9 ms·

Huh, the only successful interviews I have are the ones where I'm burned out after a long, fruitless, frustrating job search. And so I walk in assuming the int

by jcadam 6y ago

Huh, the only successful interviews I have are the ones where I'm burned out after a long, fruitless, frustrating job search. And so I walk in assuming the interview will be a waste of time and just not caring anymore. That's when I get an offer.

daenz 6y ago
People can smell desperation, and rightly or wrongly, it pushes them away.
- flattone 6y ago
  Haha. So the more driven and hungry i am the worse ill be viewed. The more silver spoon and apathetic ill be cherished. Sounds like dating ;)
  - rovolo 6y ago
    A different way to view this is that being desperate makes you behave badly. For example, someone desperate for a job won't push back against bad decisions and will become a "Yes Man". Someone desperate for a date won't engage with the other person as a person.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - flattone 6y ago
      That is a different way to view it. An incredibly negative seeming view of humans. Ill lay my cards down though, i have limited years of really varied experience (ups, ski resort, landscaper, metal grinder, fork lift driver, house painter, door to door vacuum sales, google pm, msft Analyst, trying to break into infosec.) In my short list (ignoring years of time wasted travelling), i have only met 1 yes man. He came from money, and sales. Owned 4 large businesses, and would over promise, under deliver and over receive ALWAYS. So what are your experiences like and from where? I think no backbone can be a personality trait, sure. But it is NOT a trait of 'need' and action, in my experience.
      - rovolo 6y ago
        Saying "Yes man" probably derailed my thesis since it's associated with the higher rungs of the corporate ladder. I thought that this would be uncontroversial. I'd like to focus on Dating because I disagree with your offhand comment, even though it was in jest and is probably more cynical than you are in person. > The more … apathetic ill be cherished. Sounds like dating ;) Feeling bad makes your behavior suffer. Being angry makes you less nice to people. Being tired means you don't engage with people. Being scared or anxious makes you hide your vulnerabilities and close yourself off. I'm not saying that badly behaved people deserve to be ignored, I'm acknowledging that it is uncomfortable to interact with people who are hurting. Being "driven and hungry" while dating makes you behave worse. It makes you over-eager to please the other person, and it flattens out your personality. Instead of focusing on making the person like you, you should be exploring whether you like each other. A date can be successful even if the two of you don't end up dating because you two would not make a good couple.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- waldohatesyou 6y ago
  This is so true and yet so difficult to control for.
- treis 6y ago
  Some of this is like the Groucho Marx joke "I don't want to belong to any club that will have me". For companies, it's "I don't want to hire anyone that doesn't have a job". The thought being that if they were any good they'd have a job already.
- proverbialbunny 6y ago
  This is one of the things I look for when I'm being interviewed. Does the company want me to be desperate? Some companies will only hire those who are desperate and will do anything. I assume, hopefully correctly, that those are the companies not worth working for, so instead I use the interview opportunity to get better at interviewing. Because these companies want to take advantage of their employees, I do not feel bad wasting their time.
  - VRay 6y ago
