6 ms·

Everything you do in an interview will be judged. Some people will give you an incomplete problem spec and mark you down if you don't ask questions. Some will g

by Afton 11y ago

Everything you do in an interview will be judged. Some people will give you an incomplete problem spec and mark you down if you don't ask questions. Some will give you the same problem spec, but feel that you were too hesitant to "just get started" if you ask questions. There is a guessing game going on in an interview, and while it's not 'just chance' to do well vs poorly, there is an element of chance involved. Since there is this element of chance, a 'blown interview' is certainly worth evaluating, but also not necessarily worth completely changing your process. You may have just had a bad matchup of expectations.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Right, most folks give you problems just to get you talking. The problem isn't the interview, and fixating on technical answers is missing the point. Its all a process for feeling you out, understanding where you are at in your career, and testing you as a 'fit' in their organization.
- gohrt 11y ago
  You are giving interviewers a little more credit than they deserve. It's certainly a process for "feeling you out", but not so much "understanding".
  - pc86 11y ago
    You need to interview at better places, I think :)
jghn 11y ago
Exactly. There's no game you can play that'll win every scenario because you can't possibly know how the person on the other side of the table will be judging you. I made this realization a while back and decided to make two changes to how I approached interviews: - Be myself. This sounds simple but it's harder than one would think. Most people are trained to put on faces and airs in these situations, most guides will tell you how to act, dress, etc. Ignore all that. If they don't like the real you they're not going to like you long term. There are some people who will ding you for not acting all prim and proper in an interview situation, but do you want to work with them? - Flip my mentality around. They're the ones that need the selling, not me. This ties together with the first point but it is a key mentality change. It's easier to just be yourself and stay calm if you can think about the interview in terms of you interviewing them.
- analyst74 11y ago
  That's one way to deal with it, the other way is to not take it personally. It is not you who are being judged, you are merely a sales person selling your service, if the buyer ended up not buying yours, it's totally OK, you just find another buyer. In the end, it's all about framing a situation in your own mind to make yourself comfortable with it. It is a very powerful technique to allow you perform well in stressful situations, and in a sense, keep yourself happy. It also applies to more than just interviews, but dating, social events, giving presentations, etc.
  - jghn 11y ago
    That's more or less what I was saying. I didn't mean I'm interviewing them quite literally in that I don't believe I'm above them but rather that we're on a level playing field and I have no need to be a supplicant or to put on airs. If it works it works, if it doesn't it doesn't.
- vdnkh 11y ago
  >Be myself Super important, and easier said than done. I was too much "myself" during an interview, and I ended up disparaging their choice of Visual Basic as their main language (at a trendy startup in 2015) a bit too heavily. Said I passed the interview except for that bit. Did a similar thing recently during a phone interview. Another trendy startup who acquired a legacy .NET product and were looking for engineers to "automate" it. Sorry, I'm not buying what you're selling.
  - gohrt 11y ago
    You have options: * Stop being yourself in the interview, and then have a bad experience on the job, battling over your disagrements. * Be yourself, and get a job that fits you. * Change yourself, then be yourself and get a job that fits you.
  - rifung 11y ago
    I disagree that you were "too much" yourself, because if being yourself means you aren't a good fit for the company, it's better for both parties that you don't join the company. I'd argue that it just wasn't a good fit. I've definitely faked my way through interviews in the past, basically saying what I thought they wanted to hear. However, it just leads to being unhappy on the job because presumably you aren't going to fake it your whole time working there, or, even if you are, you're at a place where you constantly disagree with everyone on the inside.
braythwayt 11y ago
In general, you are right, but in this specific case, there was something deep that I learned from the experience. You shouldn't change everything in response to every setback. In general, that is called "oversteering." But sometimes a thing happens, and for you specifically, there is a lesson that you recognize speaks to a larger issue.
- curun1r 11y ago
  It's clear that you're a very analytical person and I can very much appreciate your analysis of the situation, but I think you've missed a more fundamental thing that went wrong with your interview. While it's absolutely true that answering questions at a different contextual level from what was expected will give a negative impression, it's also true that it's very difficult to discern what contextual level an interviewer is expecting from just the question alone and not all interviewers have the same expectations. But what I can assure you of it that at some point when you were veering off track from what your interviewer was looking for, your interviewer was sending you signals that you ignored. They're often very subtle and usually unconscious on the part of the interviewer, but if you can attune yourself to those subtle ways in which they're reacting to you, you can then vary what you're saying (and, just as importantly, how you're saying it) to meet the interviewer's expectations. There will