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Crush Your Interviews with the Power of Storytelling

171 points by jseliger 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rightbyte 3y ago
"For interviews, it's not what you've done, it's how you explain what you've done." Ye no. Just no. Any interview advice that is not some general "behave and for God's sake hide your flaws" or meta discussion how to game them are bad. "[Example] We needed to remove the cancellation feature because customers were confused by the self-service cancellation function." Haha ... ye that is a funny example but I don't know if it was on purpose. Show how you are able to delude yourself into doing enshittification is probably a good advice for many positions.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  Behave and hide your flaws is terrible advice.
  - ponector 3y ago
    Why? It is a good advice which can help to get a better position, higher salary, etc.
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      It’s not good advice. You have two goals during an interview: make someone like you and convey confidence in the stuff you’re being asked to do. “Behave and hide flaws” sounds like the advice of the most utterly fungible candidate for a low skill or entry level job. You should be trying to have an enjoyable conversation.
      - ponector 3y ago
        What are the chances that someone will like you if you're not behave and show your flaws?
        financltravsty 3y ago
        High if they value sincerity, and your flaws aren't "I'm a psycho" or something that's completely within your control to fix.
        ponector 3y ago
        I has different experience during many rounds of interviews, especially for big companies. Hiring managers want you to be sincere, but would lie to you many times during the process. No one will tell truth like: we are looking for person who likes overtime, will work under psycho manager and with 10-years old legacy application.
        jncfhnb 3y ago
        Perhaps that’s because you’re interviewing yourself into grunt positions that don’t require social skills in interviews.
        jncfhnb 3y ago
        Behaving is not something you should need advice for. Yes, you should “behave”. Don’t shit your pants either. But if anyone comes out of an interview and says “well that guy was well behaved” I’m going to have a very unimpressed opinion. You should 100% be comfortable showing your flaws.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    Most are not in the position to behave like divas. You got like 1s to guess what the interviewer wants you to be. Like, if he has dreadlocks you probably don't want to be uptight and stiff etc. So it always depends on the situation of course, but on average "behave and hide your flaws" is probably best.
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      I feel like you’re saying “like a diva” to mean basic social skills
  - lionkor 3y ago
    Its great advice if you have no idea what youre doing and have been cheating/faking your way in mostly. When you really dont have any idea, keeping silent and applying what little you know could get you that job. I've seen people who are pretending to know what theyre talking about say the most crazy shit when asked casually about something they did - like "my UI might be laggy because the server is slow" (the ui was completely clientside and offline). It would have been better if he had shut up because his UI was fine.
- siegecraft 3y ago
  does this article not qualify as "meta discussion of how to game them"?
wnzl 3y ago
And what story should you tell when someone comes at you with whiteboard coding challenge?
- lionkor 3y ago
  "Funny that you ask me about this problem! One time, my brother, who is now out of state, had a similar problem and came to me. He said: "I have these numbers, and every time theyre a multiple of 3 or 5..."
- maeln 3y ago
  Ye. Story telling is important for the non-technical part of interviews (although some technical interview do benefit from some story telling). It won't save you from having to cram leetcode for days.
- xnorswap 3y ago
  I tell them "Hey, I've used this question before when I'm interviewing developers" (often not true, but what's a little white lie), then explain what I'm looking for in a developer when asking those kind of questions. It makes the point that while those kind of coding challenges could be a useful filter or signal, it also stresses that I'm looking for a senior developer role and that perhaps time would be better spent assessing that part of my skill-set. I also had an interview where I joked, "You're not going to ask me to define SOLID are you?". The interviewer sheepishly replied that they only ask that if the person puts it on their CV, before scrambling for a different question to ask.
  - DeathArrow 3y ago
    > I tell them "Hey, I've used this question before when I'm interviewing developers" (often not true, but what's a little white lie), then explain what I'm looking for in a developer when asking those kind of questions. I would thank you for that and I would ask you to kindly do the code challenge.
- shalmanese 3y ago
  People on both sides of the table have the common misconception that coding challenges are about solving the problem. They're not, coding challenges are there for me to gain an insight into how you think through problems and the questions you ask are 100x more important to me than the code you write. I have a colleague who, every coding challenge, immediately started by writing a bunch of tests and asking questions around the edge cases so that he could clarify the exact specs of the task he was being asked to perform. Any interviewer who didn't roll with that was a sign to him that there probably wasn't an engineering maturity culture fit and helped eliminate a lot of companies. The story he was trying to tell was that he was an engineer that considered understanding the problem to be a much more important task than understanding the solution and he managed to tell it via the way he approached whiteboard coding.
personjerry 3y ago
Seems to be an ad to subscribe to the newsletter?
WA 3y ago
The gist of the whole thing is this: > I'm not talking about making things entertaining. But it does matter how you phrase things. You can mistakenly make a complex thing sound simple, and you can make a simple thing sound complex. Which is obviously true. Storytelling might be a way to deliver that message more clearly in some cases. But to be honest, the sections where the author starts to tell a story, I just glanced over. Storytelling is overrated – in interviews, in marketing, in non-fictional books. Clear communication is key.
