33 ms·

Interview advice that got me offers

642 points by ZainRiz 6y ago

_benj 6y ago
> Your mad technical skills no longer matter to them. If anything, humility and an openness to learning will show you in the best light. I've been interviewing for the last couple of weeks and I agree with this. Being a "good" human being, i.e. candid, humble, kind, friendly, seems to be valued a lot more than what I thought before. At the end of the day is people working with people, and the more humans that interactions can be, as opposed to a rigid, dry act, the better. At least, that gives an idea of the company and if it's a fit for me.
- youngNed 6y ago
  its easier to train someone up in technical skills than to untrain them from being a dick
  - _benj 6y ago
    I've learned that the hard way!
- Bahamut 6y ago
  Can confirm as a senior engineer at a FAANG. I've rejected people for showing negative non-technical traits but being ok technically, and recommended people for hire with not the best technical skills but with excellent non-technical/leadership traits. Life is too short to work with assholes if it can be helped.
  - nrmitchi 6y ago
    > I've rejected people for showing negative non-technical traits I'm not an expert, but this can be a really slippery slope to implicit bias creeping in to your hiring decisions, especially if these traits are outside of your area of interview/expertise.
    - vsareto 6y ago
      I bet physical appearance plays into whether someone's perceived this way too.
    - paxys 6y ago
      The "culture fit" interview which is standard in tech companies today is nothing but an avenue to introduce whatever bias the interviewer wants with no oversight, no explanation.
      - jerezzprime 6y ago
        This isn't necessarily true. You can have rigor around your value/culture fit questions. In our process, we require strong reasons for both yes and no decisions (especially for culture fit). If an interviewer says no "because X" we look for similar signal to have shown up in other parts of the loop (performed by different people). If only one interviewer sees a signal, we are careful to analyze it for bias.
      - zucked 6y ago
        I can see how it can do just that, but I explain our "culture" as best I can before evaluating candidates against it. Example: My workplace has a great deal of change, bordering on ambiguity. We need people who can deal with that and thrive in that environment. So, my interview questions aim to find out if the person is going to thrive in an environment where they might have to find their own way, or if they are the kind of person who likes to take directions and stay in a specified lane. In this case, adaption to change is part of our culture - you're either a good fit or you aren't.
    - lukeschlather 6y ago
      This assumes that your soft skills evaluations are more colored by implicit bias than your technical evaluations. Everything is colored by bias, it's just different kinds of bias. And stuff being inside your area of expertise is no defense against bias. You might subconsciously assume someone doesn't know certain technical things and simply not bother to ask the question.
  - totaldude87 6y ago
    almost on the same lines, if you feel like interviewer doesnt care about you - "Life is too short to work with assholes if it can be helped."
  - decafninja 6y ago
    Although this is welcome to hear, it's not something a candidate can count on reliably nor something they can really control. After all, a candidate can come off as likeable to one interviewer and unlikeable to another. Versus just being able ace through leetcode problems - that's a more objective criteria a candidate has more control over. Personal anecdote. I interviewed at a FAANG, got rejected. They actually offered feedback, and one of the key reasons I apparently got rejected was that "I asked too many (clarifying) questions" about the leetcode problem. Fast forward a year, I retry. I take the above feedback to heart, and refrain from asking too many questions. I get rejected again, and given feedback. One of the reasons given? "I asked too few questions".
    - alboy 6y ago
      Clearly they want you to demonstrate a working knowledge of binary search.
      - Rapzid 6y ago
        Yeah, but you gotta sort your shit out first.
    - KwisatzHaderack 6y ago
      > candidate can come off as likeable to one interviewer and unlikeable to another. > I apparently got rejected was that "I asked too many (clarifying) questions" about the leetcode problem. > I get rejected again, and given feedback. One of the reasons given? "I asked too few questions". It sounds like they didn't like you _personally_. If the rejection reason wasn't due to technical or behavioral mismatch but a fake reason like the ones above, it's the often the problematic "Airport test" (ie. They don't want to be stuck in an airport with you"reason). And to be clear, I think it's wrong to reject candidates because you personally can't think of "being friends" with them. It's unfair to both the candidate, but also the company as it misses out on great engineers.
  - Taylor_OD 6y ago
    Not being an asshole, being able to help teams work together and not be assholes to each other, and having okay technical skills is my true value proposition.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bavila 6y ago
  I recently had a technical interview where I stumbled the whole way through, but I kept my attitude lighthearted, asked plenty of dumb questions, and am pretty sure I even said "Oh, geez, I'm an idiot" at one point. They acknowledged that I was a weak candidate, but they liked me enough to extend an offer amounting to a 33% salary increase over my current job--and with an additional 33% bump after 6 months if I can prove that I am actually not so much of an idiot. :) Humility and earnestness can go a long way. A big ego never helps.
  - tootie 6y ago
    That doesn't seem to apply at FAANGs. I had some positive interviews where I went out of my way to build some rapport and it got a lot of smiles but no offer. It definitely worked at the completely not FAANG company that I work for now. I think I'm probably better off this way.
    - bavila 6y ago
      That is a good point. The company is certainly no FAANG, but those aren't quite my cup of tea, so I am grateful for that.
    - borroka 6y ago
      FAANGs are a different beast altogether. Especially at the IC level, it is 99% technical, given a normal-human-being-behavior. Then, technical the way they (individual interviewer and company) evaluate it and you don't know about, since I had a few interviews in which I was confident I did a very good job (I am not a junior...) and they got back with a rejection on technical grounds. One striking example was when I solved the coding problems posed to me in 15 minutes out of the 45 available, the interviewer said "that's great, I don't have any more questions, please use this time for you to ask about the company" and then the recruiter told me I was rejected because I did not do the coding part well enough.
      - jefftk 6y ago
        > One striking example was when I solved the coding problems posed to me in 15 minutes out of the 45 available, the interviewer said "that's great, I don't have any more questions, please use this time for you to ask about the company" and then the recruiter told me I was rejected because I did not do the coding part well enough. That's terrible behavior from the interviewer. Did you try raising this with your recruiter?
- adamredwoods 6y ago
  I have had opposite experiences. Many of my interviews were straight evaluations on technical ability, many of which I failed. Amazon in particular, I had told the interviewer that my day-to-day was in C#, but they continued to ask rigorous javascript questions, of which I could explain most of the answer, but failed to find the very specific javascript answer they were looking for. As a result, I was blocked by Amazon from any further interviews for one year. (And at the time, incredibly disheartening in my job search...)
  - ju-st 6y ago
    Did you apply for a C# or javascript job?
    - adamredwoods 6y ago
      IIRC, entry-level developer, including javascript. I don't believe I applied to any jobs that were strictly javascript. I accept the failed interview, but this doesn't explain why I was banned for failing a technical interview. Amazon is a big place.
  - bird_monster 6y ago
    The most scarring interview experience I've ever had was with Amazon, when I was very young, where they exhibited a similar amount of not listening to me at all and evaluating skills that I never claimed to have. Ultimately Amazon is too big and too popular to listen or care to candidates. They're going to do whatever they're going to do, regardless of what you say, and that'll naturally filter out a ton of candidates.
    - hnrodey 6y ago
      >evaluating skills that I never claimed to have Interesting thought. I had an interview experience a few months ago that went fairly poorly and it was in large part because the interviewer pressed me on topics that I forwardly stated I was not well versed on (microservices). I ejected from the interview process afterwards because of my displeasure with the interviewer. He was not someone I wanted to work with in the long term.
- auggierose 6y ago
  That explains a lot of the shitty software lately. Just joking. No, not really.
osdotsystem 6y ago
Great but bit short i feel ^^
mlthoughts2018 6y ago
“Keeping those skills sharp even when you’re not job hunting.” It’s so tiring to continue to see this. If the “skills” you need to keep sharp are not the same thing as the skills you exercise through your job, that’s a giant red flag that the hiring company should be avoided. If you’re practicing leetcode or Kaggle in your spare time to pass interviews, you need to stop and realize you’ve set up your goals completely backward and you are actively helping companies to commoditize your labor product and short change you on poor job quality or experience building. If you don’t reject companies when they try the algorithm hazing crap that has no bearing on the real day to day job of software engineering, you are setting yourself up to fail and burn out, with crappy resume experience and nothing but perpetual leetcode skill to show for it.
- deeeeplearning 6y ago
  You're being downvoted because much of the Software Engineering community suffers from a form of Stockholm Syndrome.
  - maire 6y ago
    Most engineers are introverts and relatively humble - so interviewing is difficult. We have to remind ourselves that we are pretty good. I always went on 2 practice interviews before the real interview and it worked.
    - chollida1 6y ago
      > Most engineers are introverts is this a defensible statement? I haven't seen any research that would lead me to believe that most engineers are introverts.
      - doggosphere 6y ago
        Defensibly anecdotally. Perhaps you have seen a classroom full of engineering students?
macintux 6y ago
Tip 3 is huge. I ask hard questions during interviews, and I don’t expect a perfect answer. What I do want is the interviewee to handle failure without being defensive, and to ask probing questions.
- vidarh 6y ago
  Same here. Some of my goto questions are questions I don't expect a solution to. I'll tell people that - I know some people use similar questions without telling candidates that, but I don't think the extra pressure is necessary. I also explicitly explain to people that what I want to see is how they think, more so than the final solution. It tells me a lot about how a candidate will work within a team if they're capable to actually bounce ideas back and forth and explain their thinking, and I've often preferred someone who doesn't get as far but who can show me better communications skills and who seems eager to learn.
  - akdas 6y ago
    Huge +1 on explicitly setting expectations. I've written on this topic[0], and there are a lot of different ways interviewers don't set expectations: - Is the interviewer looking for syntactically correct code, or general algorithmic skills? - For a warmup, is the interviewer looking for a basic solution, or an optimal solution? - For architecture walkthroughs, what level of detail is expected? The extra pressure is definitely unnecessary. [0] https://hiringfor.tech/2020/03/02/are-you-asking-candidates-to-read-your-mind.html https://hiringfor.tech/2020/03/02/are-you-asking-candidates-...
    - 908B64B197 6y ago
      I'll keep these in mind. I like to ask open-ended questions. "I am trying to solve X problem, how should-I do it?". That reduces the rote bias and also checks if the candidate can communicate.
    - redisman 6y ago
      I've found you can somewhat mitigate it by asking questions yourself. For example in one tech screen once I had the algorithm pretty much done I asked if I should look to optimize and to add test cases/handle odd input and the interviewer said it's fine as is and let's talk more about other topics like architecture in the real world.
WaitWaitWha 6y ago
