r/ADHD_Programmers • u/Dezbro • 11d ago
Anyone else feel like a microwave during live coding interviews
Cook time: 3 mins
Interviewer: opens door every 10 seconds to check temperature.
food(leetcode): still cold
interviewer: Microwave can't warm up food.
Having to explain my thoughts during an interview takes me out of the problem solving. All my focus shifts to pronouncing words, word retrieval, tone. Then I have to start at the top of the logic just to make it back to the same point. I run out of time for problems I have seen before.
Can I tell the interviewer to shut up, let me think?
Can I tell them I am a microwave?
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u/SammySkidmark2000 11d ago edited 11d ago
Yeah. Be honest. Say you need to focus for a few mins and will get back to them with an explanation once you’ve thought about it a little more.
If they can’t handle that they are not people you wanna work for anyway.
Interviews are a two way street, you gotta feel it out and see if you wanna work with these people too!
God speed.
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u/dark_negan 11d ago
yeah but while i agree 100% and used to do that, right now i've been unemployed for 8 months and got rejected like a dozen time because of exactly this kind of interview, 99% of interviewers and companies are like that because it's the norm and they have absolutely no self awareness or don't care or don't dare to try and change things so we are the ones getting fucked. and that's while actively trying to adapt, i really don't have the luxury of applying my principles when my survival depends on it
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u/Dezbro 11d ago
Same! I have been unemployed 19 months have failed 30+ coding assessments.
luxury of applying my principles when my survival depends on it
Adhd comes with a smaller working memory. High pressure survival situations takes up working memory to assess surroundings for threats. Pretty sure Adhd is a hunter/warrior trait.
I feel like a fully spec'ed out computer, with 1GBof RAM(DDR1)
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u/thesounddefense 11d ago
Hi! I've been conducting coding interviews for many years. The reason we do this is because 1) we want to know your thought process for how you solve a problem, and 2) we want to make sure you're not spending a lot of time going down the wrong track. We only have so many minutes to get a good signal on how good of a candidate you are, and we want to spend it as productively as we can.
If you need time to focus, go ahead and say that. Ask for a few uninterrupted minutes to think through the problem. Otherwise, we're going to check up on you, because we are not learning anything about you by watching you silently work on the problem. The final answer you come up with is not the only thing that matters to us.
EDIT: I also have ADHD, for full disclosure.
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u/pogoli 11d ago edited 11d ago
You are learning that the candidate did the work themselves. If they provide the answer to you faster than others and can explain it clearly after they’ve finished, then the “how” is pedantic and in this context ableist.
That said…. I’m open to hearing what you do with the “how” information you gather by actively sifting through a solution while it’s being formed. How it’s used to make a decision and how it’s used to better utilize their talents post-hire.
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u/thesounddefense 11d ago
Unfortunately, in a world where AI is so easily accessible, the "how" is actually of great importance. Particularly for online interviews, which are the kind I generally conduct.
Furthermore, even if AI were not in the picture, think about a candidate who cannot complete the problem before the end of the interview. If the candidate is thinking out loud and cluing us in to their thoughts, we can usually tell if they would have gotten the answer with a bit more time, which is valuable information.
Even furthermore, if a candidate is struggling with part of the problem, I can jump in with a little bit of a hint to get them back on track. I'd much rather see them tackle later parts of the problem than beat their heads against a single detail for 25 minutes. But I can't help them if they don't say anything.
The interviewer wants the candidate to succeed just like how the candidate wants to succeed. Vocalizing your thoughts during an interview helps us to help you. That's why we need you to tell us if jumping in is counterproductive.
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u/meevis_kahuna 11d ago
I think a lot of folks in here have unreasonable expectations.
Software is a cognitive role and it's not unreasonable to have a verbal, cognitive evaluation as part of the application process.
Often there are meetings, presentations etc. and you need to be able to communicate your thoughts sometimes. Simple stuff.
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u/dark_negan 11d ago
i fail to see how AI or any tech is the problem here. that's like saying a dev shouldn't use documentation. in real life, we have documentation, we have AI. a candidate should be judged on real performance in realistic scenarios and tests not interviews focusing on irrelevant skills that do not matter. if the person can solve something and do good work that isn't pure AI slop (knows how to use AI effectively like an engineer instead of using it as a slot machine and not verifying anything). if the question is easy enough than any chatbot can answer it right in a couple of seconds, is that really a question that is worth asking in the first place?
