Storytelling Tips for Technical Interviews(stanete.com)
stanete.com
Storytelling Tips for Technical Interviews
https://stanete.com/storytelling-tips-technical-interviews
32 comments
Here's one of my favorite examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDoH15ylAeo&feature=youtu.be
haha, this was fun!
i lol'd. hey, if anyone wants to practice answering behavioral questions for real on my youtube, let me know. it's a nice way to practice and help others learn from what you do well and can improve. it's meant to be earnest and lighthearted, not intentionally comedic, though making an interviewer chuckle is not a bad way to connect ;-p
https://www.youtube.com/CandidatePlanet
https://www.youtube.com/CandidatePlanet
Being interesting is generally more important than being right: https://codeformore.com/technical-interviews-interesting-is-...
This is true for life in general, but I'm not sure it works for technical interviews.
I've seen many candidates derail themselves by trying to tell interesting stories without realizing that the interviewer doesn't care. Many companies treat technical interviews as a test and have strict rubrics that are specific to the question.
If I ask a candidate:
"Okay, but how would you replace that XMLHttpRequest with fetch?"
all I want is a straightforward answer that shows you know the answer to the question, or an explanation of why you don't, ex:
"Oh, I would Google that. I exclusively used Axios in my prior job but I could learn fetch in an hour or two"
I know you want to feel heard and I will listen if you want to tell me how you fought your boss and won in a quest to replace all of your homegrown internal tooling with jQuery, but pay attention to your interviewer's body language and responses.
In general, my advice for an interview is never talk more than 1-2 minutes without getting active encouragement from your interviewer to continue on the current thread of conversation.
I've seen many candidates derail themselves by trying to tell interesting stories without realizing that the interviewer doesn't care. Many companies treat technical interviews as a test and have strict rubrics that are specific to the question.
If I ask a candidate:
"Okay, but how would you replace that XMLHttpRequest with fetch?"
all I want is a straightforward answer that shows you know the answer to the question, or an explanation of why you don't, ex:
"Oh, I would Google that. I exclusively used Axios in my prior job but I could learn fetch in an hour or two"
I know you want to feel heard and I will listen if you want to tell me how you fought your boss and won in a quest to replace all of your homegrown internal tooling with jQuery, but pay attention to your interviewer's body language and responses.
In general, my advice for an interview is never talk more than 1-2 minutes without getting active encouragement from your interviewer to continue on the current thread of conversation.
And in today's interviews environment, telling the greatest stories along the greatest CV, training for months and months on leetcode problems and being able to convincingly act like you never seen them before during the interview, generally bending over backwards and taking it into your ^H^H^H or what else, all that that will dramatically raise your chances of getting hired from 0.1 to 0.2%.
If you’re doing all of these things I think the reason for not getting hired is because of the pretty negative attitude encapsulated in this comment. I wouldn’t strongly advocate for a candidate who views interviewing as a fabricated system with the deck stacked against them. Nevermind someone who would lie about being exposed to problems they’ve seen before.
Interviews should be a collaborative, albeit stressful, experience. The interviewers would be much happier to hire someone than to say No and have to interview another 10 people or whatever. My advice to any candidate: stay positive, focus on what you can control, and try to have fun with it if possible. Any negativity you bring into an interview will be picked up by interviewers. But the opposite is also true! If you go in with a smile, ready to meet some new people, and ready for a challenge, interviewers will take notice and appreciate it.
Interviews should be a collaborative, albeit stressful, experience. The interviewers would be much happier to hire someone than to say No and have to interview another 10 people or whatever. My advice to any candidate: stay positive, focus on what you can control, and try to have fun with it if possible. Any negativity you bring into an interview will be picked up by interviewers. But the opposite is also true! If you go in with a smile, ready to meet some new people, and ready for a challenge, interviewers will take notice and appreciate it.
I think this is a nice theoretical fiction. In my experience and colleagues I’ve talked to about it, those that go into it knowing the system to be a nonsensical game and train defensively for it interview at 10 places and get 9 offers. Those that approach it organically, casually, get no offers and eventually after months go back and train aggressively and try again.
