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I need to be heckled
Apr. 5th, 2020 12:50 pmI have social anxiety when talking to people. It's worse when they are strangers; it's worse when the interaction is such that they are judging me; and it's worse when it's not in-person, but rather over some electronic telecommunications medium, such as phone, Skype, or teleconferencing, as there's always some limitation in the signal— either I can't see their face, or the video is not in synch with the audio, or the audio requires more concentration to comprehend, or at least I can't see the whole room and, for example, figure out that it's the cat that's distracting them, it's not that I'm being so boring.
Plus, my social anxiety is very much heightened when I'm on the spot to think through something technical or logically complex or mathematical. Someone must've humiliated me for not being able to reason mathematically on the spot as a child, and now someone looking at me while I do math or the like unnerves me. Pardon me if I've told this story before, but I survived being teaching fellow for a discrete math class by working out the homework problems I was going to present in section ahead of time, in detail, in my notebook. Obviously, duh, I was really good at doing discrete math; that's why I was TF. I knew, cold, how to do all the kinds of math problems we covered in that class. But while standing at the whiteboard with people looking at me, I couldn't count on myself knowing the answer to 2 times 3. Oh look, it says 6 on my notebook; I'll copy that to the whiteboard.
Interviewing for a software job, and having a coding challenge be part of that, is the perfect storm of all of these factors. It's strangers, they are judging me (OH BOY ARE THEY JUDGING ME— IS THIS PERSON WORTH $120,000 PER YEAR???), it's technical, it's over teleconferencing. Before the epidemic the final round of interview would be in-person but now all rounds are teleconferencing.
I did well with the in-interview coding challenges for the hospital job, and for the initial screen for the e-commerce job, because those coding challenges were so straightforward and algorithmically un-challenging that I required no brain to do them. I just relied on my coding habits. I'm going to iterate through this list; I'm going to make a HashMap to keep track of these things... Oh look, I've thrown the usual ingredients into the pan and it works.
Since I didn't have to brain with my brain at all while doing the straightforward programming exercises, that freed up my brain to generate speech, which was good and earned me points. It was emphasized to me by a couple of different people before the disastrous interviews that it was important to talk about my thought process while I was doing the coding challenges. It's not about whether you get the "right" answer so much; they want to see how you think. Apparently my thought processes work— I do have a history of producing software that works— but it's not all verbal. So, verbalizing what I'm thinking while I'm programming can be challenging, an additional cognitive burden on top of the cognitive burden of actually doing the coding.
So, when I got the not-obviously-straightforward coding challenge, I was doing three things at once: trying to visualize a solution— actually come up with an algorithm, which is not a verbal process; speaking, making a running commentary on what I was thinking; and, at the same time, listening to and judging what I was saying. Too much cognitive load and I buckled. I got distracted by the fact that one of the knee-jerk things I said ("I'll make a HashMap to keep track of things!") was a dead end and probably idiotic. Programming requires building a Jenga stack of abstractions in my head and when I get flustered, the whole stack comes crashing down. If nobody is witnessing my passing spell of befuddlement, and there's no more than the usual amount of time pressure (like, nobody's going to notice whether I finish this today or tomorrow), I can go back to the basics— what am I trying to do here? What are the building blocks already in place?— and re-build the delicate structure of abstractions in my head. During an interview, when I'm already highly anxious, this provokes a panic attack.
I don't know how to get any job that requires writing code in Java or Python or JavaScript or Swift or C++. I have in the past been paid money to write code that actually works. I haven't lost that ability. But I can't prove that I can do that if I can't code my way out of a paper bag during an interview. And, now that I've had one disastrously embarrassing experience with failing spectacularly at a coding interview, I'm even more anxious if I have an interview. I knew I would have this problem with interviewing for any new job that is coding-heavy, but after I smashed it in some previous technical interviews and on-line assessments, I had gotten pretty sanguine. But now I can't imagine not having a panic attack because I'm afraid I'm going to fuck it up by having a panic attack.
I think I need to practice coding while someone is watching me, and verbalizing what I'm doing while I'm working on figuring something out. If I can get into the habit of talking about what I'm doing while I'm coding, hopefully it won't impose any cognitive load to do so during an interview. And if I'm used to it, and it's not weird, perhaps I can just think about the problem at hand, not the OMG SOMEONE IS JUDGING ME. Like, isn't this how actors avoid stage fright— just practicing so much that they can utterly dissociate and still perform, because it has become automated?
So: I am looking for people who can Zoom with me, and look at a screen share of whatever exercise I'm doing next on HackerRank, and heckle me while I code. Unfortunately, people who know how to code are likely to be employed, and thus too busy to heckle me. Looking to maybe trade favors for time spent heckling?