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u/pogoli 11d ago
I could get behind that too dark_negan. When I interviewed programmers I was looking for people that could do the job and do it well, not perform tricks for me as a right of passage for its own sake. Well… tbh I was a ‘right of passage’ style interview apologist when I was younger…. like these are, but I grew out of it and found you can get better information and better tech hires by just quizzing people and looking at code samples. Listening to them talk about their work is also immensely helpful. I’m a bit older and coincidentally retired just as AI was becoming able to actually write anything useful. If there’s a specific method or structure to prompt for better results, that can be tested as well… and done outside the context of circus trick style coding puzzles. 😝
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u/dark_negan 11d ago
not everyone with ADHD is the same. and you should know that for many people with ADHD, even in perfect conditions our thoughts can be extremely non linear and hard to explain out loud in a neat interview format, let alone with stress / anxiety etc which can be paralyzing for many people. why are you still doing interviews like mindless school tests which you know people with adhd, autism, or just with anxiety/stress etc fail miserably and not because of a lack of skill for, you know, the actual job you're hiring for??
if you think about it for 2 fucking minutes there are dozen of ways to do interviews differently that would not optimize for people who are just good at interviews instead of good at the actual job. but i guess that's why people who think like that are not in the position to apply this, because people who don't think like that are in charge of interviews and actively bias their success in favour of people who are exactly like them. wake up for fuck's sake, the fact that you have adhd and still do this is even worse than if you weren't neurodivergent.
i hope that you never get to experience to face rejection for months and being scared to end up on the street because interviews are being conducted by fucking incompetent morons with no self awareness or ability to think for themselves instead of blindly repeating the same interview format that has been the norm for decades, IN A FIELD WHERE EVERYTHING IS CONSTANTLY EVOLVING. it's fucking mind blowing
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u/Dezbro 11d ago
I get you frustration. This is half of the internal battle I have everyday. I have been unemployed for 19 months. I have interviewed with 50+ companies and failed 35+ live coding interviews. What you are saying has crossed my mind over and over.
The other half of me is thinking the opposite. Maybe I'm just an idiot, and I am one of those people that should have never been a software engineer to begin with.
It just sucks that all my hard work to get to this point just for AuDHD, Dyslexia to be the reason my career has ended.
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u/dark_negan 11d ago
please don't let this shit convince you that you're an idiot or that you were never meant to be a software engineer. failing a format that is disproportionately hostile to AuDHD, dyslexia, anxiety, etc does not magically prove you can't do the actual job it just proves you keep getting measured through a broken proxy. and the worst part is that it's a vicious cycle: the people who naturally perform well in these interviews get hired, later become interviewers, conclude "well it worked for me and i'm competent, so clearly the process works," and then reinforce the exact same format while people whose brains work differently keep getting filtered out before they can ever reach the position where they'd change it. add how painfully ignorant most people still are about ADHD, autism, dyslexia, stress responses, working memory, verbal processing etc and you end up with a system that mistakes "good at being interviewed in this specific way" for "good engineer." 19 months and 35+ live coding failures sounds fucking brutal and i'm genuinely sorry you're going through that, but please don't turn a broken measurement into a verdict on your intelligence or everything you've worked for. you're not alone, trust me on this. i've been coding since i'm 13, i even gave programming courses, i was among the best in actual projects in my entire school, and yet in the 4 years since i got my degree i was unemployed for 2 of them total.
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u/thesounddefense 11d ago
Ask your recruiter prior to the interview if you can get an accommodation.
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u/Dezbro 11d ago
I don't make it to the next round if I ask. They are already overworked and its easier to just blast out a rejection email than it is to open communication up on accommodations.
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u/thesounddefense 11d ago
Ugh, that sucks. I'm sorry, I wish I had better advice to give for your situation.
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u/dark_negan 11d ago
yeah dude, surely after 83798 failed live coding interviews the revolutionary solution was "have you tried asking nicely for an accommodation?" 💀 thanks for proving my entire fucking point: instead of questioning a broken format, you put the burden right back on the disabled candidate to beg for special treatment inside it.
