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Comment by bayer_rggb | Hacker News Reader

I saw this video where Bryan Cranston gives advice to young actors. He basically says, don't go into an audition 'looking' for a job, or 'wanting' a job. Go in, do your thing, portray the best you and get out. If they want you, you'll get the job, If they don't ... why would you want to work at a place where they don't want you ?

This was eye opening for me. Totally changed the way I went to interviews.

(Can't find the video now :( )

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  > portray the best you and get out

Very true. But I contend that I did not portray the best me. And that is a valuable lesson. This essay is not about the job I didn't get, it's about the lesson I learned about myself.

Can you be sure you would have been given the job if you had portrayed your best you?

It's possible you simply dodged a bullet. Maybe this company misclassified a valuable resource, and (for all anyone knows) hired someone less able instead.

Given your practical background, why did no one ask for practical examples?

I agree with the general point - interviews are really about proving you can save time and make money, and everything else is a warm-up.

But still - the hiring process is notoriously unreliable, and it's going to be interesting to see where this start-up is a few years from now.

This was more than ten years ago.

I'd like to point out that they did ask specific questions, I was just enamored of generalizing at that point in my life, and treated every specific question as an invitation to generalize.

"Bryan Cranston's Advice to Aspiring Actors"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1WiCGq-PcY

Thanks for the tip. I hadn't seen this video before.

Statistically, regardless of what the video is, most people haven't seen it. I always find it fun when someone is surprised someone else hasn't seen a specific movie or a popular video on youtube. I believe we're well past the point where even if you wanted to spend 24/7 watching videos, you couldn't possibly see everything that exists. Kind of out of the scope of this topic, but just a fun point to make.

I definitely enjoy seeing Malcom's father give advice, or is it a drug lord giving advice... hmm...

I was merely noting that I hadn't seen it before. As I'm a fan of Bryan Cranston and my daughter is an aspiring actor, I had at least two interests that might have led to me stumbling across it. But no, instead it comes to my attention via HN. This perhaps argues for the relatively good S/N quality of HN. Unlike this comment. :-)

I immediately recalled this:

https://xkcd.com/1053/

It looks like today you are one of the 10.000 people learning about this strip ;)

How needlessly pedantic.

Agreed. My bad, probably didn't help. Was in a mood of sharing.

>why would you want to work at a place where they don't want you ? //

Because you like to eat food every day?

If you're going for professional level work then you certainly should care whether they want you there, or more importantly, if you are providing any value to the company. Because if the answer to either of those is "no" then you probably won't go far in the company anyway and so you're wasting your own time.

If all you care about is eating then there's plenty of jobs where you can punch the clock, do your time and get the hell out of there.

Anyone can find a job to survive, even in the depths of a horrible recession.

I suspect the disconnect is a lot of people who say "eat food" really mean "drive a $60,000 car."

Anyone? I think you're deceiving yourself there. My point was really that the comment was clearly from a privileged perspective - not everyone out of work is just lazy.

Working in a job that's not a perfect fit is a small step down the scale of compromising one's career out of necessity. Next step would probably be working on a different industry. Then there is a lot further to go before your cleaning up other people's mess or faeces, scrubbing abattoir floors, or what-have-you.

Agreed on your second sentence, but that's a valid choice.

I "portrayed" so hard that I was let go 3 months after starting because they thought I was much much better than I actually was. They judged me on my theoretical knowledge not my applied knowledge. Oh well at least I know I can talk the talk, just need to learn the stuff for real now.

The actor acts, that's his portraying. He's not saying fake it till you make it.

If you're a programmer you need to "portray" your programming skill.

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