- DeathArrow 3y ago
  >Storytelling is overrated – in interviews, in marketing, in non-fictional books. >Clear communication is key. That is dependant on what you are trying to achieve.
- taveras 3y ago
  Narrative and clear communication aren’t mutually exclusive, but they are difficult to balance. Storytelling is a skill.
- yitchelle 3y ago
  The audience must be factored in when crafting the story. Because it dictates aspects of it. the language used, the embellishments added/removed, delivery method, the actors etc must be carefully crafted. Some stories are short and straight to the point. I had a colleague where if the analogies are used to as part of the story told, the message is not full understood by him.
lstamour 3y ago
If you like the idea behind this advice, have a look at The Job Seeker’s Script by Judith Humphrey. If you want to read it before buying (or borrowing) it, have a look at some of the articles on fastcompany.com that excerpt parts of the book, particularly the hiring/career articles: https://www.fastcompany.com/user/judith-humphrey https://www.fastcompany.com/user/judith-humphrey If you want a bit of an “audiobook” version of it, you can hear parts in https://on.soundcloud.com/bAzbHeMJCC8CNhNk7 https://on.soundcloud.com/bAzbHeMJCC8CNhNk7 which is a podcast featuring the author.
shalmanese 3y ago
The absolutely low hangingest fruit, highest ROI activity I recommend every candidate do as they're gearing up for a job search is to meticulously go through their past work history month by month or even week by week and dredge up the memories of all the things they've actually done leading up to this point in their career and then find another person and do the physical act of explaining each of the things so they know if they can even tell the story in a way that makes sense or not. The reason I believe it's the highest ROI activity is because I keep on suggesting it to people and most people think it's a great idea and then they don't do it. It's gotten to the point where, for the people I really care about, I have to schedule a 3 hour block with them on a weekend and sit down with them just to actually have them do it and after it happens, everyone agrees the result is transformative but people have a weirdly high activation friction to actually doing this. It should get to the point where I can quiz you on a "tell me of an example where you X" and they should be able to rapid fire answer back to me what example they would pick and we can do a round of 30 of these in 10 minutes. If they find themselves having an esprit de l'escalier moment of wishing they had picked different examples, that's a sign they should go back and revise more. I have so many friends who have done so many awesome things in their career but then freeze up in the interview and just plain forget to mention the perfect relevant anecdote and they think it's some defect on them but, surprise, all of our recall is terrible and we all constantly forget details of things that happened years ago and the only way to get good is with discipline and practice. Another technique I encourage every candidate to master is the classic politician technique of transforming every question into the question you wished the interviewer had asked in a seamless enough way that they don't notice. eg: One of my close friends who I coached was absolutely terrible at hypothetical scenarios, she would totally freeze up because that's not how her brain worked. I trained her so that whenever an interviewer asked: "How would you design this theoretical feature for this made up example" Her templated reply would go something along the lines of: "Oh yeah, we faced quite a similar problem when I was working on [...] at [...]. The way I approached it was [...] because [...] and it meant that [...] for [...] stakeholders. So I guess in this scenario, I would apply those same techniques [...] to make sure that [...] met [...]'s requirements. At the end of the day, we're generally all in denial about how much interviews come down to vibes and how vibes is a very trainable skill that it's very possible to reduce the error rate through practice (note: this is different from presenting a different vibe from how you actually are IRL which I generally advise people is long term counter productive). Engineers especially have a lot of emotion invested in how interviews "should" be that isn't at all concordant with any version of reality and they have hangups about investing skillpoints in things that empirically improve their interview performance because it goes against their mental model of what should improve their interview performance.
DeathArrow 3y ago
It's exactly what I do. I always try to bring the interviewer on a territory I am comfortable with and paint myself in a good light. If you seem hesitant, if you seem unsure about what you did and why, it's not good. Why should an employer trust you with the job if even you don't trust yourself that much. From two people, one with lower technical skills but with good people skills, projecting trust and confidence, the other with better technical skills, the former will almost always win the job. Employers want wheels that work well with other wheels and turn fast.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- rustybolt 3y ago
  > If you seem hesitant, if you seem unsure about what you did and why, it's not good. No, god forbid someone actually thinks about what they say before they say something.
  - DeathArrow 3y ago
    You can think while saying something, making a little intro.
  - runlaszlorun 3y ago
    I actually remember hearing something here about people who stop and pause to think for a few seconds being rated higher.
  - loup-vaillant 3y ago
    There’s a difference between hesitating and pausing to think. Perhaps not internally, but in body language. In some ways they’re even polar opposites: hesitations are involuntary and make you look weak, while pausing to think can help you control the pace of the conversation, and (if not overdone) can grant you some authority. The timing is very important: if you pause in the middle of a sentence that generally feels like a hesitation. If you pause before you start answering, then it’s all fluid, that’s pausing to think.
- 3y ago
bambax 3y ago
