderful CEO @ChrisGMurphy.

This thread seems to be gaining interest so I want to share another thing I loved about interviewing with them.

I had a separate non-tech interview where we discussed diversity and inclusion topics. They had me pick from a jeopardy style board and share my views on the questions

Waldemar talks about it here too

https://twitter.com/waldemarkindler/status/1517923472193826822

I had the pleasure to be interviewed by two engineers who were women. I got to ask them about their experience working there. As a minority in tech, it was important to me to hear about the company culture from people that actually live it everyday. I appreciated that so much.