October 10, 2026
Do You Need Performance-Enhancing Drugs or Other Substances to Pass a Technical Interview in 2026?
Recently, a friend of mine who teaches at an engineering school told me that many students were using cocaine to improve their exam…
By Thomas Dupont
3 min read
Recently, a friend of mine who teaches at an engineering school told me that many students were using cocaine to improve their exam performance.
Having never touched this drug, and actively avoiding it, I don't know what its effects are. Apparently, in the hours immediately after taking it, users experience what feels like a doubling of their cognitive abilities, followed by a brutal crash.
For the three or four hours of an exam, candidates feel like masterminds.
What Does This Have to Do With Technical Interviews?
More recently, I went through a series of technical interviews for a new software engineering position.
I was genuinely surprised by just how disconnected from reality these tests have become in 2026.
For 90 minutes to two hours, you're expected to maintain absolute concentration, demonstrate an immediate ability to respond to every problem, and any hesitation is harshly penalized. Two or three moments of hesitation can get you eliminated from the hiring process without a second thought.
I even had an interview at Orus where I hesitated for a few minutes and was rejected. One moment of hesitation in a 90-minute interview, and suddenly my skills were supposedly insufficient for the position.
Well, after many hours of training with ChatGPT on all the current methodologies and the traps interviewers might try to catch me in, I landed my new contract.
Nevertheless, the feedback wasn't "He's very good," but rather "He's good enough for the position" (French readers will recognize the analogy with the grades awarded in the French baccalauréat), despite the intensive training I had put myself through.
It is, after all, extremely difficult not to lose your composure, even slightly, during a technical interview.
That's when I thought back to my friend and his students who were using drugs, and I found myself asking the question in the title of this article.
Is Taking Drugs Before a Technical Interview Actually a Reality?
I'm not going to go over how disconnected these tests are from the reality of the job. If someone were expected to behave for 40 hours a week the way they're expected to behave during a technical interview, they'd burn out within a few weeks.
There is a study examining the relationship between substance use and performance. It doesn't specifically focus on cocaine, but rather on the use of psychoactive substances in software development:
https://dblp.org/rec/conf/icse/NewmanEWJ23.html
The motivation is fairly easy to understand: someone who keeps getting rejected over minor moments of hesitation will eventually look for a way around the problem.
In my case, that meant training. I invested time, several days in total, to anticipate the traps and the methodological conventions.
Essentially, I had to put myself in the mindset of someone who knows how to pass technical interviews, rather than that of a developer who cares about clean code and Domain-Driven Design (DDD).
However, not everyone has that kind of time to invest, and the shortcut offered by substances becomes tempting.
Especially since they're so easy to obtain. Drug trafficking has never been as lucrative in Europe as it is today.
What Does This Reveal About the Future of Our Profession?
Throughout the various hiring processes I went through, both the ones I passed and the ones I failed, I had an uncomfortable feeling: we're no longer being treated as human beings.
Imagine someone buying a car and pushing it to its limits on the road for a few minutes to determine whether it's worth purchasing.
As a candidate, I felt like that car. Just a machine being pushed far beyond normal conditions to find its breaking point.
There's plenty of literature on cognitive fatigue in software engineering. Here's an example from a mainstream publication:
In software development, productivity demands are skyrocketing, and we're becoming little more than people who check completed work.
This is reflected in technical interviews, where companies are looking for people who don't exist: human AIs.
Now, I know the people who design these tests will explain that they're hiring extraordinary individuals (on drugs, perhaps?).
The question I'd like to ask them is: "What do you honestly think of your hiring decision after six months?"
What happens when you realize that the "machine" (a term I've seen in job postings) or the "killer" (another term I've seen in job postings) you hired was an illusion?
Not because they're bad at their job, but simply because they're human. As Nietzsche put it: "Human, All Too Human."
Disappointment, if poorly managed, will lead to disastrous consequences (dismissals) or a relentless cycle of chasing an even more elusive ideal: the search for a "real killer" who will be no more real than the last one.