Interviewing isn’t fun, if you find it fun then you probably find casually engaging in leetcode competitions fun, which is totally fine, great even that you enjoy that. But let’s not pretend that it’s not a game with particular rules.
Interviewing isn’t fun, if you find it fun then you probably find casually engaging in leetcode competitions fun, which is totally fine, great even that you enjoy that. But let’s not pretend that it’s not a game with particular rules.
To be clear, I'm not saying one shouldn't prepare for these interviews and that there aren't very clear things that interviewers are evaluating on. There is an optimal solution and you should prepare for it.
What I'm saying is that your mindset is another differentiator. If you go in with the mindset that the interview is a waste of time and that your interviewer is trying to trip you up, you've walked into an interview with a toxic mindset. I'd be willing to guarantee no one anywhere wants to hire someone with a toxic mindset.
What I'm saying is that your mindset is another differentiator. If you go in with the mindset that the interview is a waste of time and that your interviewer is trying to trip you up, you've walked into an interview with a toxic mindset. I'd be willing to guarantee no one anywhere wants to hire someone with a toxic mindset.
Also it will have zero bearing on your starting place among the organization you’re joining. No matter how well you excel at the interview or how applicable your past experience is, you’ll be dumped on one of the fringe, “new features” teams with a first time EM, and a PM right out of college or MBA with no relevant experience.
I think if you actually did all that then you’d almost certainly get the job. I wonder why there’s that disconnect?
If you actually did all that and applied to four of the FANGMA firms, you'd almost certainly get a job in at least one of them, probably two or three.
Source: I have both ran interviews, and worked on hiring committee for one of them. Someone who actually did those things would be an obvious hire.
Actually, someone who just grinded leetcode for two months would be an obvious hire, regardless of what their CV says, or what their life story was.
Source: I have both ran interviews, and worked on hiring committee for one of them. Someone who actually did those things would be an obvious hire.
Actually, someone who just grinded leetcode for two months would be an obvious hire, regardless of what their CV says, or what their life story was.
I'm currently doing way less and got multiple offers. No FANGA salaries, tho, but still fine for a uni drop out.
I've done all of that, and the best job I got was Amazon :/ It seems like this industry only works if you're just naturally intelligent (or lucky)
“The only job I got is one of the statistically highest-paying companies for engineers in the country that can be leveraged to move to any company I want in a couple years.”
It’s hard not to cringe at the amount of entitlement in being upset that your only job was Amazon.
It’s hard not to cringe at the amount of entitlement in being upset that your only job was Amazon.
Don't they have a notoriously austere work environment compared to the other tech giants?
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I... I just can't tell if that's sarcasm. I mean, don't want to sound harsh or overly preachy / guilting, but cracker on a stick, that looks like a profound lack of awareness and perspective.
What higher result and reward for a good interview do you expect than a job at one of the highest paying most respected companies in the software world?
I will spare all the stereotype of people who'd kill to get it; presumably you are talented, worked hard, and deserve it. Good on ya. Sad to see it go to someone who doesn't appreciate it though :-/
What higher result and reward for a good interview do you expect than a job at one of the highest paying most respected companies in the software world?
I will spare all the stereotype of people who'd kill to get it; presumably you are talented, worked hard, and deserve it. Good on ya. Sad to see it go to someone who doesn't appreciate it though :-/
To be clear, the answer is a company that requires the hard work I put in to get in. For most people out of college Amazon is their “safety” company because you can get an offer with 1 coding challenge. Unfortunately, because of this people assume I’m lazy and inherently unintelligent because I joined out of undergrad.
A company isn’t better just because their interview process has more coding. The “best” tech company depends on your goals, but if one of those goals is to have the opportunity to work with some pretty brilliant people and rapidly grow as an engineer, you can certainly accomplish that at Amazon.
It’s an interesting phenomenon how young people create pecking orders of which companies are the best to work at while at the same time having very little experience to make such conclusions.
Disclaimer: I work at Amazon.
It’s an interesting phenomenon how young people create pecking orders of which companies are the best to work at while at the same time having very little experience to make such conclusions.
Disclaimer: I work at Amazon.
I’m only a few years out of college, but this always seemed strange to me, on both sides. It’s more surreal on the employer side, because the real world is so different from the game the cohort you describe is playing.