All true! But not limited to interviewing. Most human interactions rely on some form of storytelling. He who controls the story often control the outcome. Storytelling is how we understand the world. Is this overused? Sure. Do many articles start with the same couple of sentences, so much so as to become ridiculous? Sure. Is the New Yorker one of the greatest offenders? Sure. But we can't do without story. It's not just that stories are interesting; it's that, if there's no story, we often cannot understand what is being said.
- wouterjanl 3y ago
  On topic, this is a really cool New Yorker story making a case against story telling https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/10/seduced-by-story-peter-brooks-bewitching-the-modern-mind-christian-salmon-the-story-paradox-jonathan-gottschall-book-review https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/10/seduced-by-sto...
  - hyperthesis 3y ago
    "Story" covers a lot. But "x causes y" is the barest story, and also literally how we understand the world.
    - mistermann 3y ago
      More often in my experience "x causes y" is how people misunderstand the world. "x causes y" is true in physics, but it is almost never true in metaphysics (anything involving humans). Trying to explain deeper complexities of metaphysical causality in a logical or scientific way almost always is rejected with a story, and higher base intelligence or a science background tends to amplify the problem rather than reduce it. More cognitive power = better, more persuasive stories I guess?
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
  > it's that, if there's no story, we often cannot understand what is being said. There's an interesting corollary here to the mundane art of stakeholder management: One of the first things you learn in this art form is that, if you don't provide a story, people make up their own. Ten people can look at the same stew of random events and come up with 10-20 different stories about what's happening and why. I'd say it's not just that stories are interesting; it's that we manufacture stories as a way of parsing and compressing the world into something understandable.
eterevsky 3y ago
As an interviewer, when I rate the candidate that I just interviewed, I will take into account how good the candidate is at communication, but it wouldn't be a decisive factor. The decisive factor would be whether they solved the problem and wrote good-quality code. If you have extra N hours to prepare for an engineering interview, I think spending them on practicing problem-solving and coding would be more efficient than practicing storytelling. If you are already pretty good at interview problems, it might be valuable to invest a bit of time into communication. Doing a mock interview or two would be good way to do it.
- boringds 3y ago
  I'd like to add that while you are right for engineering, for certain analytics roles communication would be the decisive factor I'd consider (granted of course the candidate knows how to use SQL and got decent scripting skills). The reason is most of our job as analytics engineers is communication and translating stakeholders business problems.
  - eterevsky 3y ago
    Of course, I should've started with this. Different jobs require different amount of communication skills.
    - boringds 3y ago
      Absolutely. I wasn't taking a jab at your comment, just adding my experience. Thanks for sharing your point of view!
  - chiefalchemist 3y ago
    > translating stakeholders business problems. To clarify a bit, cause it matters. This is more of a listening skill, and then an analytical skill. Mind you listening is half (or more?) of good comms. But evaluating listening is 10x more difficult than speaking or writing. The latter two are not a proxy for the former.
- crossroadsguy 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
DeathArrow 3y ago
Now let's say I am responsible for hiring. Obviously, I can't hire a person with no skills, or I would be in trouble. But given a developer with a decent skill set, which is an agreeable person, shows will and passion and he is determined to make things work, and a person with just better technical skills, I would chose the first. Because for me and my colleagues the interactions matter and having a smooth process also matters.
- cesaref 3y ago
  Agreed. If you stick to the 'smart and gets things done' mantra when hiring, lots of things like 'better skills' are trumped by the idea that if they are smart, they'll pick up the skills they need.
chiefalchemist 3y ago
Am I the only one who is more than tired of storytelling as panacea trope? Yes, it has value. Yes, it appeals to humans. No, it's not a substitute for substance. As a tool, it has its place. But please stop using it as a euphemism for "When you lack substance in the moment, then baffle'em with bullshit."
nicman23 3y ago
this thread is why the tech space is in such a shit phase. dev skills will always be better in the long run. i am not suggesting that you hire a shit person. i am suggesting you do not know how to recognize talent.
- hooverd 3y ago
  sure, but being able to communicate well is also a dev skill.
cgio 3y ago
Maybe it’s just my way of thinking, but the best stories to tell in an interview are not the ones that describe a work related incident. It is the story that links something irrelevant but deeply relatable with a concept to make an unexpected argument. The metaphors are much more powerful and succinct than an embellished or even erudite recollection. It’s like if you hack an established belief to ride your message on its patterns.
nickjj 3y ago
Has anyone encountered someone who was poor at both verbal and written communication but turned out to be excellent at designing and writing maintainable code? Maintainable code in this case would be a combination of using clear and easy to reason about logic, good names for everything, creating useful non-leaky abstractions, no major performance issues, thoughtful and extensive test cases, good documentation, etc..
- schwartzworld 3y ago
  Yes, lots of people in the industry have English as a second language.
- williamdclt 3y ago
  Yes, It's not too uncommon to see devs producing good software, but struggling to communicate on a less-technical level, either with non-technical people or with technical people who aren't familiar with the specific subject/domain at hand
  - mewpmewp2 3y ago