    Careful, lads, it's possible to be TOO confident. I interviewed at a few places for some really easy, fun-looking jobs while I was doing freelancing. I didn't care if I got the jobs, but they did look trivially easy compared to what I'd been doing earlier in my career. Surprisingly though, after making it through all the technical people and talking to the CEO in every case, I never got the job. Later on I applied to a really awesome job at a FAANG-class megacorp, and the hiring manager's manager called me. He said "Look, you've gotten the highest marks I've ever seen for a candidate. Everyone loved you. But I have a hunch that you aren't going to be dedicated to this job. So before we move forward, I want your personal promise that you aren't planning to just hop ship in 6 months to start a company or something" I was JUST starting to get nervous about finding a new job at this point. My consulting work had dried up, I was down to about 3 months' worth of cash, and I was thinking about selling my car to get a few more months' runway while I grind Leetcode in order to be able to pass the bar at Google. So you can imagine how shocked I was to hear that this guy thought his awesome senior engineer FAANG job wasn't good enough for me. I promised to stick it out, got the job, and so far it's been my favorite job of all time (other than the glorious week where my crypto trading bot was working well and just printing free money..)
jacques_chester 6y ago
I had a similar experience for my current job. I went to the interview on whim, assuming that I would fail horribly. It was only practice. Then my brilliant plan was spoiled.
cortesoft 6y ago
This was true for me, too. My previous startup I worked at had gone under, and I was thinking about starting my own. An old coworker of mine invited me to lunch. We had a couple of margaritas, and he asked if I wanted to see his office. I went to check it out, and suddenly he asks if I can talk to some of his coworkers. So I basically interviewed while drunk and not fully realizing I was being interviewed. They offered me the job, and I have been working there for 8 years now. Maybe the best way to be relaxed during a job interview is to not even realize it is happening. And having a couple of margaritas can't hurt.
- starpilot 6y ago
  This is described in http://carlos.bueno.org/2014/06/mirrortocracy.html http://carlos.bueno.org/2014/06/mirrortocracy.html Some companies stress interpersonal fit over technical ability, as you are initiated in "the Culture."
  - cortesoft 6y ago
    I actually agree. I enjoy telling this story, because I think it is funny and always gets a laugh. I do think, though, that it is indicative of a problematic culture in tech that perpetuates hiring people who are like you. I got the job when I was a young, single guy who could fit into that sort of 'brogrammer' culture. I am lucky in that the company has changed over the years (bought by a large corporation, and we have mostly moved on from this sort of culture), because I have two young kids now and can't live that sort of life anymore. What is worse, is there are a lot of great software developers who NEVER could fit in to that sort of culture, and they would have had a lot harder time being hired.
- peteradio 6y ago
  That sounds incredible.
- UncleOxidant 6y ago
  I'd like to see this two margarita interview technique catch on.
subsubzero 6y ago
That is funny as that is the way alot of my interviews go as well. I tend to have extreme anxiety on a job I really want and "pysch myself out" so to speak. I really dislike typical tech interviews as it is alot of pop quiz obscure answers under extremely tight timelines never seen on the job. I have had interviews where 3 interviewers are all demanding answers at the same time and it was horrible. I hope at some point in the future this is realized as a colossal fail in the industry and a new method is realized.
starpilot 6y ago
That's how non-FAANG goes. I work at an old, non-tech corp and the interview (just one) was basically a popularity contest with some light technical questions. Don't screw up and crack some jokes and you're in. Of course, that means our level of technical ability is low, and we have poor project outcomes because of it. But it's a nice place to work.
sizzle 6y ago
You must be coming off as confident subconsciously with your air of indifference you carry for the interview process.
decafninja 6y ago
Same. Sometimes I only go on an interview to "practice", and BAM! Offer comes.
nostrademons 6y ago
