How Traditional Technical Interviews Impact Diversity

Episode Description

Ask anyone who’s hunted for a job as a software developer what they did to prepare for their technical interviews, and they will more or less provide a similar general framework.

At a high level, we grind data structures & algo problems using some flavor of an interview prep site such as LeetCode, Hackerrank, and Interview Cake, among many others.

Armed with a copy of Cracking the Coding Interview, we can spend most evenings and weekends studying and hoping to land that dream job at our company.

Frances Coronel, a racial equity advocate and former software engineer at Slack, realized the potential harm this cookie-cutter interview process could have on improving diversity for underrepresented folks in the tech industry.

Seeing that there were so few members from the Latinx community in the tech ecosystem relative to the general population, she identified many holes in the tech talent pipeline.

She decided to land herself a role at Byteboard, a company disrupting the interviewing space.

Tune into this week’s episode as she talks about her journey into tech, how the industry is doing in terms of diversity & inclusion in general, and what suggestions she has for allies who want to help address the various issues that have created this leaky pipeline.

Resources Mentioned

• Techqueria | Latinx in Tech
• A nonprofit that serves the largest global community of Latinx professionals in the tech industry
• Byteboard: A real-world technical interview
• Project-based interviewing that is identity-blind and designed to assess engineering skills used on the job

Episode Link

Episode 09 – How Traditional Technical Interviews Impact Diversity & What Frances Did About it

About Dial a Dev Podcast

Dial a Dev is a podcast that features interviews with software developers made for anyone in the middle of a career switch or simply for those interested in the profession.

We explore the stories of people from all walks of life who took different paths to get to where they are today and learn about how becoming a software developer can entail different things depending on the perspective.

Some started with non-technical undergrad degrees, some didn’t attend a traditional 4-year college, and some knew they had been interested in computer science since they were little.

Regardless of what kind of journey they embarked on, each person’s anecdote offers unique and exciting insights.