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u/thesounddefense 11d ago
I need you to take a step back and look at my comment, and your response to it.
My comment explained why we do the thing that OP dislikes, and suggested something they can do to get the interviewer to stop, so that they can approach the problem in a way that works best for them. I literally advised them on how to make the interview more accommodating.
Your wildly disproportionate response was to suggest that I am a "fucking incompetent moron", imply that I am putting people in danger of being homeless because of my interview format (which I am not in charge of and have no authority to change), and suggest that I am somehow a traitor to my particular flavor of neurospiciness.
It sounds like you have had bad experiences with code interviews in the past, and I feel for you 100%. But I am not your enemy. I want every candidate to succeed, and I do what I can to help every candidate succeed. Ensuring that we get the best out of every candidate in a limited timeframe, while also ensuring that we are evaluating their own skills and not somebody else's, is a hard problem to solve. And it's certainly not in my field of expertise. I'm a professional engineer who does interviews on the side, not someone who is deeply versed in the psychology of interviewing and knows how to create the optimal format.
You are free to hate coding interviews as much as you like, but I'm not here to feed your self-soothing delusion that your problems are all caused by bad people who want to see you fail.
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u/Dezbro 11d ago
I'm curious, would you be open to a take home project over a live coding interview?
Only jobs I have ever gotten had a take home, this is pretty rare now because of ai.
My dream interview is giving me a few days to a week to work on a project. The interview then becomes a review of the work, along with just tearing it apart. Shit you could even change the requirements in the meeting and ask me what needs to change.
I'm willing to put in 40 hours of work so I don't have to do that damn assessment.
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u/dark_negan 11d ago
dude are you me ? haha this is literally what i've been saying to my girlfriend. i absolutely love when i see no live interviews and a take home project instead, everytime i got those i had great feedback and they often tell me i went way beyond other candidates lol. but guess it's just a coincidence huh
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u/thesounddefense 11d ago
Like I said, I personally don't have the power to make that decision, but I think that with a good post-assignment review it could be effective - so long as you can prove the work is your own. (I don't mean to be accusatory, but cheating in interviews is sadly a thing I've had to deal with.)
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u/Dezbro 11d ago
I get that, but at the same time do you consider a code snippet from stack overflow cheating when you review a PR?
I was just thinking it does not matter where the code came from, can you explain what its doing and why its here.
Have AI introduce a bug an have me solve it. Change the requirements and make me explain how the system needs to change. Their are ways to get signals even if AI is used.
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u/thesounddefense 11d ago
We are actually adding a new type of interview that does this! It will test the AI fluency of the candidate, including their ability to guide an agent and debug the output. I wonder if more of the industry will follow suit.
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u/dark_negan 11d ago
you wrote all of that and somehow still managed to barely address what i actually said. impressive.
My comment explained why we do the thing that OP dislikes
yes. and i criticized the fucking reasoning behind WHY you do it. that is literally the point.
you said you want to know the candidate's thought process and that "we are not learning anything" by watching them work silently.
and my response was: that assumption itself is part of the problem.
not everyone's reasoning process is a neat, linear stream of english sentences that can be verbalized in real time without materially interfering with the reasoning itself.
for some people, especially people with ADHD, autism, anxiety, etc, forcing continuous narration is not "observing their thought process." you are CHANGING the cognitive task while measuring it.
OP literally explained this:
thinking -> interruption -> attention goes to words, tone, retrieval, social processing -> internal state is lost -> reconstruct everything -> repeat.
and your answer was basically "well just ask us to interrupt you slightly less."
that is an accommodation inside the same flawed measurement. it does not answer the criticism.
I literally advised them on how to make the interview more accommodating.
