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It is definitely an attitude thing. However, you shouldn’t be focusing on improving your soft skills so much as it’s improving your mindset, and then the soft s

It is definitely an attitude thing. However, you shouldn’t be focusing on improving your soft skills so much as it’s improving your mindset, and then the soft skills will just flow like hot butter. This is what I tell my friends: Don’t see interviews as an adversarial thing. At the end of the day, your mindset should be: * The company is looking for someone to do a specific job * You have a unique set of skills and you are very good at doing certain things * You are looking for certain things from a job Interviewing is finding out if a relationship will work out — like a first date. When I look at job qualifications, I am trying to figure out what actual job they need done and whether my experience and skills would be good for that. I honestly don’t even care that they are looking for X years of Y. They’re not looking for a warm bag of bones with a laundry list of skills: they’re looking for someone to do a specific job. When an interviewer asks me questions, it’s because they like to do things a certain way and they just want to check if I do things similarly. They’re really asking about scenarios they’ve personally dealt with and trying to figure out my approach. I just tell them a story from the closest scenario that I’ve dealt with. And when it’s my turn to ask questions, it’s the reverse. I know that I like to do things a certain way too and I want to find out if they do things like me. I just have question after question on the spot to build out a mental image of how they work, from day to day to overall company culture. If you come in with a mindset of “be honest” without making yourself look inexperienced, you don’t have to be worrying about bullshitting, which they will pick up on anyway. While there is an imbalance of power for sure, seeing interviews as a “fitting” process is much more advantageous and makes interviewing a breeze. It’s a first date. Don’t make it weird.

