Comment by mettamage | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mettamage | Hacker News Reader

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> Order your thoughts. Keep it short. Communicate one idea in one sentence. etc. etc. etc.

This is true in general. I remember when I did consulting interviews you needed to talk like that and the feedback I got was that I didn't do enough of it.

Funnily enough, I could clearly tell that whenever I had a programmer job interview, everyone was always really impressed with how 'structured my thinking' was.

Other than being impressed the biggest benefit that you also describe in your blog post is that it is simply very clear what you are about! And people seem a lot happier when listening to you feels like a simple thing to do.

Here's an example of how I do it. The following that I wrote down was typed as quickly as possible.

---

Interviewer: So tell me about yourself

Me: Alright, there are three perspectives I'd quickly like to touch:

1. Personal

2. Educational

3. Professional

With 1. personal, I'm all about fantasy and curiosity. Understand that and you understand me.

Educational: I studied to become the bridge between the business world and the computer world while also trying to become an expert in both. Therefore, I started of with business informatics. Upon graduation I immediately started studying psychology - people, and computer science - computers. And I studied game studies to merge them back into one topic again.

Professional it's rather interesting: the past 8 years I saw my university as a playground and I just applied to any job that didn't feel like work. This resulted in me becoming a teaching assistant, a coach for teaching assistants, a bootcamp instructor and a programmer/web developer. In total I have about 2.5 years of work experience, 1.5 on teaching development and 1 on development.

---

It was a huge improvement compared to my standard 15 minute answer. This answer above is just told under 1 minute.

> Interviewer: So tell me about yourself

> Me: Alright, there are three perspectives I'd quickly like to touch:

> 1. Personal

> 2. Educational

> 3. Professional

That seems so forced and unnatural that it makes me cringe. 'Tell me about yourself' should be a natural conversation starter, not an exam that you did your homework for.

(haha, that's a fun username, kamehame... okay I'll show myself out O:) )

I am right in the middle of interviewing right now (I'm open for any interdisciplinary business/dev/get things done role).

IMO when you interview you're always on the spot and always being judged. I've done it the other way. I am the type of person who likes to just drift away and associatively talk about things (hmm... the very astute reader could've inferred this given what I said in "1. Personal" :P). It has never done me any favors when I did this in a job interview.

The issue you run into is (quote from the article):

> "So, yeah, like, we're like working on this thing, but then my cofounder quit, and now we have this customer who's really loving the product but then we hit a bug with Docker because it uses React in the Kubernetes and now, you know, I'd like to know if you reimburse travel cost when I do the interview and stuff"

It's better to make the mistake of being too formal at an informal moment than the other way around. And honestly, I have been surprised to what extent I should not have been informal in the first place.

Moreover, people will somehow signal to what extent you're being too formal. I can tell from their body language. However, when I'm too informal I can't actually tell to what extent I'm too informal.

It's futile to keep trying to force fit an interview to a natural conversation. It simply is not.

"Tell me about yourself" is simply not the kind of thing normal people ask each other for breaking the ice. It's a stressful question that puts people on the spot and forces them to 'create' a first impression.

Same here. If I heard this in an interview I'd feel like I'm being fed a presentation deck instead of an honest answer.

Now, I do think that one should do a little bit of homework to give a somewhat structured answer to "Tell me about yourself", but there is such a thing as too perfect, at which point it becomes jarring.

Do interviewers really want an honest answer, or just enough to label you? And if you don't want canned responses, maybe not ask such open-ended and really a bit weird questions. Be more specific. I have no idea what the interviewer want out of a question like that. Small-talk or just get warmed up with me saying my name and where I'm from? Or my life-story so far? What if I don't define myself as what I do for a living, would it be weird omitting the fact that I'm a programmer and instead tell about my hobbies? Should I divulge information about myself that you aren't allowed to ask (discrimination etc), but that I feel is me?

Nothing about behavioral interviews are honest. Any person who has practiced interviewing knows canned answers to the popular ones and any person who has interviewed enough has canned questions.

Interesting, since it is the honest answer. It's just condensed by trying to cut out superfluous info.

And as another person argued correctly, I probably didn't fully succeed at that.

Just because an answer is structured, doesn't mean it's dishonest.

Have you tried Amazon interview questions? They expect you to follow the STAR method.

Twice, other than that no. In most behavioral programming interviews I haven't been structured in my answers as being structured came a bit later when I was also applying for consultancies. I was a lot tougher to follow when I wasn't structured.

