Gayle Laakmann McDowell is the founder/CEO of CareerCup.com and the author of Cracking the *interview books (Cracking the Coding Interview, Cracking the PM Interview, and Cracking the Tech Career).
Her background is in software development, with a BSE/MSE in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania and prior experience as a software engineer at Google, Microsoft, and Apple.
In addition to running the CareerCup website/forum and writing books, she consults with startups to help them through acquisition interviews and with other tech companies on their engineering hiring process.