> Keeping those skills sharp even when you’re not job hunting. I rather hire someone with wisdom across multiple areas than a bleeding edge expert in few, very narrow specialty. In my experience, a group of generalists will often deal better with a problem than a group of specialist.
- xwdv 6y ago
  Perhaps your experience has only been in general problems?
  - WaitWaitWha 6y ago
    Possibly, or more strategic than tactical.
- blackoil 6y ago
  I prefer to be specialist in some areas and generalist in the periphery. e.g. I am excellent in distributed systems, Networking and FS, and have decent knowledge of web services, aws and kubernetes. I don't have any idea about embedded systems, mobile development and have no intention of acquiring that.
  - WaitWaitWha 6y ago
    I can see this, and come to think of it, my hires have this shallow, gravity-well type of expertise. few strong areas, and large swath of general knowledge.
- vidarh 6y ago
  The most important interview skill, however, is being able to effectively communicate and present that wisdom, because otherwise the interviewer will not know you have it. That is a skill a lot of developers practice way too little. It's also a skillset that is increasingly valuable if you want a promotion. It's interesting how so many of the responses here assume that the skills people should keep sharp are narrow technical skills. I'd expect a developer to keep their technical skills sharp as part of their day to day job. That's not the most important reason to practice interviewing; the most important reason is to know how to sell those skills. I know lots of techies dislike having to know to sell themselves, but the reality is that hiring managers can't read minds, so selling your skillset is part of the job, but one you don't use very often in many jobs.
vincentmarle 6y ago
The hardest part about interviewing is that there is no feedback loop; I once interviewed at 10 companies within 2 weeks and got rejected from all of them, but to this day I still don't know what part I need to improve upon.
- p1esk 6y ago
  Do you feel you did great at all 10 interviews?
- AnonC 6y ago
  This is not completely covering why they didn’t give any feedback, but something to ponder over. From the Recurse Center application process and why they don’t give feedback to rejected candidates: [1] > People would reply and try to contest our decisions, get frustrated that our responses weren’t specific enough, or otherwise indicate that our feedback wasn’t very productive. Depending on the company and its location, there could also be legal considerations in not giving feedback. [1]: https://www.recurse.com/feedback https://www.recurse.com/feedback
- dilyevsky 6y ago
  If you get to later stages you can ask for feedback. Some give it some don’t. I had some really positive experiences with that, usually with smaller companies. Worst case you just get ghosted (hi datadog, dropbox).
- magneticnorth 6y ago
  Kind of related to the advice in the blog post, there are a couple things you can do (from an open-minded, kind, curious-and-hoping-to-learn approach and way of phrasing your questions). - In an interview, if you feel it could have gone better, you can ask your interviewer about better solutions. I have literally done this in interviews that led to an offer - when they get to the point where you ask questions, one of yours can be "I don't feel like I got to a great solution here, can you explain what an efficient solutions would look like, or point me to a reference where I can read up on this"? - You can ask your recruiter for feedback, or just suggestions for general areas that you can improve. More likely than not, they won't respond or will tell you the policy is not to share anything, but you've already lost out on this job, and one polite inquiry is not going to put a black mark on your record at this company.
alexwasserman 6y ago
Some smaller items as well, that I think are worth mentioning, given the post starts out that advice is woefully short - seems like an invitation to throw in my 2p/2c/2satoshi, etc. Remember that it's really a conversation, and it goes both ways. They want to learn about you, but you need to learn about them as well. Are these people you really want to work with, and are you the kind of person they want to work with. This means you have to show your full self - honest and open, and expect the same from them. Some tricks here include making sure to turn it into a conversation, and engage the interviewers - something like finishing up your answer with "and, have you faced that problem, and how did you solve it?" works well to make them think, and engage them. You can then have a discussion about the problem and really allow yourself to show how you think and engage with someone. It stops being an exam/quiz setting. In a similar vein, you want to answer in a way that shows you've solved the problem, or something similar before, in a real setting. So, rather than just providing the book answer, you can say something like: "Well, that's a similar problem to one I had when I was at X, and we solved it by doing Y, and my responsibility there was Z.". This shows that you were genuinely part of the solution, and can work in a team, and have real practical experience that's worth hiring you for. I find it helps as well, in both the above scenarios, to highlight the problems you had, and how you overcame them. Especially in a technical field, the majority of what you'll be doing is problem solving, so demonstrate that ability. Use open ended questions to demonstrate what you're passionate about and know really well. Call it out and explain what in the exercise you really enjoy, then explain your most recent tips, techniques, and things you've been experimenting with. Passionate people come across really well, and it's much easier to talk about something you love, it removes some nerves and mental blocks. It also them demonstrates (again), your capacity to learn, grow, and improve. All of the above help you bring your humanity, as well as you tech skills, and show you can be a great help and contributor to the team they're hiring you for, and get you away from having to just rote repeat book answers to standard questions. Finally, some smaller items: 1. If you need a second to think, have a drink. I always try to make sure I've got at least a bottle of water, so take a sip, and it'll give you a minute to think, to breathe and to relax. 2. You can always just say, let me think about that, and ask for a whiteboard, notes, etc. So many candidates we interview don't, and it hurts them. In the past I've taken to pushing people to take notes and write things down to keep their thinking in order.
tmakks 6y ago
Extremely well written title, content so-so though. It's simple: Make the funnel full that you don't feel any pressure, anxiety or whatever because you have options. No need for some voodoo advice from OP.
- pointyfence 6y ago
  That's the general route that I took. As an applicant or hiring manager, I view the interview as a meeting between two equal sides looking for a mutually beneficial fit. If there isn't a fit, it's ok. Onto the next interview. It makes interviews a lot less stressful and more engaging to me. But to go down that route as an applicant, it helps a lot to think about what's needed to have those options.
klenwell 6y ago
One additional tip on recruiters: have a cheat sheet ready (web page or public Google doc) that answers the basic questions they'll have for you and makes clear your expectations. Here's the info I ask them to provide: - Job Title and Salary - Job Description - Company Overview and Location - Steps in Hiring Process Whenever I'm emailed by a recruiter, I politely thank them for reaching out, paste the link to the cheat sheet, and invite them to review it and write back if they still think I'm a good match. It quickly separates the professionals from the wannabes. (You usually don't hear back from the wannabes.) The ones who do write back often thank me for it. I'm pretty cynical when it comes to recruiters. So I find it interesting that 3 of my last 4 jobs have come through one.
- rkachowski 6y ago
  Do you find that recruiters will typically give you a salary range beyond "competitive" before you've started the interview process?
  - kortilla 6y ago
    You usually have to be the first mover and be willing to give them a number you’re looking for.
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      This would limit your options, though.
      - d4mi3n 6y ago
        This limits options that are unwilling to meet your requirements; places you would have passed on due to insufficient salaries anyway. If you're willing to take lower salaries, lower your minimal salary requirements to receive more of them. Dictating salary reqs up front does two things: 1. Reduces time wasted on folks or orgs that don't want to pay your rate. 2. Immediately moves discussion away from a dance around salary to salary _negotiation_. Any good HR org that can't meet your salary reqs and still wants you will try to compensate in other ways (stocks, RSUs, benefits, bonuses, etc).
MattGaiser 6y ago
> Keeping those skills sharp even when you’re not job hunting. Can I just add "Leetcoder" as a part time job on my resume? It is amusing how in this industry, your ability to interview will not at all be improved by spending time doing your job unless it is algo heavy. It is a separate job entirely.
- CobrastanJorji 6y ago
  I've had this discussion during interviews as a disarming technique. Candidates will sometimes express nervousness at the beginning and say stuff like "I'm terrible at interviews" or "it's been a while since I've had to do this kind of programming," and I try to respond by making it clear that I understand that the whiteboard coding has very little in common with the actual job and that I'm not judging them, so when I dutifully proceed to ask them to invert a linked list, they hopefully don't feel as judged when they approach the problem. Seems to help at least a bit. Mind you, I'd prefer NOT asking those questions, but I'm not empowered to make that change at my workplace and I'm honestly not sure what I'd replace it with if I were.
  - a_wild_dandan 6y ago
    > I'm honestly not sure what I'd replace it with if I were. Just to theorize: how about having the interviewee write a narrowly scoped toy project that's relevant to the position? (Edit: On site, as a replacement for white boarding.) A JS to-do app for a front-end engineer, for instance. Just a short thing you and the candidate can attack together in a couple hours. The candidate can write "normal" code, google things, clarify requirements, use their own architecture/patterns/style to reach the solution, etc. You could even add/change a requirement midway through the session, too. That would be realistic, and test for brittleness (and maybe be mean). I don't interview people, so this might be hopelessly naive, or maybe untenable for some types of positions. But that interview process strikes me as a far more representative microcosm of an actual job than regurgitating LeetCode solutions or hardcore algo arcana.
    - 908B64B197 6y ago
advpetc 6y ago
Another thing I found quite common in these people who can easily get a lot of great offers is that they keep writing things down, so that they never forget what they have learnt. A blog for digestions and summarizations is very usefully and can help a lot.
draw_down 6y ago
Interesting stuff. For the Bloomberg thing, I would probably view warily any company that offered so much to try to get me to join. I'd wonder why they need to try so hard to get people to join.
williesleg 6y ago
h1b helps too
Traster 6y ago
It always surprises me that these articles do so well on HN. I would assume the people who want to be in the corporate giants are, and the rest of us... don't want to be? No offence to Google, but I just don't want everything that comes with being at Google. As for the advice, I think the better, more general advice really should be "If you want a job at Google, make the people at Google want to work with you" - it's not difficult to understand what that means, you need to be smart, you need to be someone people want to work with. That's all. When people give the advice, oh well you need to be willing to learn? That's not advice for an interview - when you arrive on your first day you actually need to be willing to learn.
- paxys 6y ago
  > I would assume the people who want to be in the corporate giants are, and the rest of us... don't want to be? If that was the case then the Google interview would have a 100% success rate, when in reality it is ~0.2%.
  - Traster 6y ago
    The success rate at Google has nothing to do with how many people on HN want to work there, and the artcile provides a pretty confounding factor - that 0.2% success rate includes people applying to interviews for practice. Personally I don't think that many people applying to Google are in that 99.8% because they don't know how to learn during an interivew, it's because their application got scrapped on review stage.
totaldude87 6y ago
