7 ms·

Interview like an asset, not a beggar

116 points by Swizec 6y ago

spacemanmatt 6y ago
This couching is way more politic than "fake it til you make it." 10/10.
binarycodedhex 6y ago
I'm an SRE/SRM in the mid six-figures range, but I've had some experiences like anyone else. I love it when they give you "homework" that they just forget about. They asked me about numerous technologies, and I went to explain them, but wasn't given a chance. The CTO poo-pooed my résumé like it was difficult to read. He must've felt threatened and so sabotage my shot. They ushered me out the door almost like throwing me out by security; so incredibly rude. I didn't get the job obviously but they later asked me to interview again but I told them to "fuck right off." No, you don't get a second chance to unprofessionally dis me, and I won't work with or for such narcissistic slave-drivers. I didn't care about my rep in this instance because they're clowns who would never amount to anything. Don't be unprofessional, even if someone else is. A few weeks later, I got a $10k/week consulting contract for a funded startup already in acquihire talks. Don't settle for BS or bend-over backwards for jerks because it will just get worse. It's not worth your mental health.
- lenova 6y ago
  As a junior SRE, I'm going to need details on how you got to these pay and consulting levels ;-)
  - temikus 6y ago
    It is not easy but it can be straightforward: get into a FAANG company and find a good team you can grow in. Source: am a FAANG SRE. I also have free community office hours, feel free to sign up if you want to chat at length: https://temikus.net/office-hours https://temikus.net/office-hours
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - binarycodedhex 6y ago
    I taught myself for a long time before breezing through a reputable EE/CS program. I always did both software dev and sysadmin. I worked up at numerous big-name shops and universities in multiple fields, starting at 15.5 yo. (I should've lied about my age at 15 to get an IBM Almaden dark matter paid internship job offer, but I was too honest.) I worked on a nuclear reactor simulator, industrial embedded navigation systems, biomedical informatics, HPC, app virtualization startup with a guest driver, email startup, numerous web/internet companies, and sales engineering and consulting. The most important part is to never get lazy by always keeping skills current, never accepting something is impossible and roll up sleeves to dig deep. Do what other people won't, i.e., confirm/refute root causes with evidence rather than shrugging.
- trhway 6y ago
  Homework was already the signal - you can't expect better treatment from the places that start with it. Note: i'm not arguing about efficiency of homework - it is probably higher than that of short puzzles, yet there is such an asymmetry in it, that any minimally respectful place wouldn't do it despite the supposed higher efficiency.
pontus 6y ago
"When you're junior, coachability is what gets you hired. How quickly can we train you to be effective? When you're medium, technical chops get you hired. Can you do useful work right now and quickly fill gaps in knowledge? When you're senior, your experience and opinions get you hired." Thought this was pretty good. Hard to make that mental transition over time since we all start on one end. The default behavior is to continue interviewing the same way as your career progresses.
- sharadov 6y ago
  Not necessary, interviewed for a Sr Engineer role where I clearly impressed the CTO, but didn't do that great on a stupid coding exercise. And that was not even a requirement for the job, and I told them that was not my strongpoint. I'd done my homework on the company, they had bottlenecks, which I suggested a solution for, and they were pretty blown away. But like other folks here pointed out, all companies want are folks who can crack the coding exercise, everything else is a hogwash.
  - blackrock 6y ago
    So, you didn’t get the job because you didn’t pass their l33t coding challenge? And they hired some freshman, because he did? But who ended up writing amateurish software code that always broke.
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  I think my instinct for this and my relative lack of interview experience have been at odds. When I’m already on the job, I have no doubt that my experience and opinions show my value. I don’t even worry anymore about demonstrating value: it comes out of every action I take, and if it’s not manifest in the interaction I can either demonstrate it with outcomes or retrospectives. But that translates poorly to an interview environment where the person on the viewing side of a whiteboard might not even have the instinct to hear “this is a problem I would solve by choosing a technology that already addresses it” or even “this is something I would google because it’s not the core problem I’m solving, just a detail”.
cryptica 6y ago
Most tech companies which have a monopoly don't care about the usefulness of a person's skills. They only care about arbitrary puzzle-solving abilities and other random abilities which have nothing to do with productivity. When applying for a job at these companies, the criteria are so arbitrary that you're basically a beggar. You just have to try to figure out what they want to hear, what they want to see then you basically have to tell them and show them exactly that; all while simultaneously using your face muscles to project a sense of enthusiasm. Just like a beggar who does backflips or plays the ukulele on a banjo; you just have to do whatever random crap will impress them enough to toss a few coins your way.
- Swizec 6y ago
