The sad demise/acquisition of Cohuman had me hunting for new job the last two weeks, although really it was time anyway. The thrill was gone, not because the product was bad or the people were hard to work with. It was a good team and a good product. The technological challenges were gone for me, and without that I am just a very good whore. It pleases me not. Of course the ordinary inertia of finding a job is compounded when I think about the sexism I have faced and might face out there in the ordinary world of job hunting.

I am happy to say that job hunting was really different this time. Everyone I talked to seemed to have a job available, and also knew of several good companies that were hiring. People were generous in the gift of reference. I had the crisis of too many options. The first interview that I went to, NeedFeed, was the place that I chose in the end. I felt like I could be myself with everyone on the team. It also turns out that they were really trying to add diversity to their team. I didn’t find their awesome post on Quora until after I had accepted the job. One of the reasons that I was so interested in NeedFeed actually was their diversity. Of the 4 developers that I met, one was a woman. That is not a luxury that I have had, and it is good to know that the proportions aren’t accidental.

Going to so many interviews has me thinking about the critical role of the interview process in getting diversity on the team. Because there aren’t standardized ways of interviewing for a paired programming environment, people can fall back on looking for someone like them.

Several years ago when I was looking for my first job in Ruby, I went to a job interview for a well-funded company with no product. The founders were two PhDs from Stanford who had hired a PhD student in Mathematics. They didn’t ask about my testing practices, or how to tame database queries in Rails. They had me stand before a whiteboard and try to answer a series of abstract and inapplicable computer science and mathematics problems. They were about different sort algorithms, big O notation, and binary trees. During the first question, I said, “I think I am not the person you are looking for. I don’t have a computer science degree. I don’t start with abstraction and stay there. I am very practical and solve problems with abstractions as needed.” Their retort was that these weren’t computer science problems. They were just problem solving puzzles.

That is a bias, that I hear often. Interviewers forget having spent generous amounts of time at school learning about these computer science conundrums, and they think of them an intrinsic problems that are solvable by any smart person like them. The times that I have encountered problems that I could solve on a whiteboard before 3 hostile men, it has been because I did read, hear or study the problem at some point. I was able to use my intelligence and a fuzzy overview to build the right answer. That is not the same as testing problem solving. It is actually the complete opposite.

That kind of bias in theory should only affect oddballs like me that have only an art degree, and lots of raw problem solving skills. In practice, however, the kinds of places that employ these interviewing practices have less women on staff than exist in the computer science industry. The only bad interview that I had this round was with a company of almost 100 engineers, and only one was a woman. So, why can’t smart computer science women get through the process of reproducing JavaScript on a white board in 20 minutes while being criticized by two men?

In my experience a hostile or competitive environment is not conducive to working or thinking. I have grown to hate the word ‘collaborative’. It evokes fat people holding hands in the sunset making some corny bridge across America. That being said, I like working together with other people. Is this a female thing? It seems to be, although there are some outliers on both sides of the gender spectrum.

So, how can a team really determine intelligence and fit in an interview? At Cohuman I was offered the job after only a one hour interview where I paired with the CTO in the one room office. Everyone was respectfully listening in and they made their decision on observation and gut. At NeedFeed the CEO said he only had one question: “Tell me about your whole life, starting from where you were born.” He said he asks that question because he likes to know what motivates people and how they make decisions. That kind of strategy only works if the questioner is open and friendly, and he was. I also paired and had a white board abstraction test with the CTO. It used to be that open source projects and blogging were good measures of a potential developer, but as Ruby has become the career transition for Java programmers, that is less important.

I think the most important thing when conducting an interview is to be aware of your own biases, and proceed cautiously.