This provided me with a fascinating, albeit somewhat familiar, piece of insight: which is that I don't really ever hear my inner monologue. I'm not sure I have one! I'm either typing out my thoughts as I have them or speaking them as I have them.
I struggle in coding interviews precisely because of this: either I end up vocalizing my emotions and insecurities instead of coding, or I end up coding instead of talking about what I'm trying to accomplish. Often I will see many alternate pathways branching out before me, but if I try to start talking about them, I am no longer coding, and so my brain context-switches to "social and emotional."
Probably something I could get better at with practice, but I honestly end up commenting on places like HN simply because it "allows" me to think. If I could have a coding interview in the form of realtime text chat + code, that would be ideal for me.
I guess I have seen companies do things like "contribute to this open source project and work through an MR." I do find that quite appealing as an interview process.
Interestingly, it turns out a large number of people have no inner monologue. [1]
Some studies indicate that it's as low as 30% of people who do (so 70% don't have an inner monologue), while others show the opposite, implying around 75% of people have some amount of inner monologue while 25% do not. It's a difficult subject to test and study since we don't have direct access to people's minds and asking someone what they're thinking about literally forces their thoughts through the filter of language.
This is a fairly common condition, along the same lines as aphantasia (lack of inner-picture, rather than inner-voice). I do not believe there is any “cure” for it.
I don’t have a sense of a persistent inner voice either, but I can verbalise my thoughts just fine. It feels to me like the part of my brain that turns thoughts into English sentences automatically goes to sleep when it’s not being used. And that brain power can be used for something else.
When I’m doing particularly hard programming work, I can’t have words said near me. Even music with lyrics messes me up. I think because it wakes up my “thoughts to English” pathway and that gets in the way of my “thoughts to code” pathway.
Anyway, I don’t want to be cured. There’s nothing wrong with my mind. If anything I feel sorry for people who can’t turn off their inner dialogue, because it means they can never use those neurons for other tasks - like maths or programming.
Personally I can talk while programming if an interviewer wants that, but I’ll be a bit dumber at the keyboard than if I sat in silence.
i am the same except i use music (lyrics and all) to drown everything else out. i don’t. price the lyrics at all, but my brain is processing them because every now and then i suddenly break out of focus and am like “wait, what the hell did that song just say?” usually on comedy songs
I struggle in coding interviews precisely because of this: either I end up vocalizing my emotions and insecurities instead of coding, or I end up coding instead of talking about what I'm trying to accomplish. Often I will see many alternate pathways branching out before me, but if I try to start talking about them, I am no longer coding, and so my brain context-switches to "social and emotional."
Probably something I could get better at with practice, but I honestly end up commenting on places like HN simply because it "allows" me to think. If I could have a coding interview in the form of realtime text chat + code, that would be ideal for me.
I guess I have seen companies do things like "contribute to this open source project and work through an MR." I do find that quite appealing as an interview process.