be interviewers who want to hear abstract, high-level thinking like you exhibited in your interviewer. And there will be interviewers like the ones you met with that will want the opposite. There will even be interviewers like me that try to get you to do some of both and to be able to read my reactions to gauge which I'm expecting. Because for high-level engineering positions, this in itself is an invaluable skill. As a VP of Engineering, you'd need you to not only have technical chops, but also be able to read people. Whether it's a meeting with board members or knowing ahead of time that a key engineer intends to quit, reading people is an important part of the job. Tuning your game plan going into an interview is very important, and I think this experience has helped you do that. But if you're not able to be contextually fluent, you won't be able to make the on-the-spot adjustments necessary to really nail the interviews. Some great resources on this come from the world of poker, where reading people and concealing your own intentions is a large part of the skill involved. There's also good research from law enforcement on interrogating suspects. Both of these fields are too adversarial to be directly applicable in most situations, but they provide good examples of the kind of concrete things you look for to gauge someone's response.
mreiland 11y ago
That was my take on it.
jib 11y ago
There's a class of interviews that are like this though. Knowing about that class is important because it's in heavy use. If it says "competency based interview" anywhere, don't do theory or generalities, prep as many specific examples as you can, and know the Situation/Task/Action/Result format.
- braythwayt 11y ago
  And especially, Behavioural Interviewing: http://www.udel.edu/CSC/pdf/behav_interview.pdf http://www.udel.edu/CSC/pdf/behav_interview.pdf
steven2012 11y ago
This is great advice. I just went through a ton of interviews for my next job. I got phone screens on all of them, but only offers from about half. I studied one way for all of them, and there's only so much material you can prepare for. A couple of the interviews I blew because I was completely unprepared for graph questions, since I've never used a graph in 20+ years of programming, so there's no point in faking like I knew how just to get a job. As well, one interview I was asked a very tough bit manipulation, which I completely flunked. Another interview I bombed because my interviewer didn't know C/C++, and although he said I could program in any language, it was obvious he couldn't understand what I did, and had no confidence that my solution worked, even though it did. I did learn, however, that using C/C++ in interviews these days is problem, because most interviews now expect you to run these on the fly, or they ask questions that expect you to use built-in libraries that other languages already have. I was asked at a couple of interviews to parse a CSV file, and that was a huge problem in C/C++ that would have been handled in a single line of code with python. Lesson learned, the nature of the questions are changing and I need to adapt to it. Next time around, I will need to master python and use that.
- rosege 11y ago
  maybe even powershell? import-csv
soham 11y ago
Well said. In other words, an interviewing is not so much of an standardized test, as it is a date. Half of it depends on your interviewER. Just like a date, both of you move on if it doesn't click. There is no formula to "crack every date" and there never will be. Prepare well, but be yourself. It's true for a date and for interviews. [About us: http://InterviewKickstart.com http://InterviewKickstart.com]
jakejake 11y ago
That's really true. At the end of the day, you are being interviewed by people, and people are all different in the questions they ask and the answers they want to hear. If the author made a mistake then it might be that perhaps he wasn't watching for clues that his answers were being well received. Or perhaps just straight-up asking if his answer was what they were looking for. The interviewer may have just said "yes" to be polite, but perhaps they would have explained that they were looking for a more specific answer. That's great that the author had a friend who was able to give him the honest scoop - most of us never have the luxury of knowing exactly why we didn't receive an offer.
pc86 11y ago
> There is a guessing game going on in an interview Or you should act how you will act on the job and let the chips fall. If you are a question-asker you gain nothing (and stand to lose quite a bit) by rushing into it because that's what your potential boss wants.
MichaelMoser123 11y ago
in my experience interviewing is a game where you have to display a good measure of self confidence (but again not too much of it); I guess that too much self examination upon a failure here will work against you, as it will make you part with your remaining self confidence. The problem is that it is very hard to appear self confident if one is looking out hard for a job for more than two weeks; Any ideas on how to manage this particular problem? Interesting that most hiring processes do not give much weight to past working experience or good references - instead one is supposed to perform well on the detailed check list of the interviewer. What does that say about the company that is adopting such a hiring process vs one that doesn't ?
jboy55 11y ago
I think the best strategy is to try to emulate how you actually work as close as possible. If in the former case a candidate were expected to get started, it's probably indicative to the culture of engineering that the behavior is valued. If they are one that likes asking questions and clarifying before working on it, and that's counted as a negative, at least they won't be in a situation where how they normally approach problems is always criticized, seen as a 'weakness' and probably brought up in reviews.