    Yeah, actually it could be the case, where someone who is so deep into what they are doing, they don't understand how everyone else doesn't understand the intricacies and so they end up explaining and communicating in a way that others don't understand. Even though it is said that if you can't explain a concept to a child, you don't really understand it, but I think there still can be cases in which you are so deep in there, you have hard time grasping what is the best way to make it simple for others considering their understanding. Especially if you have been working around other people who are deep there and now you are put into a group where people have completely different levels of understanding. It's sometimes easy to assume that something is common knowledge when it really is not, because it seems so natural to yourself. And obviously I have faced it the other way in different fields where I absolutely lack all the knowledge and they start to use terms I am clueless about, but I feel stupid about asking about each term because they talk in a way that it seems they think it's so obvious that I should know.
- wizerdrobe 3y ago
lnsru 3y ago
I had many many technical interviews this year. Nobody wanted to listen to my stories. I got a technical task and needed to solve it. From explaining steps in Visual Studio on paper how to create a functional hello world GUI. To some crazy undefined system design tasks. The single story I was allowed to tell was my introduction. I never experienced an interview where somebody wanted to do something else than assess my technical skills.
- mewpmewp2 3y ago
  I think there can be good stories that capture interest, however you should use some sort of method to first test the waters whether this sort of story would be interesting to the other party. Reading the blog post, the story about tripping due to bad shoes to me would be a turn off to hear. Because are they going to tell this story from out of nowhere? If they started off with "I had a crazy scare today, I almost slipped and fell walking high up.", I might appreciate it more since I can choose myself then to ask whether I want to hear more details about the story. Otherwise the story just takes up too much time and it's not polite to interrupt them. It's a risky investment of time that the other party might not appreciate or care for. Of course it depends on the personality of the person who you are telling the story to. Some people definitely may appreciate the detailed visuals etc, but to me when someone ends up with a long winded answer, I tend to think "man, they could've just summed all of this information up with one sentence".
  - maroonblazer 3y ago
    I took the story as simply an example of the difference between an interesting vs uninteresting anecdote. I think it's implicit in the article that the story you choose to tell is relevant to the interview situation you're in.
    - mewpmewp2 3y ago
      Yes, however still to me people sometimes will talk too much, when it would be much better where they are concise at first and I can ask immediate interactive follow ups about the details. Interview is such a limited time so to me it seems most efficient to have a dialogue out of the box. Or they should at least make pauses to give opportunity for cuts. I don't want to listen to prose someone studied word by word. I don't need to "feel" the challenge as the author said. I need to be able to figure out during 1 hour the problem solving capability of the candidate. If they spend unnecessarily much time on stories, I would be concerned whether they are a bser and want to limit my ability to ask questions as the time runs out.
CoachRufus87 3y ago
I think many folks are missing the fact that Dave's blog is largely targeted towards those in leadership, in which story telling/selling is an _essential_ skill.
ineptech 3y ago
I think this is extremely good advice so I'm making a top-level comment to defend it and respond to some of the criticisms in this thread. First, no one is asking you to lie. This isn't about inventing details or exagerrating. This is about deciding how to answer and phrasing your answer. Second, "story" in this case means personal anecdote, like the author's hiking example. It is not very closely related to stories in books or games or whatever. What can we say about the stories you tell casually at parties or with friends? Probably that they take less than two minutes, they start with an interesting hook, and they include a problem of some kind and the resolution to that problem. That's what your interview stories should look like. Ex: Suppose you are asked, "Tell me about a time when you had a disagreement with a coworker and how you resolved it". Compare these two answers: 1) "One time I had a coworker that kind of hated me. I'm not sure what his deal was, we didn't interact all that much and I thought his work was pretty good, but he developed a personal animus towards me and started being rude and picking fights with me on Slack. He ended up getting fired after he threw eggs at my car." 2) "I was leading the effort to fix the critical-but-brittle X service, and I wanted to start by wrapping it in a service with modern deploy and test automation, so we could at least deploy it safely while we fixed it. However, the lead architect was opposed to that plan, because of Y. We worked through it by getting all of the stakeholders together and doing Z. Which answer is more true? The first one might feel more honest. After all, the "disagreement with a coworker" part is much more central to answer 1 than answer 2. But it's also a terrible answer, because it has fuck all to do with your abilities. It's just a thing that happened to you that happens to meet the criteria the question asked for, but is otherwise not relevant.
- ineptech 3y ago
  tl;dr of my comment and of the whole article: a) think of the 3-5 best things you've done recently at work b) practice describing them to a friend (you don't work with) the way you'd tell any other personal anecdote c) When asked a behavioral "Tell me about a time when" question, instead of trying to comb through your memory of the thousands of experiences you've had at work, just ask yourself which of your 3-5 stories is closest, and tell it d) if that feels dishonest (and it does to a lot of people!) remember that the whole point of an interview is for you to tell them how great you are. If they knew you had led the effort to fix the critical-but-brittle X service, they would've asked you. They asked a vague open-ended question to give you the latitude to answer however you see fit.
natbennett 3y ago
If storytelling isn’t part of your interviewing process you are absolutely leaving value on the table. You would be wasting less time interviewing & get better outcomes if you improved your path to getting into the interview. Ideally you have a conversation with the hiring manager before you even enter the formal hiring process and storytelling should absolutely be part of that conversation. The story is “why you want to hire me specifically.”