I recently got interviewed by a FAANG company, and it was not a nice experience, it had like 4 hours of back to back interviews with 4 different people and couple of them didn't even bother.. on the technical side, I was asked questions that didn't even fit my profile :( . although am waiting for their response, regardless of whether i have cleared their "tech" rounds, at this point I dont even care about that interview anymore or their offer (if it did happen) :| so the fine print is, be attentive in the interviews and see whether "they" really care about you, and if you dont feel comfortable about other side, dont bother!
- mercutio2 6y ago
  If you're not up for four to eight hours of interviews (with a break or two, depending on how long the day is), asking the standard bank of questions, it doesn't sound like you're a good fit for a big tech company. But why did you bother applying? None of what you describe seems like it should have been a surprise.
  - totaldude87 6y ago
    my point was not about 4 hours, its more like , if i spend 4 hours for you, least you can do is to look interested and make me feel like they need me (just like i need them )
    - ffhhj 6y ago
      Demotivated interviewers reflect the stress they deal with in those companies.
  - moksly 6y ago
    I’ve been on the other side, and hired people, which means you sit through 8 hours of interviews. Sometimes days in a row. I also work as an external examiner for CS students, which again, mean that I sit through long days of tedious technical tests. I can’t imagine why you would ever want to subject candidates to that. It’s tiring enough when you’re not on the spot. I’ll typically spend the weekend or days leading up to such an ordeal in preparation, and when a day is over I’ll go home or to the hotel, do a few hours of prepping for the next round and then go straight to bed. Because you’re that spent. It would be ridiculous to expect a candidate to perform well, or show you anything about themselves, when the interviewer gets that busted. Because a candidate would have it much harder, especially if they are early in their careers. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to subject themselves to those sort of ordeals either. I realise that I’m Scandinavian, and that our interviews and hiring processes are very different from Silicon Valley, but all my interviews have been as much about the company/organisation selling itself to me as me selling myself to it. Well not for my first two jobs, but since then.
agustif 6y ago
I need to get a good software engineering job, BUT I'm tired of the take home projects, the 5 phase interviews just to drop you 1h before a final -not important just burecreacy-google meeting with the VP of Engineering, recuriter just tells you there's been some internal miss-communication on the roles they're hiring and they're not looking for frontend roles anymore, and they're sorry... Nevermind I'm pretty good at backend too with node/python and devops chops... I need to learn vue and nuxt for applying to a job now, It would take me 20% effort and time doing it in react/next but who cares... not the recuriters or companies..
- syspec 6y ago
  Not everyone can join the NFL either
  - agustif 6y ago
    I'm not talking about FAANG here though, and yes I prob am not good enough for the position/company. Just saying that every interview I do / application I go through ends up with my noticing this little feeling that I maybe just am not wired to work for someone else...
dfilppi 6y ago
Great advice. Especially practice interviewing and keeping skills up. Alas, the interview barriers set up by many companies would leave them without staff if applied to their current employees.
redisman 6y ago
This doesn't really go against the Leetcode till you die advice. It's just assuming that you're baseline really good at Leetcode style questions so that you can focus on soft skills. I do not believe you can get a job in any top 100 company in this day and age without being able to regurgitate Leetcode mediums in your sleep. So yeah be nice to people and all that, but you also must pass the tech screen and the 3-4 Leetcode sessions.
hfkldjsjfkdj 6y ago
These blogs are just for procasinators to feel productive. If you landed the interview then it is just about practicing through a lot of questions. The time you finished reading this comment and this blog, some people out there have already completed a mock interview or a leetcode question. I wonder who made greater gains.
- yudlejoza 6y ago
  I agree with this. I would add, these holier-than-thou FAANG interviewers writing blog posts about how to clear a FAANG interview are actually bullshitters. They want to feel good about themselves. So they write. When push comes to shove, these same interviewers would clear the candidates who've pretty much memorized all the medium-level leetcode problems, but lie during the interview by claiming that they've never seen the problem before in their lives, but just happen to be "so good" they end up solving the whole thing in 30-35 minutes. P.S.: The non-tech part is not that hard. Just don't be a dick.
  - xyzelement 6y ago
    >> P.S.: The non-tech part is not that hard. Just don't be a dick. This is probably true for junior roles but gets much more important for senior roles or ones where they are testing out your potential to take on greater responsibility shortly after joining. An answer to a vague behavioral question can make a ton of difference. EG: Question: Have you ever managed people? Answer A: Nope, always an individual contributor. Answer B: No, but at my last job I took ownership of a project that involved coordinating work of 50+ developers, UX people, QA, etc to deliver. Question A is technically correct and "not a dick" but if the person has it in them to figure out to provide answer B (assuming it's true) they are more likely to get a more senior job and make more money.
  - jpmoral 6y ago
    You can argue that the advice is BS, but I don't detect any moralising in it.
slg 6y ago
>Learn to answer the more ambiguous questions This is something I have never done before my most recent job search but it has been a huge help. Previously all my interview prep was on tech and I pretty much winged it for the behavioral stuff since interview prep guides seem to always focus on the tech side. Plus it always feels worse and more obvious when you struggle with or fail to properly answer the tech questions. What I did is I prepared 10 different stories about my career experience and then tagged them with a bunch of prompts. For example I have a story about one project that had dual PMs that experienced a lot of scope creep and eventually fizzled on release. I can now use that story to answer a broad range of questions from failure to various project management approaches. Overall I now have prepared stories to answer probably 50-75 different questions immediately. Another benefit is that I have also told these stories multiple times in interviews now and I get better telling them each time. Even if the answer isn't 100% relevant, I feel more confident and likely come off better launching immediately into a detailed story about my experience rather than trying to awkwardly come up with an answer on the fly. It is also easy to drop irrelevant parts or expand on specific details when the basic framework of the story is already something that feels natural. I will even have the document with all the prompts and story bullet points open whenever I am doing phone or remote interviews. I could probably even create a cheat sheet to use for in person interviews since I usually would bring an executive style notepad with me anyway to interviews to jot down notes about the company. Maybe this is obvious advice, but I think I am relatively smart and never done it previously or even seen this approach recommend so I am guessing there are other people who could use this tip.
- drchopchop 6y ago
  I had to do a bunch of interviews recently and did something similar, multiple pages of notes with bullet points in a big font just out of view. Was very helpful for those moments where your brain just freezes up and you can't remember the perfect anecdote or systems architecture point you wanted to bring up. I do think it would work for actual on-site interviews as well, as it's common for a candidate to bring in their own notes of questions to ask, etc.
- ZainRiz 6y ago
  This is great advice. A single memorable event you went though tends to highlight many different skills, so having a few stories down well will let you answer most of those questions And what if it doesn't answer the interviewer's question perfectly? Their real goal was to try to get to know you better. The question was just a prompt to get a better signal about you, and you delivered above and beyond what was asked.
itronitron 6y ago
Worth noting that the author claims to get lots of job offers but is not able to "create an array" in a language of their choice from memory.
- xyzelement 6y ago
  I think you're saying this to dismiss the wisdom of the author. I think it's actually worth noting that you can be a very valuable developer and not remember minutiae. For example, in the last few days I wrote in C++, Python and JS. Do you think my fingers always typed the right type of bracket to create an array as I jumped between the languages? Who cares.
  - itronitron 6y ago
    I am merely encouraging people that read the blog post to recognize that the author may be embellishing some points.
  - throwaway80332 6y ago
    tis the same brackets tho
    - xyzelement 6y ago
      C++is {}
MauranKilom 6y ago
One important thing I want to note for chronic "interview preppers": The interviewer wants to get to know you, not the interview you! They want to understand what it would be like to work with you and how you tackle new problems. It is therefore of very little use to them if you just have boilerplate answers to throw back at behavioral questions and/or if you already know the answer to every technical problem off-hand. Assuming your job will involve creative problem solving struggle, displaying some of that in the interview is a bonus (although it's of course up to the interviewer to tailor the problems accordingly). You probably won't be rejected for doing too well on the technical part, but don't hide your personality and technical aptitude behind walls of preparation. > "Remember, never let them see you sweat" Vince told me. But when the stakes are low and you’re having fun, who sweats? This can backfire. It's great if you enjoy tackling the interview problems, and sincerity is great, but indifference is not a good look. > And as an interviewer, I can attest: sincere interest is always a good sign. Fully agreed.
disown 6y ago
> Your mad technical skills no longer matter to them. If anything, humility and an openness to learning will show you in the best light. Your technical skills no longer matter? So someone without technical skills, but the humility and willingness to learn is what they are looking for? Is that why these companies want CS graduates? Is that why they run interviewees through technical quizzes? How about technical skills are just as important, but also are humility and willingness to learn? How about they were always important? Since when were humility and willingness to learn not important in the tech industry? The guy just rehashed industry interview talking points that have been around forever. The only thing new in the articl is "technical skills no longer matter. Which is nonsense. Also, nothing more humble than bragging about getting offers from google, microsoft and stripe. That headline screams humility.
hnrodey 6y ago
Has anyone here pivoted from software engineer to software engineering recruiter? Curious or yours (or anyones for that matter) thoughts on this topic. It's a move I've considered just to keep my career interesting.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- draw_down 6y ago
  Those are very different skill sets, I'd be surprised if that happened often. Not to mention the difference in pay...
- xyzelement 6y ago
  Closest I have come is managing a lot of recruiting (but still from the engineering side) and I know a few very senior folks who started their own headhunting firms - it's an obvious move given their vast network. I don't know for sure but I suspect most recruiters make a LOT less than the roles they are recruiting for, since generally the skills to make a good recruiter are easier available than those that make an engineer. If you want to broaden your career while getting more into dealing with humans rather than code, the obvious progressions are engineering management and perhaps product management.
  - MakeUsersWant 6y ago
    The ability to hire good junior engineers is one of the things that set a good senior engineer apart. So you might want to practise being an interviewer, even if you don't go into recruiting.
  - pbrb 6y ago
    I personally know an engineer who started his own recruiting firm and is making much, much more money than he did as an IC engineer. He also has built a business that he can sell one day.
    - hnrodey 6y ago
caffeine 6y ago