by Afton 11y ago

JoeAltmaier 11y ago

Right, most folks give you problems just to get you talking. The problem isn't the interview, and fixating on technical answers is missing the point. Its all a process for feeling you out, understanding where you are at in your career, and testing you as a 'fit' in their organization.

gohrt 11y ago
You are giving interviewers a little more credit than they deserve. It's certainly a process for "feeling you out", but not so much "understanding".
- pc86 11y ago
  You need to interview at better places, I think :)

jghn 11y ago

Exactly. There's no game you can play that'll win every scenario because you can't possibly know how the person on the other side of the table will be judging you. I made this realization a while back and decided to make two changes to how I approached interviews: - Be myself. This sounds simple but it's harder than one would think. Most people are trained to put on faces and airs in these situations, most guides will tell you how to act, dress, etc. Ignore all that. If they don't like the real you they're not going to like you long term. There are some people who will ding you for not acting all prim and proper in an interview situation, but do you want to work with them? - Flip my mentality around. They're the ones that need the selling, not me. This ties together with the first point but it is a key mentality change. It's easier to just be yourself and stay calm if you can think about the interview in terms of you interviewing them.

analyst74 11y ago
That's one way to deal with it, the other way is to not take it personally. It is not you who are being judged, you are merely a sales person selling your service, if the buyer ended up not buying yours, it's totally OK, you just find another buyer. In the end, it's all about framing a situation in your own mind to make yourself comfortable with it. It is a very powerful technique to allow you perform well in stressful situations, and in a sense, keep yourself happy. It also applies to more than just interviews, but dating, social events, giving presentations, etc.
- jghn 11y ago
  That's more or less what I was saying. I didn't mean I'm interviewing them quite literally in that I don't believe I'm above them but rather that we're on a level playing field and I have no need to be a supplicant or to put on airs. If it works it works, if it doesn't it doesn't.
vdnkh 11y ago
>Be myself Super important, and easier said than done. I was too much "myself" during an interview, and I ended up disparaging their choice of Visual Basic as their main language (at a trendy startup in 2015) a bit too heavily. Said I passed the interview except for that bit. Did a similar thing recently during a phone interview. Another trendy startup who acquired a legacy .NET product and were looking for engineers to "automate" it. Sorry, I'm not buying what you're selling.
- gohrt 11y ago
  You have options: * Stop being yourself in the interview, and then have a bad experience on the job, battling over your disagrements. * Be yourself, and get a job that fits you. * Change yourself, then be yourself and get a job that fits you.
- rifung 11y ago
  I disagree that you were "too much" yourself, because if being yourself means you aren't a good fit for the company, it's better for both parties that you don't join the company. I'd argue that it just wasn't a good fit. I've definitely faked my way through interviews in the past, basically saying what I thought they wanted to hear. However, it just leads to being unhappy on the job because presumably you aren't going to fake it your whole time working there, or, even if you are, you're at a place where you constantly disagree with everyone on the inside.

braythwayt 11y ago

In general, you are right, but in this specific case, there was something deep that I learned from the experience. You shouldn't change everything in response to every setback. In general, that is called "oversteering." But sometimes a thing happens, and for you specifically, there is a lesson that you recognize speaks to a larger issue.

curun1r 11y ago
It's clear that you're a very analytical person and I can very much appreciate your analysis of the situation, but I think you've missed a more fundamental thing that went wrong with your interview. While it's absolutely true that answering questions at a different contextual level from what was expected will give a negative impression, it's also true that it's very difficult to discern what contextual level an interviewer is expecting from just the question alone and not all interviewers have the same expectations. But what I can assure you of it that at some point when you were veering off track from what your interviewer was looking for, your interviewer was sending you signals that you ignored. They're often very subtle and usually unconscious on the part of the interviewer, but if you can attune yourself to those subtle ways in which they're reacting to you, you can then vary what you're saying (and, just as importantly, how you're saying it) to meet the interviewer's expectations. There will be interviewers who want to hear abstract, high-level thinking like you exhibited in your interviewer. And there will be interviewers like the ones you met with that will want the opposite. There will even be interviewers like me that try to get you to do some of both and to be able to read my reactions to gauge which I'm expecting. Because for high-level engineering positions, this in itself is an invaluable skill. As a VP of Engineering, you'd need you to not only have technical chops, but also be able to read people. Whether it's a meeting with board members or knowing ahead of time that a key engineer intends to quit, reading people is an important part of the job. Tuning your game plan going into an interview is very important, and I think this experience has helped you do that. But if you're not able to be contextually fluent, you won't be able to make the on-the-spot adjustments necessary to really nail the interviews. Some great resources on this come from the world of poker, where reading people and concealing your own intentions is a large part of the skill involved. There's also good research from law enforcement on interrogating suspects. Both of these fields are too adversarial to be directly applicable in most situations, but they provide good examples of the kind of concrete things you look for to gauge someone's response.

