3 ms·

As someone with many interviews coming up in the near future, this scares me. It's easy to get in a self-conscious feedback loop when you know every behavior,

by daenz 10y ago

As someone with many interviews coming up in the near future, this scares me. It's easy to get in a self-conscious feedback loop when you know every behavior, response, and gesture is being fed into a fundamentally irrational character-judging process. The best interview I've ever been on was one for a young startup. They gave essentially a homework problem, a day to solve it, and then in the interview we talked about the problem and my solution. The worst interview I've been on was sitting in front of multiple engineers as each one threw out a random CS question (from seemingly the entire space of CS) and asked me to talk intelligently about it. When I seemed unsure of myself, they glanced around nervously and disapprovingly. Interviews are the worst. I've spent my time trying to bolster my OSS projects, so that I can point to them as evidence of my competence, but I can't help but prepare for the worst anyways.

crispyambulance 10y ago
"...fundamentally irrational character-judging process" is really the wrong impression to go into interview with as a candidate. Seriously, you will handicap yourself if you see it this way. Competency is only one component of a hiring decision. After some base threshold of competency, the question then becomes whether or not you, the candidate, is going to be someone that the team WANTS to work with. Bolstering your OSS projects is fine but you'll get a better return on investment for your time to practice "behavioral interview" questions. This is absolutely the hardest type of interview but in the hands of experienced hiring managers it works better than any other technique, IMHO. If you can find an experienced mentor who will do mock behavioral interviews with you and give you honest constructive feedback, that will boost your interview skills more than anything else.
- daenz 10y ago
  Good advice, thanks. My experience so far has been difficulty appearing confident on the technical portions of the interviews. Other devs seem to sense blood in the water when nerves and shyness have you fumbling through whiteboarding obscure topics.
alfalfasprout 10y ago
Relax. Look, I've spent time at a small startups in the tech sector, then at a tech giant, then in finance (where I went on to found a small shop of my own). I can safely say that it's pretty random and all you can do is increase your odds by studying. At the end of the day, it's pretty well known that at any big tech company a second pass through the interview process would easily cut out a lot of the people there. Could be a bad day, a question you don't remember, etc. I personally now only ask the homework type of questions. Making sure to give the person plenty of time to do it. Works really well but obviously someone won't like it (though I've yet to run into the mythical person turned off by having to do a simple coding project that HN keeps talking about...)

by daenz 10y ago

crispyambulance 10y ago

"...fundamentally irrational character-judging process" is really the wrong impression to go into interview with as a candidate. Seriously, you will handicap yourself if you see it this way. Competency is only one component of a hiring decision. After some base threshold of competency, the question then becomes whether or not you, the candidate, is going to be someone that the team WANTS to work with. Bolstering your OSS projects is fine but you'll get a better return on investment for your time to practice "behavioral interview" questions. This is absolutely the hardest type of interview but in the hands of experienced hiring managers it works better than any other technique, IMHO. If you can find an experienced mentor who will do mock behavioral interviews with you and give you honest constructive feedback, that will boost your interview skills more than anything else.

daenz 10y ago
Good advice, thanks. My experience so far has been difficulty appearing confident on the technical portions of the interviews. Other devs seem to sense blood in the water when nerves and shyness have you fumbling through whiteboarding obscure topics.

alfalfasprout 10y ago

Relax. Look, I've spent time at a small startups in the tech sector, then at a tech giant, then in finance (where I went on to found a small shop of my own). I can safely say that it's pretty random and all you can do is increase your odds by studying. At the end of the day, it's pretty well known that at any big tech company a second pass through the interview process would easily cut out a lot of the people there. Could be a bad day, a question you don't remember, etc. I personally now only ask the homework type of questions. Making sure to give the person plenty of time to do it. Works really well but obviously someone won't like it (though I've yet to run into the mythical person turned off by having to do a simple coding project that HN keeps talking about...)