I think the most valuable thing to know about interviewing is: go in to interviews already holding a job offer. So to be clear I'm saying: interview at companies you don't like until you get an offer. THEN rush the recruiters at companies you do like to get you scheduled quickly, because you are holding an offer and they don't want to miss out. This lights recruiters and hiring managers on fire. It makes sure you have practiced enough to succeed. It destresses the interview for you since you have a backup. It is the ultimate and most powerful interviewing technique.
- jawns 6y ago
  > This lights recruiters and hiring managers on fire. Not always. Sometimes it has a repulsive effect. Like trying to score a first date when you're already flaunting the fact that you're engaged to someone else.
  - chrisabrams 6y ago
    > Not always. Sometimes it has a repulsive effect. Like trying to score a first date when you're already flaunting the fact that you're engaged to someone else. In what universe is this an acceptable analogy for anything? Edit: Make sure to include the quote.
    - sieabahlpark 6y ago
      If you (a low quality candidate) run into a FANG company with a job offer from a no-name company _just_ to create pressure it's no different than the analogy. FANG doesn't want you before and they don't want you now, and they're also repulsed about the way you tried to get them to budge. Recruiters and hiring managers are people too and the secret in the industry is most people are not qualified for the work being hired. Hiring incurs risk and the interview is risk mitigation. So if some low end candidate comes in trying to light a fire under themselves they will burn twice as bright but dismissed in a quarter of time.
    - darkerside 6y ago
      Are you offended by the analogy in some way?
mv4 6y ago
I interviewed a lot last year at FAANG, and my biggest takeaway was that the recruiter is your friend. Understand what they are looking for and make their job easier - and they will be your biggest advocate. It helps to understand what their job is exactly (and their success metrics) depending on where you are in the process. For example, early on you may be dealing with a sourcer whose job is to fill the funnel with qualified leads - while later in the process you may be dealing with someone whose job is to close the deal (get you to accept that offer). Communication is key. Do not hesitate to ask for advice, for guidance every step of the way, and ask how you can make the process easier - and it will become easier for you.
angarg12 6y ago
> When you're in a real interview the world changes: You're locked in a cage with a lion. I got into interviewing this last year as an interviewer. I used to think (as most people do) that the interview is a confrontation between interviewer and candidate. However my biggest breakthrough happened when I changed my perspective. Now I see interviewers as detectives, gathering evidence of whether the candidate would be a good hire. So my advice to candidates is the following: don't think of the interviewer as the enemy. Usually they aren't trying to get you, but help you. And if that isn't the case, you don't want to work for that company anyway. Keep a friendly and relaxed conversation with the interviewer and you'll be surprise how far it can get you.
- LASR 6y ago
  I mentor interviewers at my job. Pretty much, every junior (< 3 years of experience) interviewer at first asks me what they should do if the candidate starts talking about something they know very little about. The interviewers are people too. They get nervous too sometimes. They too don’t want to look stupid when they’re having a conversation with the candidate. The first learning of interviewer training I try to solidify is that the interviewer is not intended to be the person who “knows the answers”. Candidates have specialized, deep knowledge in the specific areas they’ve worked on. How can an interviewer expect to know more than them? Experienced interviewers will know that they are there simply to facilitate the candidate in arriving at solutions to the problem.
- FunnyLookinHat 6y ago
  I like to view myself as an advocate for the candidate - work with them and help them to succeed in the interview. Through that process it's really easy to figure out if you are a good fit for each other or not.
- baby 6y ago
  Not all interviewers are like this unfortunately, many are elitist and only trying to find flaws in your way of thinking and approach.
deedubaya 6y ago
I wonder how many, if any, great software engineers simply let their careers stall out because they don't want to deal with the ceremony around tech hiring.
- xyzelement 6y ago
  Same kind of person who never finds a partner because of the "ceremony around" dating, I guess? In both situations, it's not like you're adding a commodity product to your Amazon shopping card. The matching is non-trivial and both parties have to recognize and commit to the effort-full process. To abstract your comment all the way out - how many people live well below their potential because they are too lazy or afraid to work and get something they really way?
  - _qulr 6y ago
    > Same kind of person who never finds a partner because of the "ceremony around" dating, I guess? If dates were conducted like coding interviews — assuming the candidate is a liar and forcing them to prove in detail why they're not — you'd never get a second date. A job is supposed to be a voluntary, mutually advantageous relationship between two parties. So interviews ought to be kind of like dating, where you're trying to be as nice as possible and make a good impression. You don't give tests to a date, you just talk to them, get to know them. Employers too often assume that interviews are a one-way street, where the candidate wants the job no matter what and will do anything to get it. On the contrary, the candidate can walk away at any time, and the employer needs to woo the candidate just as much as the candidate needs to woo the employer.
    - xyzelement 6y ago
      >> Employers too often assume that interviews are a one-way street, where the candidate wants the job no matter what and will do anything to get it. On the contrary, the candidate can walk away at any time, and the employer needs to woo the candidate just as much as the candidate needs to woo the employer. I guess I am lucky but I never had (or gave) an interview of the former, so it DID feel like this: "On the contrary, the candidate can walk away at any time, and the employer needs to woo the candidate just as much as the candidate needs to woo the employer." Hence my comment. It sounds like you've interviewed at some shitty places or maybe underappreciated how much power you actually have.
edumucelli 6y ago
The same kind of articles over and over again with lots of text, but in reality everyone knows that in tech if you want a FAANG (and now extended to several other companies) job you better spend hours in Hackerrank/Leetcode. All the rest (except maybe Amazon with their "principles" thing) is a nice-to-have.
neyme 6y ago
I interviewed with FAANG twice this year, and both of them were rejections with zero feedback. The first one I thought went well, I had a two-way conversation with the Engineering Manager, but sadly I didn't hear back from the recruiter, so I assumed it was a rejection. The second time I cleared the initial screen question, then I had a coding question with two engineers. They gave me a problem, and I solved it but using a sub-optimal algorithm. I thought I'd done well, because it was a hard problem and the solution was not very far from the optimal one. Unfortunately, after two weeks and chasing the recruiter, I got the rejection that they went with someone else.
mnouquet 6y ago
I recently went through the process, it goes much better if you don't give a fuck and just go with the flow. Removing the stress helped tremendously.
x87678r 6y ago
How many interviews do people do a year? I've been in my job 5 years and the one before that 8, I've had 4 interviews in the last 10 years. I kinda feel at a big advantage for not job hopping. It seems some people interview a dozen times a year just as normal. Should I try to get 10 interviews just for practice before interviewing companies I really like?
- msilb 6y ago
  From my experience job hopping usually pays off (at least financially). Bumping your salary in the next job by 50% is not uncommon while may be much harder to achieve when staying at the same firm for years. As others have pointed out before, interviewing is a skill that can and should be practiced. The best way to prep (except grinding through leetcode problems) is to go to a real interview and practice telling real stories from experience and solving problems in real time under stress. So yeah, I would definitely recommend going to at least a few interviews for jobs that might not be your first choice before going for that “dream job” interview.
jcrites 6y ago
I've found that if you are transparent as recruiters and treat them as partners , sharing the offers you've gotten at other companies, they will reciprocate. At one of the Big Tech companies where I interviewed and they ultimately decided not to give me an offer (it was a near thing and I had other offers), the recruiter gave me tips about what other companies she was aware of that were paying well in my area (that I wasn't aware of). Your relationship with recruiters is more complicated and nuanced than the game-theory relationship would lead you to be believe. Maybe I could have gotten slightly better offers if I had used classic hardball negotiating tactics, but from colleagues, other recruiters, and other data sources, it looks like being transparent resulted in me getting top-of-market offers for my job role at the companies where I was interviewing and got offers. My philosophy is to interact with everyone as if I'm planning to join their team from the beginning, almost as if I'm already a team member. That entails among other things that if you're going to join someone's team then you'll interact with them with transparency and vice versa. During my recent round of interviews, I shared the ballpark details about all the offers I got and all the companies I was interviewing with with every company I was working with, and I was pleasantly surprised with the results. Recruiters would give me tips like "Competitor X's offer is likely to offer the highest compensation, but here are some reasons you should consider us", or "Offer Y from <other company> is a very good offer", all from recruiters at other companies. If I had been cagey I don't think I would have built relationships with recruiters where they'd share tips like that with me. I think a no-bullshit approach is refreshing and worth considering. The trick is being high demand as talent -- having multiple offers and being a desirable candidate for employers to hire. The recruiters that I recently worked with at all the big tech companies, pre-IPO tech companies, and startups were all very professional and I think I only benefited from treating them as partners in the profess of finding the best next job -- because the company and employee are looking for a mutual fit, after all. This resulted in me having a number of great offers (a few where I don't have details yet) that I'm currently in the process of deciding between. There might be really good negotiators who could do even better, but simply showing that you're high demand in the market was enough for me to get good offers from the companies I was working with who made them.
- savorypiano 6y ago
  I've had it happen multiple times where I tell a recruiter I'm looking for X but will go as low as Y, they simply told the company Y so it'd be easier to close the deal. Even if I specifically ask them not to say Y.
runawaybottle 6y ago
This article is out dated as of the year 2020 and soon to be 2021. It’s all Leetcode or bust and anyone telling you otherwise is straight lying to you.
vmception 6y ago
> (I wanted to learn the answer for future interviews!). This is the only advice that has ever helped me. Technical interviewers are unoriginal and looked up and use the top google result on "programming questions for X", especially for niche roles that the company is now just hiring for. Nowadays leetcode platforms can provide a more randomized set of problems for companies, but many many many teams and individuals will still just recycle. I recycle answers, which is ironically closer to what I would be expected to do for the company on a day to day basis than an original answer to any academic problems.
vmception 6y ago
> What hadn't occurred to me at the time is that C# is a very verbose language which Visual Studio beautifully automates away the tedious parts of. This online IDE automated nothing. That's pretty much why I use Javascript in interviews Writing on the board or in an online IDE Its just the gaslighting is annoying, in most contexts that's called toxic. "We don't care which language you use .... ooooh you used Javascript we code in this other thing"
Aller 6y ago
Taking interview advice from a software engineer with decades of experience is like taking advice from a beauty model on how to use Tinder...
kushalns5 6y ago
It's quite interesting how irrelevant interview skills are to the actual job.