advael 3y ago
I agree with everything you're saying here Also, in reading your post I noticed a normal human tendency that makes me wonder if hiring by interview doesn't inevitably introduce a small but pervasive organizational tendency toward a brittle culture Notice that when describing your notion of alignment, you say you look for candidates who "do things like [you] do." I think that's insightful, true across interviewers, and from the perspective of organization-building, already a slight misalignment! I think humans tend to select for people who think more similarly to them, but the organizations I've seen that are the most creative and resilient are ones where people think as differently from each other as is possible (especially in terms of how they do things) while still being compatible (past a certain threshold I do think dissimilarity can make it impossible to agree or collaborate) I know it seems like a small thing, but in aggregate I think it does a lot to explain a few larger-scale problems
- treflop 3y ago
  I think humans having their own culture and ultimately worldview is just a fact of life and the best that we can do is to learn to coexist and work with each other. But we don’t have to work side by side for 40 hours a week. Why make both of us miserable? And to your scenario, I personally too believe a culture of opposing voices is the best culture, but ourselves thinking that is… itself a worldview, making us a part of a subculture. And even then, there are limitations to my acceptance. For example, I strongly believe in keeping track of credit for ideas, so people who regularly forget who suggested an idea (or who don’t care who did it first in history) bother me immensely, so even if you had similar views as me, I wouldn’t want to work with you just on that alone. You are only a little different but, to me, in a wrong and unacceptable way. But I’ll still work with you. I just don’t want to be on a team of you’s.
  - advael 3y ago
    I think it's worth making a distinction between values and methods in many contexts, including here. Alignment enabling collaboration across value systems or sometimes even priorities can be much harder to achieve, and some would say undesirable depending on the context For example, I've met a whole spectrum of viewpoints framed in reaction to the severe and growing housing crisis (esp. in the SF bay area) on this very website, some of which I could see acting as a strong filter on whether I would want to collaborate with someone
- unsupp0rted 3y ago
  Depends on the org size and mission. Huge? You want diverse approaches. Medium? Diverse is probably better. Small? You probably want strong alignment. Tiny/Ramen-startup/doing hard things? Maybe diverse again. Maybe not.
  - advael 3y ago
    I'm not sure if I agree, but this model would predict an interesting pattern where a disproportionate number of successful startups that grew went through an early phase of ideological/personality purging at the "small" phase
lolinder 3y ago
I like this way of looking at interviews, but it's a perspective that requires a lot more self-confidence than most people have. You have to be confident that you have something of value to offer. You have to be confident that if this isn't a good fit there will be another one out there that is. If you don't have this confidence then you'll have a hard time not treating every job interview as a sales pitch that you desperately hope they'll buy.
- the_snooze 3y ago
  When I interview candidates, I try to give them opportunities to be their best confident selves, and see if they actually capitalize on it. In initial conversations, I ask them "what are you most proud of on your CV/resume?" From there, a good candidate should be able to go in depth on a topic they're comfortable with. What I see in other orgs is a counterproductive---if not humiliating---hazing process with "gotcha" techno-trivia that has no bearing on the day-to-day tasking or gauging whether a candidate can grow in the team.
- treflop 3y ago
  If my friend said that to me, I’d tell that if they’ve been doing stuff and getting experience, then they do have something to offer because they’ve obviously completed work and now know how to do something. Not everyone needs to be solving cancer and if you haven’t been solving cancer, there’s no need to start trying to solve cancer. Of course, you can start trying at any time if you want too. There’s always someone way better than you in the world but it doesn’t mean that they’re applying for the same job. Don’t worry about it and just speak honestly about what you’re good at and how it fits what the company needs.
nox101 3y ago
That might be true a small company but that's not my experience with FAANG interviews and all the companies with x-FAANG employees that just continue to do the same style of interview. I get asked what I consider, silly and unrelated stuff. I work on native APIs and was being hired for native API stuff yet my interviews including things like designing server farms for which I have next to zero knowledge. I've never set up more than a simple server. I did get hired by one of them and most of the questions I was asked have never once had any relationship to my job ever. There's also the leetcode stuff, many of which are of the variety "If you're seen this question before you'll know the answer, if not then it was a 1 in a million that one person solved it and then spread the answer but you're not going to solve it in this 45 minute session". 2 examples IMO are "find the smallest rectangle in a bitmap. The brute force answer is O(N^6). The fast answer is O(N) but I doubt anyone has solved the O(N) one on their own except an exceedingly rare few. The rest read the answer previously. Another is the code inserted into a matrix and having its columns rotated, given the result, recover the code question which can only be solved by knowing the one single algorithm that fits pretty much nothing else except this toy question. If you've been exposed to it before you solve it. If not, you don't Those questions didn't help them hire. I'm certainly productive without being able to answer them and so are several of my co-workers who admit to not being able to answer them. Most of us just feel like we got in by luck yet we're all super productive so it's not clear what the point of that interview style was. We were just the lucky few who got questions we knew the answers to already.
- skirmish 3y ago
  The point was to avoid hiring unlucky people, of course!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

advael 3y ago

I agree with everything you're saying here Also, in reading your post I noticed a normal human tendency that makes me wonder if hiring by interview doesn't inevitably introduce a small but pervasive organizational tendency toward a brittle culture Notice that when describing your notion of alignment, you say you look for candidates who "do things like [you] do." I think that's insightful, true across interviewers, and from the perspective of organization-building, already a slight misalignment! I think humans tend to select for people who think more similarly to them, but the organizations I've seen that are the most creative and resilient are ones where people think as differently from each other as is possible (especially in terms of how they do things) while still being compatible (past a certain threshold I do think dissimilarity can make it impossible to agree or collaborate) I know it seems like a small thing, but in aggregate I think it does a lot to explain a few larger-scale problems