  I think that changes rapidly when you interview past the mid- code monkey positions. I doubt a VP of engineering would be interviewed on anything but opinions and experience. When that shift happens depends on the company and what the team is hiring for.
  - avmich 6y ago
    VP of engineering brings crucial skills to the table: working with people who report to her. That's significantly different from engineering skills.
- sreque 6y ago
  I can confirm this with recent interviewing experience. I interviewed at a top tech company and got asked puzzle coding questions I wasn't prepared for. Testing whether I can find the longest palindrome subsequence of a string optimally via a tabular or memoized dynamic programming solution in 20 minutes has practically zero ability to measure how effective I am on the job. That said, after that interview I studied the algorithm and am now slightly prepared for the next big tech company I interview with, I guess. In contrast, at another interview I got given a take-home assignment that I almost didn't want to do because it felt like the kind of work I would do in my day job and I didn't want to do that in the evening or my time off. That task, on the other hand, probably measures infinitely better how effective I am on the job.
avmich 6y ago
> My girlfriend got a business job at Visa last year and later found that 5000 applied for her role. She stood out because she read the job description and highlighted relevant experience. Yeah, that's the bar. I know about different bar - not in customer service business, in software engineering. You're given a task to write a parser in 15 minutes - literally, you solve it, it mostly works - for some simple inputs at least, you don't have time to test it thoroughly. You don't pass - the bar is different. Your experience tells that the startup is too early to think about scalability problems. They can keep things simple for a solid another iteration of the product. You explain that to them, they listen, but they are doubtful - they've heard that scaling is crucial, and even though they have like a hundred of customers, they want that - so your advice is considered wrong. You don't pass that bar. They tell you they need somebody senior to coach and mentor a bunch of more junior engineers, somebody who'd steer the whole technical stack. In remaining minutes of the engineering interview they ask you to write Rabin-Karp implementation, or AVL balancing. You don't pass the bar if algorithms don't work first time.
- Swizec 6y ago
  Wow nice of you to assume it was a job in customer service. She’s a core part of the team scaling a multi billion dollar product to global markets and shooting to do trillions in transactions within a few years. Thankyouverymuch And trust me the interviews for that are just as grueling as they are for engineering. Solid 7 hours of on-site followed by business case studies for homework. But unlike engineering, you can’t skirt by as a pure code monkey who can leetcode. You have to actually know how to do the job in a real world context.
  - bobobob420 6y ago
    Hahaha you think technical business interviews are more challenging than se interviews. Do an interview for Jane street or two sigma :) I have all the cracking the case interview books by people who go ran mckinsey and other firms, it’a a joke
    - Swizec 6y ago
maest 6y ago
I guess emojis in non-informal literature are now here to stay?
- Swizec 6y ago
  I would hardly call an article on the internet “formal literature” but thank you for thinking so highly of my writing <3
refactor_master 6y ago
> When you're junior, coachability is what gets you hired. How quickly can we train you to be effective? All anecdata points towards luck/connections. There’s really no way to stand out at this stage when everybody’s CV is the same.
- mahmoudhossam 6y ago
  I'd say coachability does get you hired, networking is what gets you interviewed.
- whack 6y ago
  This is patently false. The following are all ways you can stand out for a junior position: - Attending a university that is hard to get into and has a strong CS program - Having an impressive GPA - Winning academic or software-related awards - Having commendable accomplishments in software-related "extracurriculars", such as hackathons etc - Whiteboard coding ability I've done numerous junior interviews for FANG companies. They are extremely liberal in handing out interviews, and doing well in these interviews will guarantee a job offer. "Connections" has almost zero correlation to how you're graded in these interviews. Being unlucky can trip you up every now and then. But if you get rejected from every single FANG company, I guarantee you it's not because of luck.
  - refactor_master 6y ago
    Now you’re taking about FANG as if those are the only companies in existence. There are many many other places to make a living. I’ve personally never inverted a binary tree on a whiteboard and my career is doing fine. You might want to read https://wesdesilvestro.com/the-prestige-trap https://wesdesilvestro.com/the-prestige-trap from earlier on HN.
    - whack 6y ago
      Now you're assuming that what I said applies only to FANG companies. I've also worked and gotten job offers from many non-FANG companies, across multiple industries, and they were all using the above data points to make entry-level hires. I only brought up FANG because they are the biggest and most well-known employers. I've already read that article and I don't see the relevance, unless you're trying to imply that I'm a prestige-chaser just because I've worked at FANG companies

116 points by Swizec 6y ago

This couching is way more politic than "fake it til you make it." 10/10.