171 points by jseliger 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

"For interviews, it's not what you've done, it's how you explain what you've done." Ye no. Just no. Any interview advice that is not some general "behave and for God's sake hide your flaws" or meta discussion how to game them are bad. "[Example] We needed to remove the cancellation feature because customers were confused by the self-service cancellation function." Haha ... ye that is a funny example but I don't know if it was on purpose. Show how you are able to delude yourself into doing enshittification is probably a good advice for many positions.

jncfhnb 3y ago
Behave and hide your flaws is terrible advice.
- ponector 3y ago
  Why? It is a good advice which can help to get a better position, higher salary, etc.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    It’s not good advice. You have two goals during an interview: make someone like you and convey confidence in the stuff you’re being asked to do. “Behave and hide flaws” sounds like the advice of the most utterly fungible candidate for a low skill or entry level job. You should be trying to have an enjoyable conversation.
    - ponector 3y ago
      What are the chances that someone will like you if you're not behave and show your flaws?
      - financltravsty 3y ago
        High if they value sincerity, and your flaws aren't "I'm a psycho" or something that's completely within your control to fix.
        ponector 3y ago
        I has different experience during many rounds of interviews, especially for big companies. Hiring managers want you to be sincere, but would lie to you many times during the process. No one will tell truth like: we are looking for person who likes overtime, will work under psycho manager and with 10-years old legacy application.
        jncfhnb 3y ago
        Perhaps that’s because you’re interviewing yourself into grunt positions that don’t require social skills in interviews.
      - jncfhnb 3y ago
        Behaving is not something you should need advice for. Yes, you should “behave”. Don’t shit your pants either. But if anyone comes out of an interview and says “well that guy was well behaved” I’m going to have a very unimpressed opinion. You should 100% be comfortable showing your flaws.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  Most are not in the position to behave like divas. You got like 1s to guess what the interviewer wants you to be. Like, if he has dreadlocks you probably don't want to be uptight and stiff etc. So it always depends on the situation of course, but on average "behave and hide your flaws" is probably best.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    I feel like you’re saying “like a diva” to mean basic social skills
- lionkor 3y ago
  Its great advice if you have no idea what youre doing and have been cheating/faking your way in mostly. When you really dont have any idea, keeping silent and applying what little you know could get you that job. I've seen people who are pretending to know what theyre talking about say the most crazy shit when asked casually about something they did - like "my UI might be laggy because the server is slow" (the ui was completely clientside and offline). It would have been better if he had shut up because his UI was fine.
siegecraft 3y ago
does this article not qualify as "meta discussion of how to game them"?

wnzl 3y ago

And what story should you tell when someone comes at you with whiteboard coding challenge?

lionkor 3y ago
"Funny that you ask me about this problem! One time, my brother, who is now out of state, had a similar problem and came to me. He said: "I have these numbers, and every time theyre a multiple of 3 or 5..."
maeln 3y ago
Ye. Story telling is important for the non-technical part of interviews (although some technical interview do benefit from some story telling). It won't save you from having to cram leetcode for days.
xnorswap 3y ago
I tell them "Hey, I've used this question before when I'm interviewing developers" (often not true, but what's a little white lie), then explain what I'm looking for in a developer when asking those kind of questions. It makes the point that while those kind of coding challenges could be a useful filter or signal, it also stresses that I'm looking for a senior developer role and that perhaps time would be better spent assessing that part of my skill-set. I also had an interview where I joked, "You're not going to ask me to define SOLID are you?". The interviewer sheepishly replied that they only ask that if the person puts it on their CV, before scrambling for a different question to ask.
- DeathArrow 3y ago
  > I tell them "Hey, I've used this question before when I'm interviewing developers" (often not true, but what's a little white lie), then explain what I'm looking for in a developer when asking those kind of questions. I would thank you for that and I would ask you to kindly do the code challenge.
shalmanese 3y ago
People on both sides of the table have the common misconception that coding challenges are about solving the problem. They're not, coding challenges are there for me to gain an insight into how you think through problems and the questions you ask are 100x more important to me than the code you write. I have a colleague who, every coding challenge, immediately started by writing a bunch of tests and asking questions around the edge cases so that he could clarify the exact specs of the task he was being asked to perform. Any interviewer who didn't roll with that was a sign to him that there probably wasn't an engineering maturity culture fit and helped eliminate a lot of companies. The story he was trying to tell was that he was an engineer that considered understanding the problem to be a much more important task than understanding the solution and he managed to tell it via the way he approached whiteboard coding.

personjerry 3y ago

Seems to be an ad to subscribe to the newsletter?

WA 3y ago

The gist of the whole thing is this: > I'm not talking about making things entertaining. But it does matter how you phrase things. You can mistakenly make a complex thing sound simple, and you can make a simple thing sound complex. Which is obviously true. Storytelling might be a way to deliver that message more clearly in some cases. But to be honest, the sections where the author starts to tell a story, I just glanced over. Storytelling is overrated – in interviews, in marketing, in non-fictional books. Clear communication is key.