642 points by ZainRiz 6y ago

> Your mad technical skills no longer matter to them. If anything, humility and an openness to learning will show you in the best light. I've been interviewing for the last couple of weeks and I agree with this. Being a "good" human being, i.e. candid, humble, kind, friendly, seems to be valued a lot more than what I thought before. At the end of the day is people working with people, and the more humans that interactions can be, as opposed to a rigid, dry act, the better. At least, that gives an idea of the company and if it's a fit for me.

youngNed 6y ago
its easier to train someone up in technical skills than to untrain them from being a dick
- _benj 6y ago
  I've learned that the hard way!
Bahamut 6y ago
Can confirm as a senior engineer at a FAANG. I've rejected people for showing negative non-technical traits but being ok technically, and recommended people for hire with not the best technical skills but with excellent non-technical/leadership traits. Life is too short to work with assholes if it can be helped.
- nrmitchi 6y ago
  > I've rejected people for showing negative non-technical traits I'm not an expert, but this can be a really slippery slope to implicit bias creeping in to your hiring decisions, especially if these traits are outside of your area of interview/expertise.
  - vsareto 6y ago
    I bet physical appearance plays into whether someone's perceived this way too.
  - paxys 6y ago
    The "culture fit" interview which is standard in tech companies today is nothing but an avenue to introduce whatever bias the interviewer wants with no oversight, no explanation.
    - jerezzprime 6y ago
      This isn't necessarily true. You can have rigor around your value/culture fit questions. In our process, we require strong reasons for both yes and no decisions (especially for culture fit). If an interviewer says no "because X" we look for similar signal to have shown up in other parts of the loop (performed by different people). If only one interviewer sees a signal, we are careful to analyze it for bias.
    - zucked 6y ago
      I can see how it can do just that, but I explain our "culture" as best I can before evaluating candidates against it. Example: My workplace has a great deal of change, bordering on ambiguity. We need people who can deal with that and thrive in that environment. So, my interview questions aim to find out if the person is going to thrive in an environment where they might have to find their own way, or if they are the kind of person who likes to take directions and stay in a specified lane. In this case, adaption to change is part of our culture - you're either a good fit or you aren't.
  - lukeschlather 6y ago
    This assumes that your soft skills evaluations are more colored by implicit bias than your technical evaluations. Everything is colored by bias, it's just different kinds of bias. And stuff being inside your area of expertise is no defense against bias. You might subconsciously assume someone doesn't know certain technical things and simply not bother to ask the question.
- totaldude87 6y ago
  almost on the same lines, if you feel like interviewer doesnt care about you - "Life is too short to work with assholes if it can be helped."
- decafninja 6y ago
  Although this is welcome to hear, it's not something a candidate can count on reliably nor something they can really control. After all, a candidate can come off as likeable to one interviewer and unlikeable to another. Versus just being able ace through leetcode problems - that's a more objective criteria a candidate has more control over. Personal anecdote. I interviewed at a FAANG, got rejected. They actually offered feedback, and one of the key reasons I apparently got rejected was that "I asked too many (clarifying) questions" about the leetcode problem. Fast forward a year, I retry. I take the above feedback to heart, and refrain from asking too many questions. I get rejected again, and given feedback. One of the reasons given? "I asked too few questions".
  - alboy 6y ago
    Clearly they want you to demonstrate a working knowledge of binary search.
    - Rapzid 6y ago
      Yeah, but you gotta sort your shit out first.
  - KwisatzHaderack 6y ago
    > candidate can come off as likeable to one interviewer and unlikeable to another. > I apparently got rejected was that "I asked too many (clarifying) questions" about the leetcode problem. > I get rejected again, and given feedback. One of the reasons given? "I asked too few questions". It sounds like they didn't like you _personally_. If the rejection reason wasn't due to technical or behavioral mismatch but a fake reason like the ones above, it's the often the problematic "Airport test" (ie. They don't want to be stuck in an airport with you"reason). And to be clear, I think it's wrong to reject candidates because you personally can't think of "being friends" with them. It's unfair to both the candidate, but also the company as it misses out on great engineers.
- Taylor_OD 6y ago
  Not being an asshole, being able to help teams work together and not be assholes to each other, and having okay technical skills is my true value proposition.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bavila 6y ago
I recently had a technical interview where I stumbled the whole way through, but I kept my attitude lighthearted, asked plenty of dumb questions, and am pretty sure I even said "Oh, geez, I'm an idiot" at one point. They acknowledged that I was a weak candidate, but they liked me enough to extend an offer amounting to a 33% salary increase over my current job--and with an additional 33% bump after 6 months if I can prove that I am actually not so much of an idiot. :) Humility and earnestness can go a long way. A big ego never helps.
- tootie 6y ago
  That doesn't seem to apply at FAANGs. I had some positive interviews where I went out of my way to build some rapport and it got a lot of smiles but no offer. It definitely worked at the completely not FAANG company that I work for now. I think I'm probably better off this way.
  - bavila 6y ago
    That is a good point. The company is certainly no FAANG, but those aren't quite my cup of tea, so I am grateful for that.
  - borroka 6y ago
    FAANGs are a different beast altogether. Especially at the IC level, it is 99% technical, given a normal-human-being-behavior. Then, technical the way they (individual interviewer and company) evaluate it and you don't know about, since I had a few interviews in which I was confident I did a very good job (I am not a junior...) and they got back with a rejection on technical grounds. One striking example was when I solved the coding problems posed to me in 15 minutes out of the 45 available, the interviewer said "that's great, I don't have any more questions, please use this time for you to ask about the company" and then the recruiter told me I was rejected because I did not do the coding part well enough.
    - jefftk 6y ago
      > One striking example was when I solved the coding problems posed to me in 15 minutes out of the 45 available, the interviewer said "that's great, I don't have any more questions, please use this time for you to ask about the company" and then the recruiter told me I was rejected because I did not do the coding part well enough. That's terrible behavior from the interviewer. Did you try raising this with your recruiter?
adamredwoods 6y ago
I have had opposite experiences. Many of my interviews were straight evaluations on technical ability, many of which I failed. Amazon in particular, I had told the interviewer that my day-to-day was in C#, but they continued to ask rigorous javascript questions, of which I could explain most of the answer, but failed to find the very specific javascript answer they were looking for. As a result, I was blocked by Amazon from any further interviews for one year. (And at the time, incredibly disheartening in my job search...)
- ju-st 6y ago
  Did you apply for a C# or javascript job?
  - adamredwoods 6y ago
    IIRC, entry-level developer, including javascript. I don't believe I applied to any jobs that were strictly javascript. I accept the failed interview, but this doesn't explain why I was banned for failing a technical interview. Amazon is a big place.
- bird_monster 6y ago
  The most scarring interview experience I've ever had was with Amazon, when I was very young, where they exhibited a similar amount of not listening to me at all and evaluating skills that I never claimed to have. Ultimately Amazon is too big and too popular to listen or care to candidates. They're going to do whatever they're going to do, regardless of what you say, and that'll naturally filter out a ton of candidates.
  - hnrodey 6y ago
    >evaluating skills that I never claimed to have Interesting thought. I had an interview experience a few months ago that went fairly poorly and it was in large part because the interviewer pressed me on topics that I forwardly stated I was not well versed on (microservices). I ejected from the interview process afterwards because of my displeasure with the interviewer. He was not someone I wanted to work with in the long term.
auggierose 6y ago
That explains a lot of the shitty software lately. Just joking. No, not really.

osdotsystem 6y ago

Great but bit short i feel ^^

mlthoughts2018 6y ago

“Keeping those skills sharp even when you’re not job hunting.” It’s so tiring to continue to see this. If the “skills” you need to keep sharp are not the same thing as the skills you exercise through your job, that’s a giant red flag that the hiring company should be avoided. If you’re practicing leetcode or Kaggle in your spare time to pass interviews, you need to stop and realize you’ve set up your goals completely backward and you are actively helping companies to commoditize your labor product and short change you on poor job quality or experience building. If you don’t reject companies when they try the algorithm hazing crap that has no bearing on the real day to day job of software engineering, you are setting yourself up to fail and burn out, with crappy resume experience and nothing but perpetual leetcode skill to show for it.

deeeeplearning 6y ago
You're being downvoted because much of the Software Engineering community suffers from a form of Stockholm Syndrome.
- maire 6y ago
  Most engineers are introverts and relatively humble - so interviewing is difficult. We have to remind ourselves that we are pretty good. I always went on 2 practice interviews before the real interview and it worked.
  - chollida1 6y ago
    > Most engineers are introverts is this a defensible statement? I haven't seen any research that would lead me to believe that most engineers are introverts.
    - doggosphere 6y ago
      Defensibly anecdotally. Perhaps you have seen a classroom full of engineering students?

macintux 6y ago

Tip 3 is huge. I ask hard questions during interviews, and I don’t expect a perfect answer. What I do want is the interviewee to handle failure without being defensive, and to ask probing questions.

vidarh 6y ago
Same here. Some of my goto questions are questions I don't expect a solution to. I'll tell people that - I know some people use similar questions without telling candidates that, but I don't think the extra pressure is necessary. I also explicitly explain to people that what I want to see is how they think, more so than the final solution. It tells me a lot about how a candidate will work within a team if they're capable to actually bounce ideas back and forth and explain their thinking, and I've often preferred someone who doesn't get as far but who can show me better communications skills and who seems eager to learn.
- akdas 6y ago
  Huge +1 on explicitly setting expectations. I've written on this topic[0], and there are a lot of different ways interviewers don't set expectations: - Is the interviewer looking for syntactically correct code, or general algorithmic skills? - For a warmup, is the interviewer looking for a basic solution, or an optimal solution? - For architecture walkthroughs, what level of detail is expected? The extra pressure is definitely unnecessary. [0] https://hiringfor.tech/2020/03/02/are-you-asking-candidates-to-read-your-mind.html https://hiringfor.tech/2020/03/02/are-you-asking-candidates-...
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    I'll keep these in mind. I like to ask open-ended questions. "I am trying to solve X problem, how should-I do it?". That reduces the rote bias and also checks if the candidate can communicate.
  - redisman 6y ago
    I've found you can somewhat mitigate it by asking questions yourself. For example in one tech screen once I had the algorithm pretty much done I asked if I should look to optimize and to add test cases/handle odd input and the interviewer said it's fine as is and let's talk more about other topics like architecture in the real world.

