from Gergely Orosz | by Gergely Orosz

If you asked my two years ago: I would have told you live coding interviews are fine (*I* don’t mind them). I since got to know women developers who get stressed, freeze up and get rejected on live coding interviews & whiteboards. The crazy thing is they’re all solid engineers. t.co/hFbiEewqX3

Where do most of these engineers end up working? At places which don’t do live coding or whiteboards. Ones that do eg takehomes or code reviews. If you do live coding / whiteboards, you are probably biased against underrepresented groups.

“But there’s no data that shows that live coding interviews bias against women.” Most woman devs I know share stories doing very, very poorly on this format vs reality. And a study from NC State University with a limited sample size hints at this as well: t.co/xiJUqvQFVp t.co/Q90k7mvuNj

“What are alternatives to this process?” One thing that more companies started to do like GitLab and I’ve heard others… a code review interview! Collaborate reviewing a pull request that you can prepare for ahead of time: t.co/V4BtTJoy8q

Another approach is to realize that all approaches bias towards certain groups. To be inclusive, offer a choice on how you evaluate technical skills. Yes, this is more work for the hiring team… and also a more inclusive process: t.co/Pk02CpxRMu

Finally, challenge the status quo, especially for experienced candidates with a track record. @Fonoa_HQ (where I’m an investor) does not do technical assessments for senior candidates. They found the coding signal for sr engineers… gave them no real signal so they removed it: t.co/2aph1AGeNK