I'm an SRE/SRM in the mid six-figures range, but I've had some experiences like anyone else. I love it when they give you "homework" that they just forget about. They asked me about numerous technologies, and I went to explain them, but wasn't given a chance. The CTO poo-pooed my résumé like it was difficult to read. He must've felt threatened and so sabotage my shot. They ushered me out the door almost like throwing me out by security; so incredibly rude. I didn't get the job obviously but they later asked me to interview again but I told them to "fuck right off." No, you don't get a second chance to unprofessionally dis me, and I won't work with or for such narcissistic slave-drivers. I didn't care about my rep in this instance because they're clowns who would never amount to anything. Don't be unprofessional, even if someone else is. A few weeks later, I got a $10k/week consulting contract for a funded startup already in acquihire talks. Don't settle for BS or bend-over backwards for jerks because it will just get worse. It's not worth your mental health.

lenova 6y ago
As a junior SRE, I'm going to need details on how you got to these pay and consulting levels ;-)
- temikus 6y ago
  It is not easy but it can be straightforward: get into a FAANG company and find a good team you can grow in. Source: am a FAANG SRE. I also have free community office hours, feel free to sign up if you want to chat at length: https://temikus.net/office-hours https://temikus.net/office-hours
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- binarycodedhex 6y ago
  I taught myself for a long time before breezing through a reputable EE/CS program. I always did both software dev and sysadmin. I worked up at numerous big-name shops and universities in multiple fields, starting at 15.5 yo. (I should've lied about my age at 15 to get an IBM Almaden dark matter paid internship job offer, but I was too honest.) I worked on a nuclear reactor simulator, industrial embedded navigation systems, biomedical informatics, HPC, app virtualization startup with a guest driver, email startup, numerous web/internet companies, and sales engineering and consulting. The most important part is to never get lazy by always keeping skills current, never accepting something is impossible and roll up sleeves to dig deep. Do what other people won't, i.e., confirm/refute root causes with evidence rather than shrugging.
trhway 6y ago
Homework was already the signal - you can't expect better treatment from the places that start with it. Note: i'm not arguing about efficiency of homework - it is probably higher than that of short puzzles, yet there is such an asymmetry in it, that any minimally respectful place wouldn't do it despite the supposed higher efficiency.

pontus 6y ago

"When you're junior, coachability is what gets you hired. How quickly can we train you to be effective? When you're medium, technical chops get you hired. Can you do useful work right now and quickly fill gaps in knowledge? When you're senior, your experience and opinions get you hired." Thought this was pretty good. Hard to make that mental transition over time since we all start on one end. The default behavior is to continue interviewing the same way as your career progresses.

sharadov 6y ago
Not necessary, interviewed for a Sr Engineer role where I clearly impressed the CTO, but didn't do that great on a stupid coding exercise. And that was not even a requirement for the job, and I told them that was not my strongpoint. I'd done my homework on the company, they had bottlenecks, which I suggested a solution for, and they were pretty blown away. But like other folks here pointed out, all companies want are folks who can crack the coding exercise, everything else is a hogwash.
- blackrock 6y ago
  So, you didn’t get the job because you didn’t pass their l33t coding challenge? And they hired some freshman, because he did? But who ended up writing amateurish software code that always broke.
eyelidlessness 6y ago
I think my instinct for this and my relative lack of interview experience have been at odds. When I’m already on the job, I have no doubt that my experience and opinions show my value. I don’t even worry anymore about demonstrating value: it comes out of every action I take, and if it’s not manifest in the interaction I can either demonstrate it with outcomes or retrospectives. But that translates poorly to an interview environment where the person on the viewing side of a whiteboard might not even have the instinct to hear “this is a problem I would solve by choosing a technology that already addresses it” or even “this is something I would google because it’s not the core problem I’m solving, just a detail”.

cryptica 6y ago

Most tech companies which have a monopoly don't care about the usefulness of a person's skills. They only care about arbitrary puzzle-solving abilities and other random abilities which have nothing to do with productivity. When applying for a job at these companies, the criteria are so arbitrary that you're basically a beggar. You just have to try to figure out what they want to hear, what they want to see then you basically have to tell them and show them exactly that; all while simultaneously using your face muscles to project a sense of enthusiasm. Just like a beggar who does backflips or plays the ukulele on a banjo; you just have to do whatever random crap will impress them enough to toss a few coins your way.