That can help a lot with anxiety. If you think it's pointless and you'll never get the job, you have a chance to just have fun with it and do what you can do. My first time interviewing with Google (in 2008), the press was reporting that they were in a hiring freeze, I had no big names on my resume, so I figured it was basically hopeless and I'd just do the best I could and enjoy my trip to Silicon Valley. After my interview, I was like "Well, I did okay, but you really have to be perfect to work at Google and I wasn't perfect. I'm never coming back to California anyway, so I might as well do all the tourist stuff [I'd held an extra day to interview with Twitter, but they ended up not moving forwards with my candidacy] and just treat it as an all-expenses paid trip to SF." So I just went to Alcatraz and Fisherman's Wharf, treated myself to a nice dinner, and took the red-eye home to Boston. As I'm groggily waking up after a post-red-eye nap, the Google recruiter called me to say "Your interview feedback looks great. We'd like to fast-track your application on the assumption that the hiring committee will say yes." Been living in California for 11 years now, and I just started back at Google after working there for 5.5 years, leaving, and doing startups for another 6. The most recent round of interviews was the same - I was super nervous for Lyft, Stripe, Coinbase, Netflix, etc. and ended up not getting the job, but with Google it was like "Hey, I worked there once, I know people who also know my interviewers, I used to give interviews like the one I'm sitting in now, what's the big deal?"
- quicklime 6y ago
  I also treated my Google interview as a free trip to the Bay Area, and used it to visit a friend and do touristy stuff. Wasn't expecting an offer, but got one and stayed there for many years. I've read advice that you shouldn't schedule your interview on a Friday, but that's exactly what I did so that I could spend the following weekend in SF :)
- sim_card_map 6y ago
  wait so Google did the entire red black tree interview thing again, even though you already worked for them for 6 years? lol this industry is hopeless
  - jcadam 6y ago
cmrdporcupine 6y ago
I had a quick phone screen with a recruiter the other day. For unreleated reasons the night before I hadn't slept much. That morning I was clambering about in the woods and stumbled on a wasp nest and got about 15 stings all over my body. I took 3 Benadryl anti-histamines before I remembered that I had the interview that afternoon. I was a complete space cadet. Somehow the recruiter was still interested. Maybe this should be my strategy for every job application? :-)
ipnon 6y ago
I solved this horrible problem with legal anxiolytics. I crashed and burned every interview I had until I decided to drink kava[0] beforehand until I couldn't care less about whether I got the job. I've been working there for years now. Like it or not, interviews are a game. Smart people will figure out how to play them after losing enough, though maybe some of us take a bit longer ... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kava https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kava
cannam 6y ago
Similarly, I used to find I interviewed better when I had a hangover. (I'm older now, have hangovers less often, and find them much more tiring, so this might not apply any more)
8ytecoder 6y ago
How I got my internship that converted into a full time job and everything that followed from it. I literally gave the interview and went to the sports stadium. To this day I've been job hopping without interviews. Everyone who works with me knows my skills (and my drawbacks) and they're the ones who hire me or recommend highly of me to lead to a job. My next job may not be so lucky so I'm starting to dust off my "interview skills". It's frustrating. I'd rather be building something usual than solving these. But that's the nature of it today.
proverbialbunny 6y ago
I got my first salary job this way. After that I did my typical analysis seeing if I couldn't learn from the situation and improve beyond it. My conclusion was if I interview to gain interview experience, not to get the job, I do far better, and I gain interview experience. This is the local maxima I found from that, but there could be better.
aylmao 6y ago
+1. Either this, or I have an offer in hand and so I don't have to care anymore. The role of anxiety in interviewing became very clear to me during a season when I failed all my interviews until I got my first (and a very good) offer. Suddenly I started passing all of them. It was night and day. I was very surprised having always had much longer and frustrating recruiting processes.
Kneecaps07 6y ago
I'll sometimes go on interviews when I'm NOT looking for a job. It's good practice and keeps you informed of what's out there.