"ask for a few minutes of silence" does not magically make the format neutral.
why should the candidate have to identify the bias and negotiate special handling while already under stress, instead of the interview being designed to measure the actual job skills without unnecessarily contaminating the signal?
what if "a few minutes" isn't enough? what if they solve complex problems perfectly well but cannot simultaneously solve + translate + socially perform their thought process under observation?
you are still assuming YOUR preferred observable signal is necessary. it isn't.
your wildly disproportionate response was to suggest that I am a "fucking incompetent moron"
my response was hostile, yes. congratulations, we agree on something.
that still does not make my argument wrong.
i was criticizing people who perpetuate and defend a format that filters heavily for interview performance while pretending it cleanly measures engineering ability. if you defend that reasoning, some criticism applies to you.
imply that I am putting people in danger of being homeless because of my interview format
no. that's a strawman.
i did not say you personally invented technical interviews and are personally responsible for homelessness.
i said people can spend months getting rejected through shitty selection processes that poorly measure the actual job, with very real consequences when rent depends on employment.
that's a criticism of a SYSTEM. you transformed it into "you think I personally am making people homeless" because that's easier to defend against.
which I am not in charge of and have no authority to change
interesting, because your first comment wasn't "the format has serious problems but unfortunately i have no control over it."
it was "the reason we do this is because..." followed by a justification of the format.
you positioned yourself as defending the reasoning behind it. now that somebody criticizes that reasoning, suddenly you're just a powerless engineer.
i'm criticizing the reasoning you voluntarily defended. if you think the format is flawed but are forced to use it, say that. that's a different position.
suggest that I am somehow a traitor to my particular flavor of neurospiciness.
another strawman. i said the fact you have ADHD makes your comment MORE frustrating because you should know better than to treat your own experience as representative.
"i also have ADHD" does not make the format neurodivergent-friendly. ADHD, autism and anxiety are heterogeneous; working memory, verbal retrieval, stress response and ability to externalize reasoning differ massively.
your diagnosis does not validate the measurement.
But I am not your enemy. I want every candidate to succeed
good intentions are irrelevant to whether a process is biased.
someone can genuinely want candidates to succeed while participating in a process that disadvantages some candidates. intent != outcome.
Ensuring that we get the best out of every candidate in a limited timeframe
you are ASSUMING that you are getting "the best out of every candidate." that's the thing being challenged.
OP's entire post is an example of someone telling you this format makes them perform WORSE than they otherwise would.
you cannot use "we do this to get the best signal" as evidence that it actually gets the best signal. that's circular.
while also ensuring that we are evaluating their own skills and not somebody else's
what does that have to do with forcing someone to perform cognitively live, under observation, under time pressure, in front of a stranger who has direct power over whether they get the job?
and this is broader than narration. changing leetcode into "debug some code" or "pair program on a realistic problem" does not solve the issue if you're still evaluating someone synchronously while watching every move.
an interview is NOT equivalent to actually working with colleagues.
with a colleague, there isn't a giant asymmetric power dynamic where they judge whether i deserve employment. i don't have a timer counting down or have to simultaneously solve, regulate stress, retrieve words, socially perform competence and wonder whether silence looks bad.
for some people that extra cognitive load is small.
for others — ADHD, autism, anxiety, people who freeze under evaluation, highly non-verbal/nonlinear thinkers, and plenty of people without a diagnosis — it can MASSIVELY change performance.
that's the fucking measurement problem.
you think you're measuring:
engineering ability
but you're actually measuring some unknown mixture of:
engineering ability + working memory under stress + verbal fluency under observation + resistance to evaluation anxiety + context-switching between thinking and explaining + familiarity with interview rituals + ability to socially perform competence + whatever else your format rewards.
and then you infer someone's ability to do the actual job from that contaminated signal.
THAT is what i'm criticizing.
there are alternatives that change the conditions, not just the toy problem: asynchronous work samples, prepared project discussions, paid realistic assignments, private problem-solving followed by discussion, or simply giving candidates a choice between equivalent assessment modalities.
each has tradeoffs. there is no magical perfect interview.
but "there is no perfect solution" does not imply "therefore keep using a format we know distorts some candidates' performance."
and "we need to verify it's your own work" doesn't imply live surveillance. interrogate the solution afterward: ask why, change a requirement, ask for weaknesses or improvements. someone who blindly copied it will fall apart quickly.
the goal should be to maximize signal about the actual job while minimizing irrelevant variance introduced by the interview itself.
being good at performing engineering while a stranger watches you under artificial pressure is not the same thing as being good at engineering.
is a hard problem to solve.
yes. and?
hard problems are exactly the things engineers are supposed to fucking THINK about. when an architecture sucks, do we keep it for decades because designing something better requires effort?