What else am I to do? It seems that this trial by fire is required to get any job that would let me touch the Java compiler or Python interpreter or, gasp, the relational database connection. If I'm considered too much of a dumb-ass to be trusted with those tools, what could I do that would earn money? Work retail at Home Depot?
Plus, my social anxiety is very much heightened when I'm on the spot to think through something technical or logically complex or mathematical. Someone must've humiliated me for not being able to reason mathematically on the spot as a child, and now someone looking at me while I do math or the like unnerves me. Pardon me if I've told this story before, but I survived being teaching fellow for a discrete math class by working out the homework problems I was going to present in section ahead of time, in detail, in my notebook. Obviously, duh, I was really good at doing discrete math; that's why I was TF. I knew, cold, how to do all the kinds of math problems we covered in that class. But while standing at the whiteboard with people looking at me, I couldn't count on myself knowing the answer to 2 times 3. Oh look, it says 6 on my notebook; I'll copy that to the whiteboard.
Interviewing for a software job, and having a coding challenge be part of that, is the perfect storm of all of these factors. It's strangers, they are judging me (OH BOY ARE THEY JUDGING ME— IS THIS PERSON WORTH $120,000 PER YEAR???), it's technical, it's over teleconferencing. Before the epidemic the final round of interview would be in-person but now all rounds are teleconferencing.
I did well with the in-interview coding challenges for the hospital job, and for the initial screen for the e-commerce job, because those coding challenges were so straightforward and algorithmically un-challenging that I required no brain to do them. I just relied on my coding habits. I'm going to iterate through this list; I'm going to make a HashMap to keep track of these things... Oh look, I've thrown the usual ingredients into the pan and it works.
Since I didn't have to brain with my brain at all while doing the straightforward programming exercises, that freed up my brain to generate speech, which was good and earned me points. It was emphasized to me by a couple of different people before the disastrous interviews that it was important to talk about my thought process while I was doing the coding challenges. It's not about whether you get the "right" answer so much; they want to see how you think. Apparently my thought processes work— I do have a history of producing software that works— but it's not all verbal. So, verbalizing what I'm thinking while I'm programming can be challenging, an additional cognitive burden on top of the cognitive burden of actually doing the coding.
So, when I got the not-obviously-straightforward coding challenge, I was doing three things at once: trying to visualize a solution— actually come up with an algorithm, which is not a verbal process; speaking, making a running commentary on what I was thinking; and, at the same time, listening to and judging what I was saying. Too much cognitive load and I buckled. I got distracted by the fact that one of the knee-jerk things I said ("I'll make a HashMap to keep track of things!") was a dead end and probably idiotic. Programming requires building a Jenga stack of abstractions in my head and when I get flustered, the whole stack comes crashing down. If nobody is witnessing my passing spell of befuddlement, and there's no more than the usual amount of time pressure (like, nobody's going to notice whether I finish this today or tomorrow), I can go back to the basics— what am I trying to do here? What are the building blocks already in place?— and re-build the delicate structure of abstractions in my head. During an interview, when I'm already highly anxious, this provokes a panic attack.
I don't know how to get any job that requires writing code in Java or Python or JavaScript or Swift or C++. I have in the past been paid money to write code that actually works. I haven't lost that ability. But I can't prove that I can do that if I can't code my way out of a paper bag during an interview. And, now that I've had one disastrously embarrassing experience with failing spectacularly at a coding interview, I'm even more anxious if I have an interview. I knew I would have this problem with interviewing for any new job that is coding-heavy, but after I smashed it in some previous technical interviews and on-line assessments, I had gotten pretty sanguine. But now I can't imagine not having a panic attack because I'm afraid I'm going to fuck it up by having a panic attack.
I think I need to practice coding while someone is watching me, and verbalizing what I'm doing while I'm working on figuring something out. If I can get into the habit of talking about what I'm doing while I'm coding, hopefully it won't impose any cognitive load to do so during an interview. And if I'm used to it, and it's not weird, perhaps I can just think about the problem at hand, not the OMG SOMEONE IS JUDGING ME. Like, isn't this how actors avoid stage fright— just practicing so much that they can utterly dissociate and still perform, because it has become automated?
So: I am looking for people who can Zoom with me, and look at a screen share of whatever exercise I'm doing next on HackerRank, and heckle me while I code. Unfortunately, people who know how to code are likely to be employed, and thus too busy to heckle me. Looking to maybe trade favors for time spent heckling?
What else am I to do? It seems that this trial by fire is required to get any job that would let me touch the Java compiler or Python interpreter or, gasp, the relational database connection. If I'm considered too much of a dumb-ass to be trusted with those tools, what could I do that would earn money? Work retail at Home Depot?
