Interview success can depend on how you schedule interviews
tanayagrawal.substack.com
tanayagrawal.substack.com
- You will face rejection (likely a lot). Don't take this personally and don't let it affect your confidence.
- Unless you are an outstanding interviewee, this is like a skill/muscle which you need to develop and practice. Hence ensure that you don't schedule your "dream job/company" early in the process. Keep practicing.
- Always have a beginner / practice mindset. Otherwise, you will accept the first (suboptimal) offer that you get as you will hate the interview rigmarole. Interviewing is annoying / painful. Accept it and work through it.
- Keep applying and talking to companies even after you have started negotiations. There have been companies which have told me that another candidate accepted before me( and hence the position is no longer available) even when they have "granted me time" to make my decision. Similarly companies rescind offers.
- Blowing hot(too many interviews in a short while) and cold (no interviews / interviews for a while) can be debilitating to your confidence. Hence ensure that you have a pipeline of interviews so you are talking to at least 1 company a week.
- Take notes and reflect on your performance in each interview and how you can do better.
Talking is a skill and that really stands out against other candidates.
When I’m interviewing, I’ll usually choose a stronger communicator over a stronger engineer.
Ultimately, most of the time I 'talk' with my team members, we're actually writing which is very different from talking due to the async nature of the former.
These are basically "brilliant jerks" on the soft skill side. They take so much of the space that the people who knows anything don't get much airtime. But if the soft brilliant jerk would just stop talking for a bit the other people would start talking and actually improve communication in the team.
IMO engineering orgs tend to set the bar really high for tech skills and really low for communication skills. Tech skills are easier to test and they feel more "objective" so they get more focus.
Remember that most of us that are self-taught are pretty good at being person #1 on a one person project. That's what self-teaching teaches us, after all. But, a successful business might not be possible built around one programmer, so as you progress in your career you'll be working on developing the skills to form a cohesive team around you. A lot of this is going to be talking to people, not memorizing some algorithm. (But, many jobs are going to require both, so don't forget all the algorithms while you're in those meetings. At least brush up on them before your interview. A day of prep here can equal hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of your career.)
This hold true as pretty much every level. A junior engineer who will never say "No, I don't understand, can you explain that to me again please?" and spends days/weeks writing code that doesn't meet a requirement is less productive than someone who'll talk to you to understand properly before starting to code. A senior engineer or technical cofounder who can't communicate well with customers will be much less effective in solving real customer problems or finding product/market fit.
Being a great engineer isn't just about writing good code, its about writing the right code - and to know what that is you need good communication skills.
Asking for help is more about humility and willingness to look dumb, than about being gregarious or chatty or socially open.
A) the most important indicators of likely success on the team B) very correlated with comfort in speaking
If I can't get you to talk at all when you're uncomfortable, you're unlikely to tell me you don't understand in the often uncomfortable iterating on a feature process.
It's possible to be gregarious AND be unable to ever admit that you lack critical information, which is why interviews, for me, are mostly about asking questions until we get to the point you don't know/don't understand, and see how you work with me from there on.
What a lot of people who get stressed about interviews don't realize, though, is that WHERE PRECISELY you reach your limits is unimportant. It's that you engage thoughtfully, without getting overly defensive, and don't bullshit. Not about whether you got the right answer at any given spot.
If you don't, that's a sign the engineering culture needs some TLC. And now that I think of it, in that case good communication may still be a priority factor.
The worst were the ones where the interviewer clearly didn’t want to be there and mostly acted as a cold stone statue firing questions of from a sheet of paper. Incidentally those interviews were usually also the ones with the highest number of hackerrank sorts of questions.
It's very important to realize this. Maybe you feel you nailed it and everyone really liked you but you still didn't get the job. Well, there's other candidates in the pool too and there's a chance one of them was amazing too and you lost the proverbial "coin toss".
There's also a chance you were always the backup option - it happens.
Lastly, don't give up on the role. I've seen numerous instances where an offer went out and was accepted and then a week later the person backed out because their existing employer gave them a huge package to stay on. It happens. You might get the call then after being rejected.
YES. Do not stop until your first day (half kidding). One time I stopped interviewing after accepting an offer...only to find out there were rounds of reference checks (and one of them didn't go well). It was 2-3 weeks of anxious bullshit, but only because I already turned down everything else that was in motion.
Who knows maybe a second company will come through with a better offer.
Just wanted to highlight this because it is a fantastic piece of advice to keep in mind for interviews (and honestly for your career and even crafts or hobbies too). There's a reason doctors and lawyers (for whom the stakes of failure are sometimes measured in lives or years of freedom lost) call what they do "a practice".
-Practice leetcode since it will make up 50-60% of the interview process
-Study your resume inside and out, know the whys of what you did not just the whats
-Don't talk too much, sometimes nervousness and anxiety can make itself with a candidate talking too much or too little, both are bad, be concise with your answers but don't ramble on, the more you ramble the more surface area you give the interviewer to poke holes at what you said. Being concise can lead the interviewer towards areas where you are most comfortable answering questions.