Swizec 6y ago
I think that changes rapidly when you interview past the mid- code monkey positions. I doubt a VP of engineering would be interviewed on anything but opinions and experience. When that shift happens depends on the company and what the team is hiring for.
- avmich 6y ago
  VP of engineering brings crucial skills to the table: working with people who report to her. That's significantly different from engineering skills.
sreque 6y ago
I can confirm this with recent interviewing experience. I interviewed at a top tech company and got asked puzzle coding questions I wasn't prepared for. Testing whether I can find the longest palindrome subsequence of a string optimally via a tabular or memoized dynamic programming solution in 20 minutes has practically zero ability to measure how effective I am on the job. That said, after that interview I studied the algorithm and am now slightly prepared for the next big tech company I interview with, I guess. In contrast, at another interview I got given a take-home assignment that I almost didn't want to do because it felt like the kind of work I would do in my day job and I didn't want to do that in the evening or my time off. That task, on the other hand, probably measures infinitely better how effective I am on the job.

avmich 6y ago

> My girlfriend got a business job at Visa last year and later found that 5000 applied for her role. She stood out because she read the job description and highlighted relevant experience. Yeah, that's the bar. I know about different bar - not in customer service business, in software engineering. You're given a task to write a parser in 15 minutes - literally, you solve it, it mostly works - for some simple inputs at least, you don't have time to test it thoroughly. You don't pass - the bar is different. Your experience tells that the startup is too early to think about scalability problems. They can keep things simple for a solid another iteration of the product. You explain that to them, they listen, but they are doubtful - they've heard that scaling is crucial, and even though they have like a hundred of customers, they want that - so your advice is considered wrong. You don't pass that bar. They tell you they need somebody senior to coach and mentor a bunch of more junior engineers, somebody who'd steer the whole technical stack. In remaining minutes of the engineering interview they ask you to write Rabin-Karp implementation, or AVL balancing. You don't pass the bar if algorithms don't work first time.

Swizec 6y ago
Wow nice of you to assume it was a job in customer service. She’s a core part of the team scaling a multi billion dollar product to global markets and shooting to do trillions in transactions within a few years. Thankyouverymuch And trust me the interviews for that are just as grueling as they are for engineering. Solid 7 hours of on-site followed by business case studies for homework. But unlike engineering, you can’t skirt by as a pure code monkey who can leetcode. You have to actually know how to do the job in a real world context.
- bobobob420 6y ago
  Hahaha you think technical business interviews are more challenging than se interviews. Do an interview for Jane street or two sigma :) I have all the cracking the case interview books by people who go ran mckinsey and other firms, it’a a joke
  - Swizec 6y ago

maest 6y ago

I guess emojis in non-informal literature are now here to stay?

Swizec 6y ago
I would hardly call an article on the internet “formal literature” but thank you for thinking so highly of my writing <3

refactor_master 6y ago

> When you're junior, coachability is what gets you hired. How quickly can we train you to be effective? All anecdata points towards luck/connections. There’s really no way to stand out at this stage when everybody’s CV is the same.

mahmoudhossam 6y ago
I'd say coachability does get you hired, networking is what gets you interviewed.
whack 6y ago
This is patently false. The following are all ways you can stand out for a junior position: - Attending a university that is hard to get into and has a strong CS program - Having an impressive GPA - Winning academic or software-related awards - Having commendable accomplishments in software-related "extracurriculars", such as hackathons etc - Whiteboard coding ability I've done numerous junior interviews for FANG companies. They are extremely liberal in handing out interviews, and doing well in these interviews will guarantee a job offer. "Connections" has almost zero correlation to how you're graded in these interviews. Being unlucky can trip you up every now and then. But if you get rejected from every single FANG company, I guarantee you it's not because of luck.
- refactor_master 6y ago
  Now you’re taking about FANG as if those are the only companies in existence. There are many many other places to make a living. I’ve personally never inverted a binary tree on a whiteboard and my career is doing fine. You might want to read https://wesdesilvestro.com/the-prestige-trap https://wesdesilvestro.com/the-prestige-trap from earlier on HN.
  - whack 6y ago
    Now you're assuming that what I said applies only to FANG companies. I've also worked and gotten job offers from many non-FANG companies, across multiple industries, and they were all using the above data points to make entry-level hires. I only brought up FANG because they are the biggest and most well-known employers. I've already read that article and I don't see the relevance, unless you're trying to imply that I'm a prestige-chaser just because I've worked at FANG companies