The Anxiety of the Technical Interview
I’ve always had anxiety. It’s not new to me, more like an old friend that I had come to accept over the years, and attempted to conquer. But I was not prepared for panic attacks. Usually I had been able to force myself through anxious situations and act/appear normal to those around me. I even became good at it. But panic attacks are on an entirely different level.
I had my first panic attack a few weeks into Launch Academy. I had never had one before, and it felt like I was dying for a good 15-20 minutes. When told it was just a panic attack, I didn’t understand why. I had been through much more stressful situations in my life than Launch. I wasn’t even particularly stressed, I was getting through the material without much of a problem and everything seemed fine. Until that panic attack.
The first one was just the start. Since then, I have been getting them nearly every day, unless I stay home all day. Social anxiety triggers have proven the worst, when I need to give a presentation, speak in front of a group, or the dreaded technical interview. I know I’m a skilled developer, but that doesn’t count for much when a panic attack starts in an interview. When a panic attack manifests, adrenaline rushes to the brain and you become lightheaded. It becomes hard to breathe, and you get hot flashes. No matter how hard you try to ignore it, your thoughts become consumed by the panic attack. That technical question or coding challenge that you could have normally easily solved? Forget it. Your analytical skills have taken a nosedive by probably 50%. The moment I leave the interview, I kick myself as I regain rational thought and the answer becomes clear.
I’m not writing this to complain, or seek attention. I think that the interview process could be improved. The average person is not familiar with panic disorder. In the future, if I am interviewing someone, I will always keep things like this in mind as I have experienced it myself. It is also likely that there are more people with panic disorder in this field than others, as the developer world is ripe with introverts.
It seems as if nearly every company does three rounds of interviews. The first is usually just getting to know you, the second maybe an hour long technical interview, and the third one often THREE to FOUR hours consisting mostly of technical questions. That...is far too long to be in a panic-inducing situation.
On the brighter side, I have seen some companies have a much better approach. They will send a significant coding challenge remotely, give a deadline to submit it by, and review it. Any in person interviews are mainly cultural interviews. I have found this process to be far more indicative of my abilities, and cultural interviews are much easier to get through.
Following my first interview after graduating Launch Academy, I received an email notifying me that they were passing on me and that I should “work on my analytical abilities”. I’m not one to make excuses, so I thanked them for their time and moved on. But when the technical question arose in the interview, I could barely think. To interviewers, someone might look like they’re just struggling with the question. But this was a question I would have easily answered in a normal situation.
But should those of us with panic disorder have to go into every interview and notify our interviewers at the start that we might be prone to having a panic attack that could affect our performance? No, and often we would prefer to try and appear as normal as possible. We don’t want anyone thinking we’re crazy.
The Solution:
Create an environment where it won’t matter if someone has panic disorder or not. Give remote, timed coding challenges/questions. Make all in person interviews cultural rather than technical. And above all, be friendly and welcoming during the interview. When I struggled in my first interview while having a panic attack, the interviewer actually kept sighing and appearing visibly frustrated with my answers, which only made things worse.
In Conclusion:
Change the standard technical interview. The next Mark Zuckerberg might have panic disorder.