treflop 3y ago
I think humans having their own culture and ultimately worldview is just a fact of life and the best that we can do is to learn to coexist and work with each other. But we don’t have to work side by side for 40 hours a week. Why make both of us miserable? And to your scenario, I personally too believe a culture of opposing voices is the best culture, but ourselves thinking that is… itself a worldview, making us a part of a subculture. And even then, there are limitations to my acceptance. For example, I strongly believe in keeping track of credit for ideas, so people who regularly forget who suggested an idea (or who don’t care who did it first in history) bother me immensely, so even if you had similar views as me, I wouldn’t want to work with you just on that alone. You are only a little different but, to me, in a wrong and unacceptable way. But I’ll still work with you. I just don’t want to be on a team of you’s.
- advael 3y ago
  I think it's worth making a distinction between values and methods in many contexts, including here. Alignment enabling collaboration across value systems or sometimes even priorities can be much harder to achieve, and some would say undesirable depending on the context For example, I've met a whole spectrum of viewpoints framed in reaction to the severe and growing housing crisis (esp. in the SF bay area) on this very website, some of which I could see acting as a strong filter on whether I would want to collaborate with someone
unsupp0rted 3y ago
Depends on the org size and mission. Huge? You want diverse approaches. Medium? Diverse is probably better. Small? You probably want strong alignment. Tiny/Ramen-startup/doing hard things? Maybe diverse again. Maybe not.
- advael 3y ago
  I'm not sure if I agree, but this model would predict an interesting pattern where a disproportionate number of successful startups that grew went through an early phase of ideological/personality purging at the "small" phase

lolinder 3y ago

I like this way of looking at interviews, but it's a perspective that requires a lot more self-confidence than most people have. You have to be confident that you have something of value to offer. You have to be confident that if this isn't a good fit there will be another one out there that is. If you don't have this confidence then you'll have a hard time not treating every job interview as a sales pitch that you desperately hope they'll buy.

the_snooze 3y ago
When I interview candidates, I try to give them opportunities to be their best confident selves, and see if they actually capitalize on it. In initial conversations, I ask them "what are you most proud of on your CV/resume?" From there, a good candidate should be able to go in depth on a topic they're comfortable with. What I see in other orgs is a counterproductive---if not humiliating---hazing process with "gotcha" techno-trivia that has no bearing on the day-to-day tasking or gauging whether a candidate can grow in the team.
treflop 3y ago
If my friend said that to me, I’d tell that if they’ve been doing stuff and getting experience, then they do have something to offer because they’ve obviously completed work and now know how to do something. Not everyone needs to be solving cancer and if you haven’t been solving cancer, there’s no need to start trying to solve cancer. Of course, you can start trying at any time if you want too. There’s always someone way better than you in the world but it doesn’t mean that they’re applying for the same job. Don’t worry about it and just speak honestly about what you’re good at and how it fits what the company needs.

nox101 3y ago

That might be true a small company but that's not my experience with FAANG interviews and all the companies with x-FAANG employees that just continue to do the same style of interview. I get asked what I consider, silly and unrelated stuff. I work on native APIs and was being hired for native API stuff yet my interviews including things like designing server farms for which I have next to zero knowledge. I've never set up more than a simple server. I did get hired by one of them and most of the questions I was asked have never once had any relationship to my job ever. There's also the leetcode stuff, many of which are of the variety "If you're seen this question before you'll know the answer, if not then it was a 1 in a million that one person solved it and then spread the answer but you're not going to solve it in this 45 minute session". 2 examples IMO are "find the smallest rectangle in a bitmap. The brute force answer is O(N^6). The fast answer is O(N) but I doubt anyone has solved the O(N) one on their own except an exceedingly rare few. The rest read the answer previously. Another is the code inserted into a matrix and having its columns rotated, given the result, recover the code question which can only be solved by knowing the one single algorithm that fits pretty much nothing else except this toy question. If you've been exposed to it before you solve it. If not, you don't Those questions didn't help them hire. I'm certainly productive without being able to answer them and so are several of my co-workers who admit to not being able to answer them. Most of us just feel like we got in by luck yet we're all super productive so it's not clear what the point of that interview style was. We were just the lucky few who got questions we knew the answers to already.

skirmish 3y ago
The point was to avoid hiring unlucky people, of course!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]