Storytelling Tips for Technical Interviews
stanete.com
stanete.com
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.
It’s hard not to cringe at the amount of entitlement in being upset that your only job was Amazon.
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 :-/
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.