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I work on a small team at a large organization that routinely hires across the engineering spectrum (aerospace, computer, electrical, industrial, mechanical), and we are shifting our hiring culture to emphasize conversation and brainstorming rather than the use of whiteboard programming exercises or test questions that are pass/fail. While we find that this makes for a more inclusive process, our team's subject matter experts can get frustrated at our inability to probe in that manner.

What tips or activities have you found useful to use with interview candidates that assesses their mathematics skills or knowledge without asking them to do a programming or pass/fail test?

I've used various open-source software packages for years, and now I'd like to give back by contributing in some way. I have an advanced degree in human factors engineering and real-world work experience in cognitive systems engineering, UX, and UI design. However, I'm not the best programmer -- I program a little for my day job, but it's mostly for data analysis. Interface programming isn't my expertise.

Is there a way to contribute and improve OSS design without relying explicitly on my programming chops?

I'm a student writing a capstone project on how human error contributes to cybersecurity breaches and hacking incidents. It's easy to find news articles and published security surveys [see {0..3}] that generally point to aggregate data, but I'm looking for details from actual IT / security professionals on their actual experiences with breaches.

Have you ever responded to a breach or incident you thought was caused by human error? Was it a problem caused by an end user (phished, spearphished, etc) or by someone else in IT (forgot to apply a patch, ports left open, system misconfigured, etc)? What's something that your organization is doing to meet and reduce these threats?

Answer any questions you'd like, thanks for helping!

[EDIT: Formatting.]

[0] - https://securityintelligence.com/the-role-of-human-error-in-successful-security-attacks/

[1] - https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/risk-management/pages/human-error-top-cause-data-breaches.aspx

[2] - https://www-01.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?htmlfid=SEW03073USEN

[3] - https://hbr.org/2015/09/cybersecuritys-human-factor-lessons-from-the-pentagon