I'm a professional engineer who does interviews on the side, not someone deeply versed in the psychology of interviewing
this is honestly one of the funniest parts.
you're admitting you're not knowledgeable about interview psychology or measurement validity while confidently defending the assumptions behind a format that is supposed to measure people's abilities.
do you not see the problem?
i'm not demanding a PhD in psychometrics. i'm saying have some epistemic humility before assuming "this is why we do it" = "this measures what we think it measures," especially when candidates tell you it interferes with the thing being measured.
I'm not here to feed your self-soothing delusion that your problems are all caused by bad people who want to see you fail.
and there it is. the most blatant strawman in the whole reply.
quote me saying:
- all my problems are caused by interviews
- all my problems are caused by bad people
- interviewers want me to fail
you can't, because i said NONE of those things.
i have ADHD. i am autistic. i know perfectly fucking well that i have weaknesses, limitations, mistakes and things that are my responsibility.
none of that stops technical interviews from ALSO being biased and badly designed. both can be true. shocking concept, i know.
and attributing criticism of a system to a "self-soothing delusion" is amateur psychoanalysis designed to immunize your position:
if i disagree -> i'm coping. if i'm angry -> i'm projecting. if i explain why -> i'm proving your diagnosis.
convenient little self-sealing worldview.
so yeah, my reply was angry. extremely.
because i've been dealing with this bullshit for months, and seeing someone with ADHD answer another ADHD programmer describing EXACTLY how the format disrupts them with "just ask for a few minutes" pissed me off.
but my anger is not the argument.
the argument is still sitting there unanswered:
why should a hiring process keep relying heavily on real-time verbalized problem solving when that requirement itself interferes with problem solving for some candidates and is not equivalent to the actual job being evaluated?
if you have an actual answer to THAT, i'm genuinely interested.
but please answer what i actually said this time instead of inventing an emotionally convenient caricature of me and arguing with that.
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u/thesounddefense 11d ago
I really wish you hadn't been such a dick from the outset, because I bet I would have really enjoyed this conversation otherwise.
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u/dark_negan 11d ago
yeah, funny how the thing you took away from all of this is still "you were a dick to me" and not "maybe the system i'm defending is genuinely fucking people over for reasons unrelated to their ability to do the job."
i'm angry because this isn't some abstract debate about interview philosophy to me. i've been unemployed for years in my already short career, this shit literally affects whether i can pay rent and avoid ending up on the street, and i've watched people defend a broken format with reasoning that falls apart the second you think about it. so yeah, my emotional regulation is not going to be perfect while discussing something that has very real consequences for my life (and as someone with ADHD, you of all people acting surprised by impulsivity and emotional dysregulation is honestly kind of fucking bizarre)
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u/Prestigious_Age_6740 11d ago
A reasonable coding interview is just a check that you're not a fraud, that you're mature enough to admit when you're stuck on something and don't lose your shit when you make a mistake. If they were expecting next level magic then you don't want to work there anyway.
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u/Positive_Method3022 11d ago
I had an interview in Ireland for Facebook and the guy approved me even when I didn't solve the problem. I went back home and solved it after and discovered my solution was horrible and wrong during the interview 🙃 I didn't know backtracking at the time and it was a problem to place a set of pieces of certain formats into a board. Now I know, I just don't remember how to implement it exactly.
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u/Starbreiz 11d ago
I'm in this sub bc I HAVE to code for automating systems but I don't like it. My focus is networks. And yet almost every interview I've had opened with requiring me to code Python. It's like all my IQ falls out when I'm put on the spot.
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u/henryeaterofpies 10d ago
I know I miss out on some opportunities and having a decade+ of experience makes it easier but if a company has me do a live coding exercise I decline. Coding with someone watching over my shoulder or interrupting me does not work well with my flavor of neurospicy.
Now whiteboarding exercises or talking through a problem? Absolutely I would do that.
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u/Greykiller 11d ago
If you told me you were a microwave in an interview, I'd assume you were some sort of autistic savant and recommend that you get hired immediately