WaitWaitWha 6y ago

> Keeping those skills sharp even when you’re not job hunting. I rather hire someone with wisdom across multiple areas than a bleeding edge expert in few, very narrow specialty. In my experience, a group of generalists will often deal better with a problem than a group of specialist.

xwdv 6y ago
Perhaps your experience has only been in general problems?
- WaitWaitWha 6y ago
  Possibly, or more strategic than tactical.
blackoil 6y ago
I prefer to be specialist in some areas and generalist in the periphery. e.g. I am excellent in distributed systems, Networking and FS, and have decent knowledge of web services, aws and kubernetes. I don't have any idea about embedded systems, mobile development and have no intention of acquiring that.
- WaitWaitWha 6y ago
  I can see this, and come to think of it, my hires have this shallow, gravity-well type of expertise. few strong areas, and large swath of general knowledge.
vidarh 6y ago
The most important interview skill, however, is being able to effectively communicate and present that wisdom, because otherwise the interviewer will not know you have it. That is a skill a lot of developers practice way too little. It's also a skillset that is increasingly valuable if you want a promotion. It's interesting how so many of the responses here assume that the skills people should keep sharp are narrow technical skills. I'd expect a developer to keep their technical skills sharp as part of their day to day job. That's not the most important reason to practice interviewing; the most important reason is to know how to sell those skills. I know lots of techies dislike having to know to sell themselves, but the reality is that hiring managers can't read minds, so selling your skillset is part of the job, but one you don't use very often in many jobs.

vincentmarle 6y ago

The hardest part about interviewing is that there is no feedback loop; I once interviewed at 10 companies within 2 weeks and got rejected from all of them, but to this day I still don't know what part I need to improve upon.

p1esk 6y ago
Do you feel you did great at all 10 interviews?
AnonC 6y ago
This is not completely covering why they didn’t give any feedback, but something to ponder over. From the Recurse Center application process and why they don’t give feedback to rejected candidates: [1] > People would reply and try to contest our decisions, get frustrated that our responses weren’t specific enough, or otherwise indicate that our feedback wasn’t very productive. Depending on the company and its location, there could also be legal considerations in not giving feedback. [1]: https://www.recurse.com/feedback https://www.recurse.com/feedback
dilyevsky 6y ago
If you get to later stages you can ask for feedback. Some give it some don’t. I had some really positive experiences with that, usually with smaller companies. Worst case you just get ghosted (hi datadog, dropbox).
magneticnorth 6y ago
Kind of related to the advice in the blog post, there are a couple things you can do (from an open-minded, kind, curious-and-hoping-to-learn approach and way of phrasing your questions). - In an interview, if you feel it could have gone better, you can ask your interviewer about better solutions. I have literally done this in interviews that led to an offer - when they get to the point where you ask questions, one of yours can be "I don't feel like I got to a great solution here, can you explain what an efficient solutions would look like, or point me to a reference where I can read up on this"? - You can ask your recruiter for feedback, or just suggestions for general areas that you can improve. More likely than not, they won't respond or will tell you the policy is not to share anything, but you've already lost out on this job, and one polite inquiry is not going to put a black mark on your record at this company.

alexwasserman 6y ago

Some smaller items as well, that I think are worth mentioning, given the post starts out that advice is woefully short - seems like an invitation to throw in my 2p/2c/2satoshi, etc. Remember that it's really a conversation, and it goes both ways. They want to learn about you, but you need to learn about them as well. Are these people you really want to work with, and are you the kind of person they want to work with. This means you have to show your full self - honest and open, and expect the same from them. Some tricks here include making sure to turn it into a conversation, and engage the interviewers - something like finishing up your answer with "and, have you faced that problem, and how did you solve it?" works well to make them think, and engage them. You can then have a discussion about the problem and really allow yourself to show how you think and engage with someone. It stops being an exam/quiz setting. In a similar vein, you want to answer in a way that shows you've solved the problem, or something similar before, in a real setting. So, rather than just providing the book answer, you can say something like: "Well, that's a similar problem to one I had when I was at X, and we solved it by doing Y, and my responsibility there was Z.". This shows that you were genuinely part of the solution, and can work in a team, and have real practical experience that's worth hiring you for. I find it helps as well, in both the above scenarios, to highlight the problems you had, and how you overcame them. Especially in a technical field, the majority of what you'll be doing is problem solving, so demonstrate that ability. Use open ended questions to demonstrate what you're passionate about and know really well. Call it out and explain what in the exercise you really enjoy, then explain your most recent tips, techniques, and things you've been experimenting with. Passionate people come across really well, and it's much easier to talk about something you love, it removes some nerves and mental blocks. It also them demonstrates (again), your capacity to learn, grow, and improve. All of the above help you bring your humanity, as well as you tech skills, and show you can be a great help and contributor to the team they're hiring you for, and get you away from having to just rote repeat book answers to standard questions. Finally, some smaller items: 1. If you need a second to think, have a drink. I always try to make sure I've got at least a bottle of water, so take a sip, and it'll give you a minute to think, to breathe and to relax. 2. You can always just say, let me think about that, and ask for a whiteboard, notes, etc. So many candidates we interview don't, and it hurts them. In the past I've taken to pushing people to take notes and write things down to keep their thinking in order.

tmakks 6y ago

Extremely well written title, content so-so though. It's simple: Make the funnel full that you don't feel any pressure, anxiety or whatever because you have options. No need for some voodoo advice from OP.

pointyfence 6y ago
That's the general route that I took. As an applicant or hiring manager, I view the interview as a meeting between two equal sides looking for a mutually beneficial fit. If there isn't a fit, it's ok. Onto the next interview. It makes interviews a lot less stressful and more engaging to me. But to go down that route as an applicant, it helps a lot to think about what's needed to have those options.

klenwell 6y ago

One additional tip on recruiters: have a cheat sheet ready (web page or public Google doc) that answers the basic questions they'll have for you and makes clear your expectations. Here's the info I ask them to provide: - Job Title and Salary - Job Description - Company Overview and Location - Steps in Hiring Process Whenever I'm emailed by a recruiter, I politely thank them for reaching out, paste the link to the cheat sheet, and invite them to review it and write back if they still think I'm a good match. It quickly separates the professionals from the wannabes. (You usually don't hear back from the wannabes.) The ones who do write back often thank me for it. I'm pretty cynical when it comes to recruiters. So I find it interesting that 3 of my last 4 jobs have come through one.

rkachowski 6y ago
Do you find that recruiters will typically give you a salary range beyond "competitive" before you've started the interview process?
- kortilla 6y ago
  You usually have to be the first mover and be willing to give them a number you’re looking for.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    This would limit your options, though.
    - d4mi3n 6y ago
      This limits options that are unwilling to meet your requirements; places you would have passed on due to insufficient salaries anyway. If you're willing to take lower salaries, lower your minimal salary requirements to receive more of them. Dictating salary reqs up front does two things: 1. Reduces time wasted on folks or orgs that don't want to pay your rate. 2. Immediately moves discussion away from a dance around salary to salary _negotiation_. Any good HR org that can't meet your salary reqs and still wants you will try to compensate in other ways (stocks, RSUs, benefits, bonuses, etc).

MattGaiser 6y ago

> Keeping those skills sharp even when you’re not job hunting. Can I just add "Leetcoder" as a part time job on my resume? It is amusing how in this industry, your ability to interview will not at all be improved by spending time doing your job unless it is algo heavy. It is a separate job entirely.

CobrastanJorji 6y ago
I've had this discussion during interviews as a disarming technique. Candidates will sometimes express nervousness at the beginning and say stuff like "I'm terrible at interviews" or "it's been a while since I've had to do this kind of programming," and I try to respond by making it clear that I understand that the whiteboard coding has very little in common with the actual job and that I'm not judging them, so when I dutifully proceed to ask them to invert a linked list, they hopefully don't feel as judged when they approach the problem. Seems to help at least a bit. Mind you, I'd prefer NOT asking those questions, but I'm not empowered to make that change at my workplace and I'm honestly not sure what I'd replace it with if I were.
- a_wild_dandan 6y ago
  > I'm honestly not sure what I'd replace it with if I were. Just to theorize: how about having the interviewee write a narrowly scoped toy project that's relevant to the position? (Edit: On site, as a replacement for white boarding.) A JS to-do app for a front-end engineer, for instance. Just a short thing you and the candidate can attack together in a couple hours. The candidate can write "normal" code, google things, clarify requirements, use their own architecture/patterns/style to reach the solution, etc. You could even add/change a requirement midway through the session, too. That would be realistic, and test for brittleness (and maybe be mean). I don't interview people, so this might be hopelessly naive, or maybe untenable for some types of positions. But that interview process strikes me as a far more representative microcosm of an actual job than regurgitating LeetCode solutions or hardcore algo arcana.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago

advpetc 6y ago

Another thing I found quite common in these people who can easily get a lot of great offers is that they keep writing things down, so that they never forget what they have learnt. A blog for digestions and summarizations is very usefully and can help a lot.

draw_down 6y ago

Interesting stuff. For the Bloomberg thing, I would probably view warily any company that offered so much to try to get me to join. I'd wonder why they need to try so hard to get people to join.

williesleg 6y ago

h1b helps too

Traster 6y ago

It always surprises me that these articles do so well on HN. I would assume the people who want to be in the corporate giants are, and the rest of us... don't want to be? No offence to Google, but I just don't want everything that comes with being at Google. As for the advice, I think the better, more general advice really should be "If you want a job at Google, make the people at Google want to work with you" - it's not difficult to understand what that means, you need to be smart, you need to be someone people want to work with. That's all. When people give the advice, oh well you need to be willing to learn? That's not advice for an interview - when you arrive on your first day you actually need to be willing to learn.

paxys 6y ago
> I would assume the people who want to be in the corporate giants are, and the rest of us... don't want to be? If that was the case then the Google interview would have a 100% success rate, when in reality it is ~0.2%.
- Traster 6y ago
  The success rate at Google has nothing to do with how many people on HN want to work there, and the artcile provides a pretty confounding factor - that 0.2% success rate includes people applying to interviews for practice. Personally I don't think that many people applying to Google are in that 99.8% because they don't know how to learn during an interivew, it's because their application got scrapped on review stage.