by jcadam 6y ago

daenz 6y ago

People can smell desperation, and rightly or wrongly, it pushes them away.

flattone 6y ago
Haha. So the more driven and hungry i am the worse ill be viewed. The more silver spoon and apathetic ill be cherished. Sounds like dating ;)
- rovolo 6y ago
  A different way to view this is that being desperate makes you behave badly. For example, someone desperate for a job won't push back against bad decisions and will become a "Yes Man". Someone desperate for a date won't engage with the other person as a person.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - flattone 6y ago
    That is a different way to view it. An incredibly negative seeming view of humans. Ill lay my cards down though, i have limited years of really varied experience (ups, ski resort, landscaper, metal grinder, fork lift driver, house painter, door to door vacuum sales, google pm, msft Analyst, trying to break into infosec.) In my short list (ignoring years of time wasted travelling), i have only met 1 yes man. He came from money, and sales. Owned 4 large businesses, and would over promise, under deliver and over receive ALWAYS. So what are your experiences like and from where? I think no backbone can be a personality trait, sure. But it is NOT a trait of 'need' and action, in my experience.
    - rovolo 6y ago
      Saying "Yes man" probably derailed my thesis since it's associated with the higher rungs of the corporate ladder. I thought that this would be uncontroversial. I'd like to focus on Dating because I disagree with your offhand comment, even though it was in jest and is probably more cynical than you are in person. > The more … apathetic ill be cherished. Sounds like dating ;) Feeling bad makes your behavior suffer. Being angry makes you less nice to people. Being tired means you don't engage with people. Being scared or anxious makes you hide your vulnerabilities and close yourself off. I'm not saying that badly behaved people deserve to be ignored, I'm acknowledging that it is uncomfortable to interact with people who are hurting. Being "driven and hungry" while dating makes you behave worse. It makes you over-eager to please the other person, and it flattens out your personality. Instead of focusing on making the person like you, you should be exploring whether you like each other. A date can be successful even if the two of you don't end up dating because you two would not make a good couple.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
waldohatesyou 6y ago
This is so true and yet so difficult to control for.
treis 6y ago
Some of this is like the Groucho Marx joke "I don't want to belong to any club that will have me". For companies, it's "I don't want to hire anyone that doesn't have a job". The thought being that if they were any good they'd have a job already.
proverbialbunny 6y ago
This is one of the things I look for when I'm being interviewed. Does the company want me to be desperate? Some companies will only hire those who are desperate and will do anything. I assume, hopefully correctly, that those are the companies not worth working for, so instead I use the interview opportunity to get better at interviewing. Because these companies want to take advantage of their employees, I do not feel bad wasting their time.
- VRay 6y ago
  Careful, lads, it's possible to be TOO confident. I interviewed at a few places for some really easy, fun-looking jobs while I was doing freelancing. I didn't care if I got the jobs, but they did look trivially easy compared to what I'd been doing earlier in my career. Surprisingly though, after making it through all the technical people and talking to the CEO in every case, I never got the job. Later on I applied to a really awesome job at a FAANG-class megacorp, and the hiring manager's manager called me. He said "Look, you've gotten the highest marks I've ever seen for a candidate. Everyone loved you. But I have a hunch that you aren't going to be dedicated to this job. So before we move forward, I want your personal promise that you aren't planning to just hop ship in 6 months to start a company or something" I was JUST starting to get nervous about finding a new job at this point. My consulting work had dried up, I was down to about 3 months' worth of cash, and I was thinking about selling my car to get a few more months' runway while I grind Leetcode in order to be able to pass the bar at Google. So you can imagine how shocked I was to hear that this guy thought his awesome senior engineer FAANG job wasn't good enough for me. I promised to stick it out, got the job, and so far it's been my favorite job of all time (other than the glorious week where my crypto trading bot was working well and just printing free money..)

jacques_chester 6y ago

I had a similar experience for my current job. I went to the interview on whim, assuming that I would fail horribly. It was only practice. Then my brilliant plan was spoiled.

cortesoft 6y ago

This was true for me, too. My previous startup I worked at had gone under, and I was thinking about starting my own. An old coworker of mine invited me to lunch. We had a couple of margaritas, and he asked if I wanted to see his office. I went to check it out, and suddenly he asks if I can talk to some of his coworkers. So I basically interviewed while drunk and not fully realizing I was being interviewed. They offered me the job, and I have been working there for 8 years now. Maybe the best way to be relaxed during a job interview is to not even realize it is happening. And having a couple of margaritas can't hurt.

starpilot 6y ago
This is described in http://carlos.bueno.org/2014/06/mirrortocracy.html http://carlos.bueno.org/2014/06/mirrortocracy.html Some companies stress interpersonal fit over technical ability, as you are initiated in "the Culture."
- cortesoft 6y ago
  I actually agree. I enjoy telling this story, because I think it is funny and always gets a laugh. I do think, though, that it is indicative of a problematic culture in tech that perpetuates hiring people who are like you. I got the job when I was a young, single guy who could fit into that sort of 'brogrammer' culture. I am lucky in that the company has changed over the years (bought by a large corporation, and we have mostly moved on from this sort of culture), because I have two young kids now and can't live that sort of life anymore. What is worse, is there are a lot of great software developers who NEVER could fit in to that sort of culture, and they would have had a lot harder time being hired.
peteradio 6y ago
That sounds incredible.
UncleOxidant 6y ago
I'd like to see this two margarita interview technique catch on.

subsubzero 6y ago

That is funny as that is the way alot of my interviews go as well. I tend to have extreme anxiety on a job I really want and "pysch myself out" so to speak. I really dislike typical tech interviews as it is alot of pop quiz obscure answers under extremely tight timelines never seen on the job. I have had interviews where 3 interviewers are all demanding answers at the same time and it was horrible. I hope at some point in the future this is realized as a colossal fail in the industry and a new method is realized.

starpilot 6y ago

That's how non-FAANG goes. I work at an old, non-tech corp and the interview (just one) was basically a popularity contest with some light technical questions. Don't screw up and crack some jokes and you're in. Of course, that means our level of technical ability is low, and we have poor project outcomes because of it. But it's a nice place to work.