DeathArrow 3y ago
>Storytelling is overrated – in interviews, in marketing, in non-fictional books. >Clear communication is key. That is dependant on what you are trying to achieve.
taveras 3y ago
Narrative and clear communication aren’t mutually exclusive, but they are difficult to balance. Storytelling is a skill.
yitchelle 3y ago
The audience must be factored in when crafting the story. Because it dictates aspects of it. the language used, the embellishments added/removed, delivery method, the actors etc must be carefully crafted. Some stories are short and straight to the point. I had a colleague where if the analogies are used to as part of the story told, the message is not full understood by him.

lstamour 3y ago

If you like the idea behind this advice, have a look at The Job Seeker’s Script by Judith Humphrey. If you want to read it before buying (or borrowing) it, have a look at some of the articles on fastcompany.com that excerpt parts of the book, particularly the hiring/career articles: https://www.fastcompany.com/user/judith-humphrey https://www.fastcompany.com/user/judith-humphrey If you want a bit of an “audiobook” version of it, you can hear parts in https://on.soundcloud.com/bAzbHeMJCC8CNhNk7 https://on.soundcloud.com/bAzbHeMJCC8CNhNk7 which is a podcast featuring the author.

shalmanese 3y ago

The absolutely low hangingest fruit, highest ROI activity I recommend every candidate do as they're gearing up for a job search is to meticulously go through their past work history month by month or even week by week and dredge up the memories of all the things they've actually done leading up to this point in their career and then find another person and do the physical act of explaining each of the things so they know if they can even tell the story in a way that makes sense or not. The reason I believe it's the highest ROI activity is because I keep on suggesting it to people and most people think it's a great idea and then they don't do it. It's gotten to the point where, for the people I really care about, I have to schedule a 3 hour block with them on a weekend and sit down with them just to actually have them do it and after it happens, everyone agrees the result is transformative but people have a weirdly high activation friction to actually doing this. It should get to the point where I can quiz you on a "tell me of an example where you X" and they should be able to rapid fire answer back to me what example they would pick and we can do a round of 30 of these in 10 minutes. If they find themselves having an esprit de l'escalier moment of wishing they had picked different examples, that's a sign they should go back and revise more. I have so many friends who have done so many awesome things in their career but then freeze up in the interview and just plain forget to mention the perfect relevant anecdote and they think it's some defect on them but, surprise, all of our recall is terrible and we all constantly forget details of things that happened years ago and the only way to get good is with discipline and practice. Another technique I encourage every candidate to master is the classic politician technique of transforming every question into the question you wished the interviewer had asked in a seamless enough way that they don't notice. eg: One of my close friends who I coached was absolutely terrible at hypothetical scenarios, she would totally freeze up because that's not how her brain worked. I trained her so that whenever an interviewer asked: "How would you design this theoretical feature for this made up example" Her templated reply would go something along the lines of: "Oh yeah, we faced quite a similar problem when I was working on [...] at [...]. The way I approached it was [...] because [...] and it meant that [...] for [...] stakeholders. So I guess in this scenario, I would apply those same techniques [...] to make sure that [...] met [...]'s requirements. At the end of the day, we're generally all in denial about how much interviews come down to vibes and how vibes is a very trainable skill that it's very possible to reduce the error rate through practice (note: this is different from presenting a different vibe from how you actually are IRL which I generally advise people is long term counter productive). Engineers especially have a lot of emotion invested in how interviews "should" be that isn't at all concordant with any version of reality and they have hangups about investing skillpoints in things that empirically improve their interview performance because it goes against their mental model of what should improve their interview performance.

DeathArrow 3y ago

It's exactly what I do. I always try to bring the interviewer on a territory I am comfortable with and paint myself in a good light. If you seem hesitant, if you seem unsure about what you did and why, it's not good. Why should an employer trust you with the job if even you don't trust yourself that much. From two people, one with lower technical skills but with good people skills, projecting trust and confidence, the other with better technical skills, the former will almost always win the job. Employers want wheels that work well with other wheels and turn fast.

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rustybolt 3y ago
> If you seem hesitant, if you seem unsure about what you did and why, it's not good. No, god forbid someone actually thinks about what they say before they say something.
- DeathArrow 3y ago
  You can think while saying something, making a little intro.
- runlaszlorun 3y ago
  I actually remember hearing something here about people who stop and pause to think for a few seconds being rated higher.
- loup-vaillant 3y ago
  There’s a difference between hesitating and pausing to think. Perhaps not internally, but in body language. In some ways they’re even polar opposites: hesitations are involuntary and make you look weak, while pausing to think can help you control the pace of the conversation, and (if not overdone) can grant you some authority. The timing is very important: if you pause in the middle of a sentence that generally feels like a hesitation. If you pause before you start answering, then it’s all fluid, that’s pausing to think.
3y ago

bambax 3y ago

All true! But not limited to interviewing. Most human interactions rely on some form of storytelling. He who controls the story often control the outcome. Storytelling is how we understand the world. Is this overused? Sure. Do many articles start with the same couple of sentences, so much so as to become ridiculous? Sure. Is the New Yorker one of the greatest offenders? Sure. But we can't do without story. It's not just that stories are interesting; it's that, if there's no story, we often cannot understand what is being said.