In high school, I thought it was insane how some of the smartest people I knew pinned their entire future on getting into MIT or whatever. The ones that did get into “ivy leagues“ are working junior roles at consulting firms, which seems like a very predatory line of work to me, but whatever.
In college, I thought it was insane that second years were resume hacking and leetcoding, only to apply to FAANG companies. When they didn’t get in, they basically gave up it was FAANG or bust (!). Many of them graduated with no internship experiences to speak of, at companies big or small. Those that “got in” got a lot of street cred amongst friends, but seemingly have no idea what to do with their lives.
My hypothesis is that their houses are not free-standing. I think they genuinely do not know what they want out of their lives or careers, so they autopilot in to chasing after some vague sense of prestige. The longest line at the career fair must be the best, and I want to be the best, so there shall I go.
Some will say they want to work at Google, so that they can “work anywhere”. OK, then what? crickets, or something something change the world. I don’t know how you can structure your career or life around something so ephemeral, but maybe I’m the weird one.
If there are any ex members of this cult reading this, can you shed some light for me, on how this works out?
In high school, I thought it was insane how some of the smartest people I knew pinned their entire future on getting into MIT or whatever. The ones that did get into “ivy leagues“ are working junior roles at consulting firms, which seems like a very predatory line of work to me, but whatever.
In college, I thought it was insane that second years were resume hacking and leetcoding, only to apply to FAANG companies. When they didn’t get in, they basically gave up it was FAANG or bust (!). Many of them graduated with no internship experiences to speak of, at companies big or small. Those that “got in” got a lot of street cred amongst friends, but seemingly have no idea what to do with their lives.
My hypothesis is that their houses are not free-standing. I think they genuinely do not know what they want out of their lives or careers, so they autopilot in to chasing after some vague sense of prestige. The longest line at the career fair must be the best, and I want to be the best, so there shall I go.
Some will say they want to work at Google, so that they can “work anywhere”. OK, then what? crickets, or something something change the world. I don’t know how you can structure your career or life around something so ephemeral, but maybe I’m the weird one.
If there are any ex members of this cult reading this, can you shed some light for me, on how this works out?
It sounds like the never ending prestige ladder climb in business, finance, or law, you first struggle to get admitted into a top tier university, then either a top tier business school or law school, then a prestigious firm. A career in medicine could potentially be like this as well. But not other types of engineering, as far as I know.
Maybe the path of all top-paying secure white collar professions start resembling each other at some point. Excess competition breeds people gaming the applications process and focusing on it for its own sake to get in, instead of figuring out what they want to do once they’re in- besides get paid high salaries, of course.
Maybe the path of all top-paying secure white collar professions start resembling each other at some point. Excess competition breeds people gaming the applications process and focusing on it for its own sake to get in, instead of figuring out what they want to do once they’re in- besides get paid high salaries, of course.
What are you aiming for instead of Amazon? (I am an outsider to the industry and I am curious).
Amazon is my dream company. FB/Google are social media & ad nonsense. They rejected me though.
Taleb makes the observation in his latest book Skin in the Game that the best storytellers are necessarily also bullshit artists.
Hard disagree. A bullshit artist is a good storyteller because they tell you exactly what you want to hear. The best storytellers can change your mind.
I've seen both. I had a manager who was a mesmerizing storyteller but was really full of bullshit and I have watched the even more mesmerizing Brian Greene who is not full of bullshit.
Does he provide any evidence for this assertion in his book or is this just an opinion? Because he frequently plays the role of bullshit artist on Twitter where it's hard to take him as a credible intellectual anymore.
> You can read this post in Spanish here.
Just a small comment: isn’t this better written in Spanish? Just this sentence. Non-English speakers won’t know what this says to click it.
The Spanish version has this, too:
> Puedes leer este post en inglés aquí.
I wouldn’t know this means the same for reading the post in English.
Just a small comment: isn’t this better written in Spanish? Just this sentence. Non-English speakers won’t know what this says to click it.
The Spanish version has this, too:
> Puedes leer este post en inglés aquí.
I wouldn’t know this means the same for reading the post in English.