They need therapy because hiring practices are broken?
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
-Jiddu Krishnamurti
We do everything we can think of to make the process as close to working together on the kind of code that candidates would work on at our company, but ultimately you can't get rid of the fact that someone is being actively assessed as they're working.
When I see people are psyching themselves out sometimes I'll ask them if they want to take a little time to get their thoughts together, end the call and come back when they've got a groove going, or reschedule the call. Because people who are in their own heads trying to code while I'm watching them simply cannot put up a fair representation of their abilities.
As an interviewer there's only so much I can do to help people with that. I try to take what I perceive as nerves or difficulty when I make a hiring decision, but I've also observed that people who are really struggling in this way in an interview are often going through something in their own lives that ends up interfering with their ability to be effective at work. So it's hard to balance.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that therapy can be beneficial regardless of the brokenness of the hiring process.
Thanks, but I think there's only so much you can do. Part of the problem seems to be that there's such a thing as a "company hiring process" in the first place. (I don't know how to fix this; most problems seem to get solved by a thousand people making incremental improvements, so you're probably helping regardless.)
> So I guess what I'm trying to say is that therapy can be beneficial regardless of the brokenness of the hiring process.
This is definitely true. Though: therapy can be expensive, a good therapist is hard to find, and a therapist that works for you can be even harder; so it might not be worth seeking therapy for everyone.
Maybe $parent was a bit harsh.. let's say she needs a lot more friendly support to get her mind out of this pit.
And actually, we don't even know if the blog itself is really written by Gail, since someone just posted that _they_ are the real Gail and it wasn't written by her.