mreiland 11y ago

That was my take on it.

jib 11y ago

There's a class of interviews that are like this though. Knowing about that class is important because it's in heavy use. If it says "competency based interview" anywhere, don't do theory or generalities, prep as many specific examples as you can, and know the Situation/Task/Action/Result format.

braythwayt 11y ago
And especially, Behavioural Interviewing: http://www.udel.edu/CSC/pdf/behav_interview.pdf http://www.udel.edu/CSC/pdf/behav_interview.pdf

steven2012 11y ago

This is great advice. I just went through a ton of interviews for my next job. I got phone screens on all of them, but only offers from about half. I studied one way for all of them, and there's only so much material you can prepare for. A couple of the interviews I blew because I was completely unprepared for graph questions, since I've never used a graph in 20+ years of programming, so there's no point in faking like I knew how just to get a job. As well, one interview I was asked a very tough bit manipulation, which I completely flunked. Another interview I bombed because my interviewer didn't know C/C++, and although he said I could program in any language, it was obvious he couldn't understand what I did, and had no confidence that my solution worked, even though it did. I did learn, however, that using C/C++ in interviews these days is problem, because most interviews now expect you to run these on the fly, or they ask questions that expect you to use built-in libraries that other languages already have. I was asked at a couple of interviews to parse a CSV file, and that was a huge problem in C/C++ that would have been handled in a single line of code with python. Lesson learned, the nature of the questions are changing and I need to adapt to it. Next time around, I will need to master python and use that.

rosege 11y ago
maybe even powershell? import-csv

soham 11y ago

Well said. In other words, an interviewing is not so much of an standardized test, as it is a date. Half of it depends on your interviewER. Just like a date, both of you move on if it doesn't click. There is no formula to "crack every date" and there never will be. Prepare well, but be yourself. It's true for a date and for interviews. [About us: http://InterviewKickstart.com http://InterviewKickstart.com]

jakejake 11y ago

That's really true. At the end of the day, you are being interviewed by people, and people are all different in the questions they ask and the answers they want to hear. If the author made a mistake then it might be that perhaps he wasn't watching for clues that his answers were being well received. Or perhaps just straight-up asking if his answer was what they were looking for. The interviewer may have just said "yes" to be polite, but perhaps they would have explained that they were looking for a more specific answer. That's great that the author had a friend who was able to give him the honest scoop - most of us never have the luxury of knowing exactly why we didn't receive an offer.

pc86 11y ago

> There is a guessing game going on in an interview Or you should act how you will act on the job and let the chips fall. If you are a question-asker you gain nothing (and stand to lose quite a bit) by rushing into it because that's what your potential boss wants.

MichaelMoser123 11y ago

in my experience interviewing is a game where you have to display a good measure of self confidence (but again not too much of it); I guess that too much self examination upon a failure here will work against you, as it will make you part with your remaining self confidence. The problem is that it is very hard to appear self confident if one is looking out hard for a job for more than two weeks; Any ideas on how to manage this particular problem? Interesting that most hiring processes do not give much weight to past working experience or good references - instead one is supposed to perform well on the detailed check list of the interviewer. What does that say about the company that is adopting such a hiring process vs one that doesn't ?

jboy55 11y ago

I think the best strategy is to try to emulate how you actually work as close as possible. If in the former case a candidate were expected to get started, it's probably indicative to the culture of engineering that the behavior is valued. If they are one that likes asking questions and clarifying before working on it, and that's counted as a negative, at least they won't be in a situation where how they normally approach problems is always criticized, seen as a 'weakness' and probably brought up in reviews.