totaldude87 6y ago

I recently got interviewed by a FAANG company, and it was not a nice experience, it had like 4 hours of back to back interviews with 4 different people and couple of them didn't even bother.. on the technical side, I was asked questions that didn't even fit my profile :( . although am waiting for their response, regardless of whether i have cleared their "tech" rounds, at this point I dont even care about that interview anymore or their offer (if it did happen) :| so the fine print is, be attentive in the interviews and see whether "they" really care about you, and if you dont feel comfortable about other side, dont bother!

mercutio2 6y ago
If you're not up for four to eight hours of interviews (with a break or two, depending on how long the day is), asking the standard bank of questions, it doesn't sound like you're a good fit for a big tech company. But why did you bother applying? None of what you describe seems like it should have been a surprise.
- totaldude87 6y ago
  my point was not about 4 hours, its more like , if i spend 4 hours for you, least you can do is to look interested and make me feel like they need me (just like i need them )
  - ffhhj 6y ago
    Demotivated interviewers reflect the stress they deal with in those companies.
- moksly 6y ago
  I’ve been on the other side, and hired people, which means you sit through 8 hours of interviews. Sometimes days in a row. I also work as an external examiner for CS students, which again, mean that I sit through long days of tedious technical tests. I can’t imagine why you would ever want to subject candidates to that. It’s tiring enough when you’re not on the spot. I’ll typically spend the weekend or days leading up to such an ordeal in preparation, and when a day is over I’ll go home or to the hotel, do a few hours of prepping for the next round and then go straight to bed. Because you’re that spent. It would be ridiculous to expect a candidate to perform well, or show you anything about themselves, when the interviewer gets that busted. Because a candidate would have it much harder, especially if they are early in their careers. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to subject themselves to those sort of ordeals either. I realise that I’m Scandinavian, and that our interviews and hiring processes are very different from Silicon Valley, but all my interviews have been as much about the company/organisation selling itself to me as me selling myself to it. Well not for my first two jobs, but since then.

agustif 6y ago

I need to get a good software engineering job, BUT I'm tired of the take home projects, the 5 phase interviews just to drop you 1h before a final -not important just burecreacy-google meeting with the VP of Engineering, recuriter just tells you there's been some internal miss-communication on the roles they're hiring and they're not looking for frontend roles anymore, and they're sorry... Nevermind I'm pretty good at backend too with node/python and devops chops... I need to learn vue and nuxt for applying to a job now, It would take me 20% effort and time doing it in react/next but who cares... not the recuriters or companies..

syspec 6y ago
Not everyone can join the NFL either
- agustif 6y ago
  I'm not talking about FAANG here though, and yes I prob am not good enough for the position/company. Just saying that every interview I do / application I go through ends up with my noticing this little feeling that I maybe just am not wired to work for someone else...

dfilppi 6y ago

Great advice. Especially practice interviewing and keeping skills up. Alas, the interview barriers set up by many companies would leave them without staff if applied to their current employees.

redisman 6y ago

This doesn't really go against the Leetcode till you die advice. It's just assuming that you're baseline really good at Leetcode style questions so that you can focus on soft skills. I do not believe you can get a job in any top 100 company in this day and age without being able to regurgitate Leetcode mediums in your sleep. So yeah be nice to people and all that, but you also must pass the tech screen and the 3-4 Leetcode sessions.

hfkldjsjfkdj 6y ago

These blogs are just for procasinators to feel productive. If you landed the interview then it is just about practicing through a lot of questions. The time you finished reading this comment and this blog, some people out there have already completed a mock interview or a leetcode question. I wonder who made greater gains.

yudlejoza 6y ago
I agree with this. I would add, these holier-than-thou FAANG interviewers writing blog posts about how to clear a FAANG interview are actually bullshitters. They want to feel good about themselves. So they write. When push comes to shove, these same interviewers would clear the candidates who've pretty much memorized all the medium-level leetcode problems, but lie during the interview by claiming that they've never seen the problem before in their lives, but just happen to be "so good" they end up solving the whole thing in 30-35 minutes. P.S.: The non-tech part is not that hard. Just don't be a dick.
- xyzelement 6y ago
  >> P.S.: The non-tech part is not that hard. Just don't be a dick. This is probably true for junior roles but gets much more important for senior roles or ones where they are testing out your potential to take on greater responsibility shortly after joining. An answer to a vague behavioral question can make a ton of difference. EG: Question: Have you ever managed people? Answer A: Nope, always an individual contributor. Answer B: No, but at my last job I took ownership of a project that involved coordinating work of 50+ developers, UX people, QA, etc to deliver. Question A is technically correct and "not a dick" but if the person has it in them to figure out to provide answer B (assuming it's true) they are more likely to get a more senior job and make more money.
- jpmoral 6y ago
  You can argue that the advice is BS, but I don't detect any moralising in it.

slg 6y ago

>Learn to answer the more ambiguous questions This is something I have never done before my most recent job search but it has been a huge help. Previously all my interview prep was on tech and I pretty much winged it for the behavioral stuff since interview prep guides seem to always focus on the tech side. Plus it always feels worse and more obvious when you struggle with or fail to properly answer the tech questions. What I did is I prepared 10 different stories about my career experience and then tagged them with a bunch of prompts. For example I have a story about one project that had dual PMs that experienced a lot of scope creep and eventually fizzled on release. I can now use that story to answer a broad range of questions from failure to various project management approaches. Overall I now have prepared stories to answer probably 50-75 different questions immediately. Another benefit is that I have also told these stories multiple times in interviews now and I get better telling them each time. Even if the answer isn't 100% relevant, I feel more confident and likely come off better launching immediately into a detailed story about my experience rather than trying to awkwardly come up with an answer on the fly. It is also easy to drop irrelevant parts or expand on specific details when the basic framework of the story is already something that feels natural. I will even have the document with all the prompts and story bullet points open whenever I am doing phone or remote interviews. I could probably even create a cheat sheet to use for in person interviews since I usually would bring an executive style notepad with me anyway to interviews to jot down notes about the company. Maybe this is obvious advice, but I think I am relatively smart and never done it previously or even seen this approach recommend so I am guessing there are other people who could use this tip.

drchopchop 6y ago
I had to do a bunch of interviews recently and did something similar, multiple pages of notes with bullet points in a big font just out of view. Was very helpful for those moments where your brain just freezes up and you can't remember the perfect anecdote or systems architecture point you wanted to bring up. I do think it would work for actual on-site interviews as well, as it's common for a candidate to bring in their own notes of questions to ask, etc.
ZainRiz 6y ago
This is great advice. A single memorable event you went though tends to highlight many different skills, so having a few stories down well will let you answer most of those questions And what if it doesn't answer the interviewer's question perfectly? Their real goal was to try to get to know you better. The question was just a prompt to get a better signal about you, and you delivered above and beyond what was asked.

itronitron 6y ago

Worth noting that the author claims to get lots of job offers but is not able to "create an array" in a language of their choice from memory.

xyzelement 6y ago
I think you're saying this to dismiss the wisdom of the author. I think it's actually worth noting that you can be a very valuable developer and not remember minutiae. For example, in the last few days I wrote in C++, Python and JS. Do you think my fingers always typed the right type of bracket to create an array as I jumped between the languages? Who cares.
- itronitron 6y ago
  I am merely encouraging people that read the blog post to recognize that the author may be embellishing some points.
- throwaway80332 6y ago
  tis the same brackets tho
  - xyzelement 6y ago
    C++is {}

MauranKilom 6y ago

One important thing I want to note for chronic "interview preppers": The interviewer wants to get to know you, not the interview you! They want to understand what it would be like to work with you and how you tackle new problems. It is therefore of very little use to them if you just have boilerplate answers to throw back at behavioral questions and/or if you already know the answer to every technical problem off-hand. Assuming your job will involve creative problem solving struggle, displaying some of that in the interview is a bonus (although it's of course up to the interviewer to tailor the problems accordingly). You probably won't be rejected for doing too well on the technical part, but don't hide your personality and technical aptitude behind walls of preparation. > "Remember, never let them see you sweat" Vince told me. But when the stakes are low and you’re having fun, who sweats? This can backfire. It's great if you enjoy tackling the interview problems, and sincerity is great, but indifference is not a good look. > And as an interviewer, I can attest: sincere interest is always a good sign. Fully agreed.

disown 6y ago

> Your mad technical skills no longer matter to them. If anything, humility and an openness to learning will show you in the best light. Your technical skills no longer matter? So someone without technical skills, but the humility and willingness to learn is what they are looking for? Is that why these companies want CS graduates? Is that why they run interviewees through technical quizzes? How about technical skills are just as important, but also are humility and willingness to learn? How about they were always important? Since when were humility and willingness to learn not important in the tech industry? The guy just rehashed industry interview talking points that have been around forever. The only thing new in the articl is "technical skills no longer matter. Which is nonsense. Also, nothing more humble than bragging about getting offers from google, microsoft and stripe. That headline screams humility.

hnrodey 6y ago

Has anyone here pivoted from software engineer to software engineering recruiter? Curious or yours (or anyones for that matter) thoughts on this topic. It's a move I've considered just to keep my career interesting.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
draw_down 6y ago
Those are very different skill sets, I'd be surprised if that happened often. Not to mention the difference in pay...
xyzelement 6y ago
Closest I have come is managing a lot of recruiting (but still from the engineering side) and I know a few very senior folks who started their own headhunting firms - it's an obvious move given their vast network. I don't know for sure but I suspect most recruiters make a LOT less than the roles they are recruiting for, since generally the skills to make a good recruiter are easier available than those that make an engineer. If you want to broaden your career while getting more into dealing with humans rather than code, the obvious progressions are engineering management and perhaps product management.
- MakeUsersWant 6y ago
  The ability to hire good junior engineers is one of the things that set a good senior engineer apart. So you might want to practise being an interviewer, even if you don't go into recruiting.
- pbrb 6y ago
  I personally know an engineer who started his own recruiting firm and is making much, much more money than he did as an IC engineer. He also has built a business that he can sell one day.
  - hnrodey 6y ago

caffeine 6y ago

I think the most valuable thing to know about interviewing is: go in to interviews already holding a job offer. So to be clear I'm saying: interview at companies you don't like until you get an offer. THEN rush the recruiters at companies you do like to get you scheduled quickly, because you are holding an offer and they don't want to miss out. This lights recruiters and hiring managers on fire. It makes sure you have practiced enough to succeed. It destresses the interview for you since you have a backup. It is the ultimate and most powerful interviewing technique.

