3 ms·

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 ask

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.

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.