sizzle 6y ago

You must be coming off as confident subconsciously with your air of indifference you carry for the interview process.

decafninja 6y ago

Same. Sometimes I only go on an interview to "practice", and BAM! Offer comes.

nostrademons 6y ago

That can help a lot with anxiety. If you think it's pointless and you'll never get the job, you have a chance to just have fun with it and do what you can do. My first time interviewing with Google (in 2008), the press was reporting that they were in a hiring freeze, I had no big names on my resume, so I figured it was basically hopeless and I'd just do the best I could and enjoy my trip to Silicon Valley. After my interview, I was like "Well, I did okay, but you really have to be perfect to work at Google and I wasn't perfect. I'm never coming back to California anyway, so I might as well do all the tourist stuff [I'd held an extra day to interview with Twitter, but they ended up not moving forwards with my candidacy] and just treat it as an all-expenses paid trip to SF." So I just went to Alcatraz and Fisherman's Wharf, treated myself to a nice dinner, and took the red-eye home to Boston. As I'm groggily waking up after a post-red-eye nap, the Google recruiter called me to say "Your interview feedback looks great. We'd like to fast-track your application on the assumption that the hiring committee will say yes." Been living in California for 11 years now, and I just started back at Google after working there for 5.5 years, leaving, and doing startups for another 6. The most recent round of interviews was the same - I was super nervous for Lyft, Stripe, Coinbase, Netflix, etc. and ended up not getting the job, but with Google it was like "Hey, I worked there once, I know people who also know my interviewers, I used to give interviews like the one I'm sitting in now, what's the big deal?"

quicklime 6y ago
I also treated my Google interview as a free trip to the Bay Area, and used it to visit a friend and do touristy stuff. Wasn't expecting an offer, but got one and stayed there for many years. I've read advice that you shouldn't schedule your interview on a Friday, but that's exactly what I did so that I could spend the following weekend in SF :)
sim_card_map 6y ago
wait so Google did the entire red black tree interview thing again, even though you already worked for them for 6 years? lol this industry is hopeless
- jcadam 6y ago

cmrdporcupine 6y ago

I had a quick phone screen with a recruiter the other day. For unreleated reasons the night before I hadn't slept much. That morning I was clambering about in the woods and stumbled on a wasp nest and got about 15 stings all over my body. I took 3 Benadryl anti-histamines before I remembered that I had the interview that afternoon. I was a complete space cadet. Somehow the recruiter was still interested. Maybe this should be my strategy for every job application? :-)

ipnon 6y ago

I solved this horrible problem with legal anxiolytics. I crashed and burned every interview I had until I decided to drink kava[0] beforehand until I couldn't care less about whether I got the job. I've been working there for years now. Like it or not, interviews are a game. Smart people will figure out how to play them after losing enough, though maybe some of us take a bit longer ... [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kava https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kava

cannam 6y ago

Similarly, I used to find I interviewed better when I had a hangover. (I'm older now, have hangovers less often, and find them much more tiring, so this might not apply any more)

8ytecoder 6y ago

How I got my internship that converted into a full time job and everything that followed from it. I literally gave the interview and went to the sports stadium. To this day I've been job hopping without interviews. Everyone who works with me knows my skills (and my drawbacks) and they're the ones who hire me or recommend highly of me to lead to a job. My next job may not be so lucky so I'm starting to dust off my "interview skills". It's frustrating. I'd rather be building something usual than solving these. But that's the nature of it today.

proverbialbunny 6y ago

I got my first salary job this way. After that I did my typical analysis seeing if I couldn't learn from the situation and improve beyond it. My conclusion was if I interview to gain interview experience, not to get the job, I do far better, and I gain interview experience. This is the local maxima I found from that, but there could be better.

aylmao 6y ago

+1. Either this, or I have an offer in hand and so I don't have to care anymore. The role of anxiety in interviewing became very clear to me during a season when I failed all my interviews until I got my first (and a very good) offer. Suddenly I started passing all of them. It was night and day. I was very surprised having always had much longer and frustrating recruiting processes.

Kneecaps07 6y ago

I'll sometimes go on interviews when I'm NOT looking for a job. It's good practice and keeps you informed of what's out there.