jawns 6y ago
> This lights recruiters and hiring managers on fire. Not always. Sometimes it has a repulsive effect. Like trying to score a first date when you're already flaunting the fact that you're engaged to someone else.
- chrisabrams 6y ago
  > Not always. Sometimes it has a repulsive effect. Like trying to score a first date when you're already flaunting the fact that you're engaged to someone else. In what universe is this an acceptable analogy for anything? Edit: Make sure to include the quote.
  - sieabahlpark 6y ago
    If you (a low quality candidate) run into a FANG company with a job offer from a no-name company _just_ to create pressure it's no different than the analogy. FANG doesn't want you before and they don't want you now, and they're also repulsed about the way you tried to get them to budge. Recruiters and hiring managers are people too and the secret in the industry is most people are not qualified for the work being hired. Hiring incurs risk and the interview is risk mitigation. So if some low end candidate comes in trying to light a fire under themselves they will burn twice as bright but dismissed in a quarter of time.
  - darkerside 6y ago
    Are you offended by the analogy in some way?

mv4 6y ago

I interviewed a lot last year at FAANG, and my biggest takeaway was that the recruiter is your friend. Understand what they are looking for and make their job easier - and they will be your biggest advocate. It helps to understand what their job is exactly (and their success metrics) depending on where you are in the process. For example, early on you may be dealing with a sourcer whose job is to fill the funnel with qualified leads - while later in the process you may be dealing with someone whose job is to close the deal (get you to accept that offer). Communication is key. Do not hesitate to ask for advice, for guidance every step of the way, and ask how you can make the process easier - and it will become easier for you.

angarg12 6y ago

> When you're in a real interview the world changes: You're locked in a cage with a lion. I got into interviewing this last year as an interviewer. I used to think (as most people do) that the interview is a confrontation between interviewer and candidate. However my biggest breakthrough happened when I changed my perspective. Now I see interviewers as detectives, gathering evidence of whether the candidate would be a good hire. So my advice to candidates is the following: don't think of the interviewer as the enemy. Usually they aren't trying to get you, but help you. And if that isn't the case, you don't want to work for that company anyway. Keep a friendly and relaxed conversation with the interviewer and you'll be surprise how far it can get you.

LASR 6y ago
I mentor interviewers at my job. Pretty much, every junior (< 3 years of experience) interviewer at first asks me what they should do if the candidate starts talking about something they know very little about. The interviewers are people too. They get nervous too sometimes. They too don’t want to look stupid when they’re having a conversation with the candidate. The first learning of interviewer training I try to solidify is that the interviewer is not intended to be the person who “knows the answers”. Candidates have specialized, deep knowledge in the specific areas they’ve worked on. How can an interviewer expect to know more than them? Experienced interviewers will know that they are there simply to facilitate the candidate in arriving at solutions to the problem.
FunnyLookinHat 6y ago
I like to view myself as an advocate for the candidate - work with them and help them to succeed in the interview. Through that process it's really easy to figure out if you are a good fit for each other or not.
baby 6y ago
Not all interviewers are like this unfortunately, many are elitist and only trying to find flaws in your way of thinking and approach.

deedubaya 6y ago

I wonder how many, if any, great software engineers simply let their careers stall out because they don't want to deal with the ceremony around tech hiring.

xyzelement 6y ago
Same kind of person who never finds a partner because of the "ceremony around" dating, I guess? In both situations, it's not like you're adding a commodity product to your Amazon shopping card. The matching is non-trivial and both parties have to recognize and commit to the effort-full process. To abstract your comment all the way out - how many people live well below their potential because they are too lazy or afraid to work and get something they really way?
- _qulr 6y ago
  > Same kind of person who never finds a partner because of the "ceremony around" dating, I guess? If dates were conducted like coding interviews — assuming the candidate is a liar and forcing them to prove in detail why they're not — you'd never get a second date. A job is supposed to be a voluntary, mutually advantageous relationship between two parties. So interviews ought to be kind of like dating, where you're trying to be as nice as possible and make a good impression. You don't give tests to a date, you just talk to them, get to know them. Employers too often assume that interviews are a one-way street, where the candidate wants the job no matter what and will do anything to get it. On the contrary, the candidate can walk away at any time, and the employer needs to woo the candidate just as much as the candidate needs to woo the employer.
  - xyzelement 6y ago
    >> Employers too often assume that interviews are a one-way street, where the candidate wants the job no matter what and will do anything to get it. On the contrary, the candidate can walk away at any time, and the employer needs to woo the candidate just as much as the candidate needs to woo the employer. I guess I am lucky but I never had (or gave) an interview of the former, so it DID feel like this: "On the contrary, the candidate can walk away at any time, and the employer needs to woo the candidate just as much as the candidate needs to woo the employer." Hence my comment. It sounds like you've interviewed at some shitty places or maybe underappreciated how much power you actually have.

edumucelli 6y ago

The same kind of articles over and over again with lots of text, but in reality everyone knows that in tech if you want a FAANG (and now extended to several other companies) job you better spend hours in Hackerrank/Leetcode. All the rest (except maybe Amazon with their "principles" thing) is a nice-to-have.

neyme 6y ago

I interviewed with FAANG twice this year, and both of them were rejections with zero feedback. The first one I thought went well, I had a two-way conversation with the Engineering Manager, but sadly I didn't hear back from the recruiter, so I assumed it was a rejection. The second time I cleared the initial screen question, then I had a coding question with two engineers. They gave me a problem, and I solved it but using a sub-optimal algorithm. I thought I'd done well, because it was a hard problem and the solution was not very far from the optimal one. Unfortunately, after two weeks and chasing the recruiter, I got the rejection that they went with someone else.

mnouquet 6y ago

I recently went through the process, it goes much better if you don't give a fuck and just go with the flow. Removing the stress helped tremendously.

x87678r 6y ago

How many interviews do people do a year? I've been in my job 5 years and the one before that 8, I've had 4 interviews in the last 10 years. I kinda feel at a big advantage for not job hopping. It seems some people interview a dozen times a year just as normal. Should I try to get 10 interviews just for practice before interviewing companies I really like?

msilb 6y ago
From my experience job hopping usually pays off (at least financially). Bumping your salary in the next job by 50% is not uncommon while may be much harder to achieve when staying at the same firm for years. As others have pointed out before, interviewing is a skill that can and should be practiced. The best way to prep (except grinding through leetcode problems) is to go to a real interview and practice telling real stories from experience and solving problems in real time under stress. So yeah, I would definitely recommend going to at least a few interviews for jobs that might not be your first choice before going for that “dream job” interview.

jcrites 6y ago

I've found that if you are transparent as recruiters and treat them as partners , sharing the offers you've gotten at other companies, they will reciprocate. At one of the Big Tech companies where I interviewed and they ultimately decided not to give me an offer (it was a near thing and I had other offers), the recruiter gave me tips about what other companies she was aware of that were paying well in my area (that I wasn't aware of). Your relationship with recruiters is more complicated and nuanced than the game-theory relationship would lead you to be believe. Maybe I could have gotten slightly better offers if I had used classic hardball negotiating tactics, but from colleagues, other recruiters, and other data sources, it looks like being transparent resulted in me getting top-of-market offers for my job role at the companies where I was interviewing and got offers. My philosophy is to interact with everyone as if I'm planning to join their team from the beginning, almost as if I'm already a team member. That entails among other things that if you're going to join someone's team then you'll interact with them with transparency and vice versa. During my recent round of interviews, I shared the ballpark details about all the offers I got and all the companies I was interviewing with with every company I was working with, and I was pleasantly surprised with the results. Recruiters would give me tips like "Competitor X's offer is likely to offer the highest compensation, but here are some reasons you should consider us", or "Offer Y from <other company> is a very good offer", all from recruiters at other companies. If I had been cagey I don't think I would have built relationships with recruiters where they'd share tips like that with me. I think a no-bullshit approach is refreshing and worth considering. The trick is being high demand as talent -- having multiple offers and being a desirable candidate for employers to hire. The recruiters that I recently worked with at all the big tech companies, pre-IPO tech companies, and startups were all very professional and I think I only benefited from treating them as partners in the profess of finding the best next job -- because the company and employee are looking for a mutual fit, after all. This resulted in me having a number of great offers (a few where I don't have details yet) that I'm currently in the process of deciding between. There might be really good negotiators who could do even better, but simply showing that you're high demand in the market was enough for me to get good offers from the companies I was working with who made them.

savorypiano 6y ago
I've had it happen multiple times where I tell a recruiter I'm looking for X but will go as low as Y, they simply told the company Y so it'd be easier to close the deal. Even if I specifically ask them not to say Y.

runawaybottle 6y ago

This article is out dated as of the year 2020 and soon to be 2021. It’s all Leetcode or bust and anyone telling you otherwise is straight lying to you.

vmception 6y ago

> (I wanted to learn the answer for future interviews!). This is the only advice that has ever helped me. Technical interviewers are unoriginal and looked up and use the top google result on "programming questions for X", especially for niche roles that the company is now just hiring for. Nowadays leetcode platforms can provide a more randomized set of problems for companies, but many many many teams and individuals will still just recycle. I recycle answers, which is ironically closer to what I would be expected to do for the company on a day to day basis than an original answer to any academic problems.

vmception 6y ago

> What hadn't occurred to me at the time is that C# is a very verbose language which Visual Studio beautifully automates away the tedious parts of. This online IDE automated nothing. That's pretty much why I use Javascript in interviews Writing on the board or in an online IDE Its just the gaslighting is annoying, in most contexts that's called toxic. "We don't care which language you use .... ooooh you used Javascript we code in this other thing"

Aller 6y ago

Taking interview advice from a software engineer with decades of experience is like taking advice from a beauty model on how to use Tinder...

kushalns5 6y ago

It's quite interesting how irrelevant interview skills are to the actual job.