I consider myself a good coder, I'm very creative with my approach to the problems. I pick new things very easily and my skillset is also very diverse. My employers in past have always been happy to have me on team. And always consider me an asset. But one thing I really suck at is interviews. My mouth just can't keep up with my mind and I end up blurting nonsense. I mess up the easiest questions. My skillset doesn't translate to the interview format at all. I fiddle, I get lost. Worst part is, I started my career as a freelancer, then I got an offer from a start-up after being impressed with my work. Then another startup hired me, looking at my work in the previous start-up. And I've never had a real interview after college.
I'm not tensed during the interview, but I just can't bring myself to focus during the duration of interview. I recently completed my masters, and I'm on an F1 status in US. And job market has not been so good unless I get enrolled in shady consultancies, which I don't want to. Anyone who can offer me an advice, I would genuinely appreciate it. Especially if you have been through something similar I would like to learn from you.
We specialize in hiring people on the spectrum. All our workflows are async, remote-first, transparent-first, in a written format, and don't have a deadline unless absolutely needed. We are almost all - including myself - on the spectrum, and minimize team meetings to 1 per week, allow only 1:1s outside of that, and trust everyone to priotzit their own work outside of tasks assigned specifically to one person.
Were you prescribed any medication? Just getting a diagnosis is good, and learning some tools to help you cope is great, but honestly medication has done wonders for me when I was taking it. (I'm not going to say which specific one, because I'm not a doctor, and what worked for me may not work for you.)
> And job market has not been so good unless I get enrolled in shady consultancies, which I don't want to.
What sort of shadiness are you talking about? If they're just crappy build-out-six-CRUD-apps-a-week shops, but their paychecks don't bounce... well, rent doesn't pay itself, you know? On the other hand, if they're doing something explicitly immoral or illegal, then yeah, avoid those.
I carry a satin sash everywhere that I constantly play with. Always out of sight, but I’m playing with it. It allows me to take some of that energy and spend it there while I fight myself to pay attention.
You’ve stated issues you have focusing on the interview. Work on those. Go get purposely bored and work on those skills.
It’s not fun. It sucks. But you’re not going to change until the pain of change is less than the pain of staying the same.
1. Find the copes that get you through the day.
2. Don't tell anyone at work. Ever. You will be seen as unreliable and employers don't need to accommodate the kinds of things adhd does to you.
A byproduct of the interview process is that it weeds out people who suck at talking. I took an acting class and that helped me a lot. In the biz we call this Masking.
Do spend a little time researching the company’s interview process. Some companies have live coding interviews and/or take-home coding and put more emphasis on those. I completely blew an interview once on databases, only to still get the offer because I aced the live coding. The live coding “interview” was me being left alone in a room for an hour to write a small text-based game after being handed the game rules.
Lots of people have different ADHD coping mechanisms and different things that help them and varied kinds of self-tricks and results. Could it help you during an interview if you thought about it as you testing them instead of them testing you? Maybe having a goal to collect information you want about the job and the people you’d work with could help with focus? Also remember that asking questions uses up interview time, can give you valuable information, and shows both curiosity and initiative. Be polite and conversational of course, but ask as many questions as you can! ;)
Additionally, you seem to have diagnosed yourself as having a skill deficit with interviewing. This is also a great position to be in. If you want to work on interviewing, which based on your message it sounds like is your weak skill, then invest time (and maybe money) in practicing that skill with the added understanding you have (and skills you are building) about your managing your ADHD.
One way to think about this is to treat interviewing as a separate skill set; there really are lots of online resources that teach you to interview these days. Practice interviewing as a separate skill set.
You can invest in this skill with money; leetcode and other sites really package this as a service. The benefit to you is not that they will grant you a job offer; it's that they will grant you the opportunity to practice in low stakes environments. There are also places online that are pairing people for interview practice.
You can also reach out to people you have worked with previously and say: I want to practice interviewing; would you spend 30 minutes with me doing a mock interview? People love to help each other.
At the same time continue to invest in managing and understanding your ADHD by working with professionals to develop those skills. Combine the two and some time and you can do this.
You'll get this. Hang in there! Feel free to email me if you would like to talk more.
Start with companies you like but are not your preference.
Try to schedule them reasonable spread to have enough time to learn from them but not that you have to keep them waiting for too long on an answer.
the goal was not just to get the right answer, but also to make the person interviewing me laugh.
i took a little longer on the questions, but it is way more beneficial to have a comically correct answer after a few seconds than an immediate one that while profound, was misunderstood by everyone but me.
definitely made me be more present in the room than if I'd only been in an interview.