When I was structured I did use a variation the STAR method when they expected me to. Having a method like that makes things quicker to go through, as long as you make it your own and own it. I adapted the framework a bit by swapping the T (Task) for P (Problem) as it sense to me why you'd need to emphasize the task as opposed to the problem you'd be trying to solve. In rare cases I also adapted it to the SPARAR method, since the result made the problem smaller but didn't fully solve it yet.

I prefer to structure things on the fly though without a pre-defined framework.

“Tell me about yourself” is lazy, unnatural conversation. “Tell me about <thing you did on your cv>” is way better, especially if it hints at some other interests.

This.

How would I describe myself? Three words: hardworking, alpha male, jackhammer, merciless, insatiable.

Whether is sounds forced or comes across as someone who has well structured thinking will depend on the delivery.

Great you already cut your normal 15 minute one to this. But honestly, it’s still quite long.

Of course, context matters and the context of a YC interview is an elevator pitch.

In that setting, the “tell us a little about yourself” question should probably be one or two sentences.

I’d probably answer. “My name is Tim, from the Netherlands living in Berlin with my long time partner. Second time founder in the tech space. I have a computer science background and enjoy playing the guitar.”

As always, YMMV.

Ok let's try.

My name is Mettamage, from The Netherlands. Living in Amsterdam with my girlfriend. I studied: psychology, business informatics -- both bachelors -- and computer science and game studies -- both masters. I have worked as a teacher/bootcamp instructor and programmer. I enjoy running.

When I'm reading it, I think I see this working better in some situations but not in others as my profile simply invokes a lot of questions. And when it does invoke a lot of questions, then my way of talking about it saves time.

People are going to ask: why did you study so many things? With my answer they don't. More importantly, I don't like that question. I can't stand it. I've heard it too many times over in my life. I'm a bit burned out with people their tone on that question. I'm fine with if you're surprised. But a lot of people simply find it weird in a negative sense, and I'm tired of hearing it.

My profile in what I did as work is rather broad, which leads to questions. Interviewers, being the conservative munchkins that they are, they can't pigeonhole me into a role. In my particular answer I pre-empt the most important one which is: why did you do so many things in such a short amount of time? Oh, you did it as side jobs during your study for fun. And now you're looking for your first long-term job.

And most importantly, it's all true. Or at least, I believe it is.

Also, I don't want people to know that I enjoy running. I want people to know that I'm a curious fellow that loves to use his imagination and if you understand the essence of that you can kind of infer a lot about who I am (in one of my other comments there's an example of this).

No, first question I would have: Why are you talking so much about your education?

It feels like profile from a guy who just finished school. I do not thing that education is that important in startups or business generally.

A good education helps you to understand the state of the art. My education helped me to do this with security, especially when it comes to reverse engineering binaries and hardware security.

Ideally, it should do it for a lot more topics but that's where reality sets in.

> I can't stand it.

You cannot stand when people ask you "why study so many things" question?

Your "cannot stand" attitude hints that you resist evaluation of your potential mistakes.

I can't stand people that feel negative towards curiosity and taking ownership of your education. That's what I hear in a good chunk of people their tone.

Mand!

I think the content is there, but you could keep the structure without making it too explicit.

Something like this should set the tone up for an interview -

Hi I'm ... studied business informatics because I'm interested in the intersection between business world and the computer world. Upon graduation I realized I wanted to understand human psychology better so took that up formally. This eventually led me to game studies. I'd say that makes me come across as a curious person which I identify with.

Over the past 8 years I became a teaching assistant, a coach for teaching assistants, a bootcamp instructor and a programmer/web developer. In total I have about 2.5 years of work experience including 1.5 on teaching development to others.

P.S. Based on my experience, "applied to any job that didn't feel like work" is something better left out from an introduction for a job interview.

You have a point, thanks for the tip!

Also, I feel that you're right with:

> P.S. Based on my experience, "applied to any job that didn't feel like work" is something better left out from an introduction for a job interview.

But I wouldn't be fully to explain why. IMO if something doesn't feel like work but play, it means your energy capacity of it is really high.

I feel that the message is being misinterpreted for having a lack of responsibility or something, but that's not the case.

I like to break down my resume in three parts, too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j-7BORF4J4Y

is this satire? because if not, you wanna short it to 1 to 2 sentences.

Nope, I'm afraid it isn't. This is literally how I am, pretty comprehensive and summarized.

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