For a moment there I was worried I had written this post! I had gone through these very same feelings and thoughts. Even have the same books although I prefer

For a moment there I was worried I had written this post! I had gone through these very same feelings and thoughts. Even have the same books although I prefer different branches of maths these days. I still find myself feeling this way some times as I start to enter this phase of life where I’m twice as old as some of my colleagues. It doesn’t help that folks start treating you differently. I’ve advocated for deliberate interview practice. I set up flash cards with a problem description on one side and the solution algorithm on the other. I kept a spreadsheet of my practice results. I focused on the five most common algorithms and implemented a few different trees. I too have contributed to various open source projects over the years. Openstack, Mozilla Firefox, C Python, Hy, various libraries. Nothing major but nothing to snooze at. So a litte more than a couple of years ago when I went out looking for a job I fell into this very pit: it’s not a perfect system but it can’t be completely wrong, can it? I thought. Despite all of my hard work I was passing the first interviews fine but would choke up near the end when they got to the hard technical ones. No offers were coming through. The lockdowns were still rolling through. Money was tight. I was stressed out. Then I did some reading. It turns out there’s good evidence that all these interview processes are good at is measuring how well you handle anxiety. It turns out that after meeting several people in a day, answering all kinds of questions, when I have so many responsibilities and needs riding on my success, I get anxious. I am also someone for whom interacting with people takes a considerable amount of effort. It was no wonder I wasn’t getting though these interviews. I choked on the most basic things that I had practiced more than a half dozen times in these interviews. It didn’t make sense until I realized it was the stress. Under normal circumstances I’m not programming with the fate of my family hanging on recalling how to implement a kd-tree off the top of my head. It took a while but I realized that I am a good programmer. You probably are too.