wouterjanl 3y ago
On topic, this is a really cool New Yorker story making a case against story telling https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/10/seduced-by-story-peter-brooks-bewitching-the-modern-mind-christian-salmon-the-story-paradox-jonathan-gottschall-book-review https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/10/seduced-by-sto...
- hyperthesis 3y ago
  "Story" covers a lot. But "x causes y" is the barest story, and also literally how we understand the world.
  - mistermann 3y ago
    More often in my experience "x causes y" is how people misunderstand the world. "x causes y" is true in physics, but it is almost never true in metaphysics (anything involving humans). Trying to explain deeper complexities of metaphysical causality in a logical or scientific way almost always is rejected with a story, and higher base intelligence or a science background tends to amplify the problem rather than reduce it. More cognitive power = better, more persuasive stories I guess?
q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
> it's that, if there's no story, we often cannot understand what is being said. There's an interesting corollary here to the mundane art of stakeholder management: One of the first things you learn in this art form is that, if you don't provide a story, people make up their own. Ten people can look at the same stew of random events and come up with 10-20 different stories about what's happening and why. I'd say it's not just that stories are interesting; it's that we manufacture stories as a way of parsing and compressing the world into something understandable.

eterevsky 3y ago

As an interviewer, when I rate the candidate that I just interviewed, I will take into account how good the candidate is at communication, but it wouldn't be a decisive factor. The decisive factor would be whether they solved the problem and wrote good-quality code. If you have extra N hours to prepare for an engineering interview, I think spending them on practicing problem-solving and coding would be more efficient than practicing storytelling. If you are already pretty good at interview problems, it might be valuable to invest a bit of time into communication. Doing a mock interview or two would be good way to do it.

boringds 3y ago
I'd like to add that while you are right for engineering, for certain analytics roles communication would be the decisive factor I'd consider (granted of course the candidate knows how to use SQL and got decent scripting skills). The reason is most of our job as analytics engineers is communication and translating stakeholders business problems.
- eterevsky 3y ago
  Of course, I should've started with this. Different jobs require different amount of communication skills.
  - boringds 3y ago
    Absolutely. I wasn't taking a jab at your comment, just adding my experience. Thanks for sharing your point of view!
- chiefalchemist 3y ago
  > translating stakeholders business problems. To clarify a bit, cause it matters. This is more of a listening skill, and then an analytical skill. Mind you listening is half (or more?) of good comms. But evaluating listening is 10x more difficult than speaking or writing. The latter two are not a proxy for the former.
crossroadsguy 3y ago

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DeathArrow 3y ago

Now let's say I am responsible for hiring. Obviously, I can't hire a person with no skills, or I would be in trouble. But given a developer with a decent skill set, which is an agreeable person, shows will and passion and he is determined to make things work, and a person with just better technical skills, I would chose the first. Because for me and my colleagues the interactions matter and having a smooth process also matters.

cesaref 3y ago
Agreed. If you stick to the 'smart and gets things done' mantra when hiring, lots of things like 'better skills' are trumped by the idea that if they are smart, they'll pick up the skills they need.

chiefalchemist 3y ago

Am I the only one who is more than tired of storytelling as panacea trope? Yes, it has value. Yes, it appeals to humans. No, it's not a substitute for substance. As a tool, it has its place. But please stop using it as a euphemism for "When you lack substance in the moment, then baffle'em with bullshit."

nicman23 3y ago

this thread is why the tech space is in such a shit phase. dev skills will always be better in the long run. i am not suggesting that you hire a shit person. i am suggesting you do not know how to recognize talent.

hooverd 3y ago
sure, but being able to communicate well is also a dev skill.

cgio 3y ago

Maybe it’s just my way of thinking, but the best stories to tell in an interview are not the ones that describe a work related incident. It is the story that links something irrelevant but deeply relatable with a concept to make an unexpected argument. The metaphors are much more powerful and succinct than an embellished or even erudite recollection. It’s like if you hack an established belief to ride your message on its patterns.

nickjj 3y ago

Has anyone encountered someone who was poor at both verbal and written communication but turned out to be excellent at designing and writing maintainable code? Maintainable code in this case would be a combination of using clear and easy to reason about logic, good names for everything, creating useful non-leaky abstractions, no major performance issues, thoughtful and extensive test cases, good documentation, etc..

