Anonymous mock interviews with engineers from FAANG and more

I love meritocracy, but all the recent anti-DEI rhetoric is bad

By Aline Lerner | Published: October 2, 2024; Last updated: November 12, 2025

I’m the founder of interviewing.io, and in some ways, I’m the meritocracy hipster who was writing about how eng hiring should be meritocratic and about how quotas are bad, way before saying either was cool. At interviewing.io, my team and I have been trying to make hiring meritocratic for the last decade.

I’ll also be the first to admit that DEI is ideologically flawed because of its emphasis on race and gender-based outcomes and its insistence on equality of those outcomes. In the last decade, we've seen a lot of bad stuff done in the name of DEI, firsthand. I'll talk about those in this post.

But all the recent pro-meritocracy, anti-DEI rhetoric is bad. Yelling “Meritocracy!” as if it’s a fait accompli is just as harmful as the worst parts of DEI. I’d even go so far to say that the DEI movement has done more for meritocracy than the loud pro-meritocracy movement is doing right now.

I’m delighted that “meritocracy” is no longer a dirty word. But, just saying it isn’t enough. We have to change our hiring practices. We need to stop using meritocracy as a shield to preserve the status quo.

In this post, I talk about the flaws of DEI, the false promise of meritocracy, and what to do to actually make hiring meritocratic and fair.

Refuting Bloomberg's analysis: ChatGPT isn't racist. But it is bad at recruiting.

By Aline Lerner | Published: April 10, 2024; Last updated: October 25, 2025

Bloomberg recently published an article saying ChatGPT has racial bias when evaluating resumes. We re-ran their numbers and saw that they didn't do any statistical significance testing. In other words, there's no evidence of racial bias, at least not in this data set. However, ChatGPT has another kind of bias -- it drastically overestimates the value of top companies and top schools and does non-traditional candidates a disservice as a result.

The 3 things that diversity hiring initiatives get wrong

By Aline Lerner | Published: March 17, 2021; Last updated: October 31, 2025

I’ve been hiring engineers in some capacity for the past decade. Five years ago I founded interviewing.io, a technical recruiting marketplace that provides engineers with anonymous mock interviews and then fast-tracks top performers—regardless of who they are or how they look on paper—at top companies. We’ve hosted close to 100K technical interviews on our platform and have helped thousands of engineers find jobs. For the last year or so, we’ve also been running a Fellowship program specifically for engineers from underrepresented backgrounds. That’s all to say that even though I have developed some strong opinions about “diversity hiring” initiatives, my opinions are based not on anecdotes but on cold, hard data.

The technical interview practice gap, and how it keeps underrepresented groups out of software engineering

By Aline Lerner | Published: March 8, 2021; Last updated: November 12, 2025

I’ve been hiring engineers in some capacity for the past decade, and five years ago I founded interviewing.io, a technical recruiting marketplace that provides engineers with anonymous mock interviews and then fast-tracks top performers—regardless of who they are or how they look on paper—at top companies. We’ve hosted close to 100K technical interviews on our platform and have helped thousands of engineers find jobs. Since last year, we’ve also been running a Fellowship program specifically for engineers from underrepresented backgrounds.

Announcing the interviewing.io Technical Interview Practice Fellowship

By Aline Lerner | Published: July 19, 2020; Last updated: October 31, 2025

I started interviewing.io because I was frustrated with how inefficient and unfair hiring was and how much emphasis employers placed on resumes. But the problem is bigger than resumes. We’ve come to learn that interview practice matters just as much. The resume gets you in the door, and your interview performance is what gets you the offer.

We ran the numbers, and there really is a pipeline problem in eng hiring.

By Aline Lerner | Published: December 2, 2019; Last updated: January 23, 2026

If you say the words “there’s a pipeline problem” to explain why we’ve failed to make meaningful progress toward gender parity in software engineering, you probably won’t make many friends (or many hires). The pipeline problem argument goes something like this: “There aren’t enough qualified women out there, so it’s not our fault if we don’t hire them.” Many people don’t like this reductive line of thinking because it ignores the growing body of research that points to unwelcoming environments that drive underrepresented talent out of tech.

Can fake names create bias? An exploration into interviewing.io’s pseudonym generator

By Atomic Artichoke | Published: March 6, 2019; Last updated: October 31, 2025

Hello everyone, my name is Atomic Artichoke, and I’m the newest employee of the interviewing.io team, having joined a couple months ago as a Data Scientist. Atomic Artichoke isn’t my real name, of course. That’s the pseudonym the interviewing.io platform gave me, right before I took my final interview with the company.

We looked at how a thousand college students performed in technical interviews to see if where they went to school mattered. It didn't.

By Samantha Jordan | Published: February 12, 2018; Last updated: November 12, 2025

interviewing.io is a platform where engineers practice technical interviewing anonymously. If things go well, they can unlock the ability to participate in real, still anonymous, interviews with top companies like Twitch, Lyft and more.

If you care about diversity, don't just hire from the same five schools

By Meena Boppana | Published: October 23, 2017; Last updated: November 12, 2025

If you’re a software engineer, you probably believe that, despite some glitches here and there, folks who have the technical chops can get hired as software engineers. For many students looking for their first job, the odds of breaking into a top company are slim because they will likely never even have the chance to show their skills in an interview.

You can’t fix diversity in tech without fixing the technical interview.

By Aline Lerner | Published: November 21, 2016; Last updated: November 12, 2025

In the last few months, several large players, including Google and Facebook, have released their latest and ultimately disappointing diversity numbers. Despite a number of initiatives, gains in diversity hiring have been lackluster across industries.