[florabuzzword]

My experience agrees with this. I am a different, significantly less comfortable person to be around when strangers are asking me so many questions about myself. I think it’s just about the worst way to get to know me.

When I get hired this way, I always feel a little bit of guilt because I know they actually hired somebody else.

What can be done? I’m not sure, but I can say one thing: my level of discomfort is multiplied by the number of strangers in the room. Does this ever get considered with interviews?

I am far more comfortable coding in front of 1 or 2 people who each give me a little bit of background about their coding experience; just so I know. If they are experienced engineers, it’s probably not going to change what I say aloud, but it just makes me more comfortable. I guess more overlap of technologies in our background does help. It’s nice to not feel pressure of worrying if my solutions reflect general programming conventions enough to be language agnostic. I have never really used Java, for example.