schwartzworld 3y ago
Yes, lots of people in the industry have English as a second language.
williamdclt 3y ago
Yes, It's not too uncommon to see devs producing good software, but struggling to communicate on a less-technical level, either with non-technical people or with technical people who aren't familiar with the specific subject/domain at hand
- mewpmewp2 3y ago
  Yeah, actually it could be the case, where someone who is so deep into what they are doing, they don't understand how everyone else doesn't understand the intricacies and so they end up explaining and communicating in a way that others don't understand. Even though it is said that if you can't explain a concept to a child, you don't really understand it, but I think there still can be cases in which you are so deep in there, you have hard time grasping what is the best way to make it simple for others considering their understanding. Especially if you have been working around other people who are deep there and now you are put into a group where people have completely different levels of understanding. It's sometimes easy to assume that something is common knowledge when it really is not, because it seems so natural to yourself. And obviously I have faced it the other way in different fields where I absolutely lack all the knowledge and they start to use terms I am clueless about, but I feel stupid about asking about each term because they talk in a way that it seems they think it's so obvious that I should know.
wizerdrobe 3y ago

lnsru 3y ago

I had many many technical interviews this year. Nobody wanted to listen to my stories. I got a technical task and needed to solve it. From explaining steps in Visual Studio on paper how to create a functional hello world GUI. To some crazy undefined system design tasks. The single story I was allowed to tell was my introduction. I never experienced an interview where somebody wanted to do something else than assess my technical skills.

mewpmewp2 3y ago
I think there can be good stories that capture interest, however you should use some sort of method to first test the waters whether this sort of story would be interesting to the other party. Reading the blog post, the story about tripping due to bad shoes to me would be a turn off to hear. Because are they going to tell this story from out of nowhere? If they started off with "I had a crazy scare today, I almost slipped and fell walking high up.", I might appreciate it more since I can choose myself then to ask whether I want to hear more details about the story. Otherwise the story just takes up too much time and it's not polite to interrupt them. It's a risky investment of time that the other party might not appreciate or care for. Of course it depends on the personality of the person who you are telling the story to. Some people definitely may appreciate the detailed visuals etc, but to me when someone ends up with a long winded answer, I tend to think "man, they could've just summed all of this information up with one sentence".
- maroonblazer 3y ago
  I took the story as simply an example of the difference between an interesting vs uninteresting anecdote. I think it's implicit in the article that the story you choose to tell is relevant to the interview situation you're in.
  - mewpmewp2 3y ago
    Yes, however still to me people sometimes will talk too much, when it would be much better where they are concise at first and I can ask immediate interactive follow ups about the details. Interview is such a limited time so to me it seems most efficient to have a dialogue out of the box. Or they should at least make pauses to give opportunity for cuts. I don't want to listen to prose someone studied word by word. I don't need to "feel" the challenge as the author said. I need to be able to figure out during 1 hour the problem solving capability of the candidate. If they spend unnecessarily much time on stories, I would be concerned whether they are a bser and want to limit my ability to ask questions as the time runs out.

CoachRufus87 3y ago

I think many folks are missing the fact that Dave's blog is largely targeted towards those in leadership, in which story telling/selling is an _essential_ skill.

ineptech 3y ago

I think this is extremely good advice so I'm making a top-level comment to defend it and respond to some of the criticisms in this thread. First, no one is asking you to lie. This isn't about inventing details or exagerrating. This is about deciding how to answer and phrasing your answer. Second, "story" in this case means personal anecdote, like the author's hiking example. It is not very closely related to stories in books or games or whatever. What can we say about the stories you tell casually at parties or with friends? Probably that they take less than two minutes, they start with an interesting hook, and they include a problem of some kind and the resolution to that problem. That's what your interview stories should look like. Ex: Suppose you are asked, "Tell me about a time when you had a disagreement with a coworker and how you resolved it". Compare these two answers: 1) "One time I had a coworker that kind of hated me. I'm not sure what his deal was, we didn't interact all that much and I thought his work was pretty good, but he developed a personal animus towards me and started being rude and picking fights with me on Slack. He ended up getting fired after he threw eggs at my car." 2) "I was leading the effort to fix the critical-but-brittle X service, and I wanted to start by wrapping it in a service with modern deploy and test automation, so we could at least deploy it safely while we fixed it. However, the lead architect was opposed to that plan, because of Y. We worked through it by getting all of the stakeholders together and doing Z. Which answer is more true? The first one might feel more honest. After all, the "disagreement with a coworker" part is much more central to answer 1 than answer 2. But it's also a terrible answer, because it has fuck all to do with your abilities. It's just a thing that happened to you that happens to meet the criteria the question asked for, but is otherwise not relevant.

ineptech 3y ago
tl;dr of my comment and of the whole article: a) think of the 3-5 best things you've done recently at work b) practice describing them to a friend (you don't work with) the way you'd tell any other personal anecdote c) When asked a behavioral "Tell me about a time when" question, instead of trying to comb through your memory of the thousands of experiences you've had at work, just ask yourself which of your 3-5 stories is closest, and tell it d) if that feels dishonest (and it does to a lot of people!) remember that the whole point of an interview is for you to tell them how great you are. If they knew you had led the effort to fix the critical-but-brittle X service, they would've asked you. They asked a vague open-ended question to give you the latitude to answer however you see fit.

natbennett 3y ago

If storytelling isn’t part of your interviewing process you are absolutely leaving value on the table. You would be wasting less time interviewing & get better outcomes if you improved your path to getting into the interview. Ideally you have a conversation with the hiring manager before you even enter the formal hiring process and storytelling should absolutely be part of that conversation. The story is “why you want to hire me specifically.”