-Realize you might be an amazing developer but you only have a couple of hours to show prospective employer what you got, don't be too harsh on yourself if you get rejected, it is impossible to know a person in 3 hours, they are merely going based on their best judgement of you (which is mixed in with actual performance considerations and bias many times) and not the "reality" of you.
I know we're on HackerNews, but this is still a very bold assumption lol
There's the bold assumption haha. I'm certain that less than 5% of all job interviews use leetcode.
Even in big tech, I'd imagine the majority of interviewees (such as the product manager who wrote the original article) won't need it.
I think this depends on the role. I was interviewing for staff level front end roles a few months ago and didn’t have a single leetcode-style interview. All the coding questions were realistic problems.
And, if you can do that where you are, put yourself forward to be interviewing. After about 20-30 interviews you’ll find a few nuanced insights, some of them specific to your area.
1. Mornings only is impossible because a lot of interviewer availability is in the afternoon since for a lot of them, it’s an unproductive task
2. Batching sounds good, but doesn’t work because different companies move at different paces and you almost always can’t batch them. You’d be lucky if you could batch 2 onsites back to back.
3. You may not be able to batch subsequent rounds together because you sometimes may not hear back on time
4. Most important of all, none of this takes into account that you already may be working a demanding job that you cant take time off from that easily
The science is not debunked by a blog post on nautil.us.
If the author is very sure of their argument then it would be of greater scientific merit for them to review the original data and other data, and report the fact of the data not matching what was reported in the original study, as well as proposing their own hypothesis for future work.
But the author's blog post claims an ad-absurdum proof, while ignoring that their proof doesn't extend to the difference in height between 21 year old males and females, despite that being cited as being an equivalent effect size. It's this kind of thing that means cited scientific work appears in the Wikipedia article, and Nautilus blog posts do not.
Edit: dis-disclosure I have nothing to do with the person who wrote the parent comment, just an observer
If you're amazing at interviews, the interviewer will remember you and want to hire you. They will even rave about you to their colleagues... "Hey, this person was awesome, we need to hire them."
Accomplish that special human ability, and you don't have to worry about such micro-optimisations.
Full disclosure: I provide paid professional career mentorship and coaching. Contact info is in my profile.
I know some people are opposed to hiring a paid resource, yet when I hired someone for myself, my career abilities and achievements increased much faster than before. And I still meet with a professional mentor regularly.
Of course, both the compatibility and quality of the resource matter, so by all means talk with a few people until you find the right match for you.
If CEOs, actors, athletes, and other pros hire someone to help, why shouldn't you?
"It's easy, you just..."
Most of us are not amazing at interviews so telling people to be amazing at interviews isn't too helpful. Interview feedback tends to be pretty sparse. Often you don't hear anything back unless you got the job. Even if you do get a "no" response it will be light on details (and it's usually this way due to legal concerns). It's difficult to improve a skill when there's little or no feedback and what feedback you do get is vague.
And I also am not sure I want to work at a place where being really good at interview skills is what gets people jobs. The correlation between "interviews well" and "collaborative, productive coworker" isn't very strong.
Unfortunately “being good at interviews” is generally what gets people jobs everywhere, so I’m not sure what point you’re making to begin with.
Also, generally being likeable makes a positive impact on people. Teams would much rather someone they feel they can work well with than someone who is going to be a total stick in the mud and drag everyone down.
Because I would assume that people who study and prepare for the interview are more likely to be studious and prepared in other aspects of life, including their workplace.
I have also worked with a number of people who are quite bad at interviewing but were excellent colleagues: highly collaborative and technically excellent.
When I create hiring processes, it's the latter people I try to select for. So assorted coworkers aside, the data I have come from those hiring processes. The glibbest and most charming people often do poorly in the pair programming portion; the most awkward often settle down into doing excellent work once you get them in a familiar context.
Some people are great at both, of course, and some people are bad at both. Which should be unsurprising given the number of people recommending a focus on developing interview skills. The whole idea requires that job skill and interview skill are not well correlated.
"getting and applying professional feedback for one's interview skills has a better ROI in my opinion."
And I specifically addressed that: it's difficult to get any actionable interview feedback because companies tend not to supply much (if any) useful interview feedback probably due to legal concerns.
I think he was suggesting getting feedback from doing mock interviews with friends or interview specialists.
For resources of people who might be able to help, I would include people like a mentor, hired professional, or trusted friends who are good communicators.
> getting and applying professional feedback for one's interview skills has a better ROI in my opinion
I am not good at interviewing. I have very little confidence when interviewing, and I get super nervous. I get better when I warm up, towards the end of the interview. The only way I do better is when I practice a lot, keep a schedule, exercise before the interview, and usually I need a job-support group to help. It's an effort.
In practice you more likely to see a steady drip as you ramp up your search. Some recruiters get back fast, some slowly. There's no real way you can control this other than giving some feedback as you progress so that firms that you like will hurry up a bit and firms that are your backup can be held a bit.
Furthermore, some really are impossible. For example #2 is to schedule interviews in cohorts. I tried to follow this in my most recent job hunt and it is truly impossible. The problem is that some jobs I would go through a phone screen and hear back later that day or the next morning in order to schedule another interview. Some companies will wait a week to get back to you. Others are 3-4 days. As just one example, I interviewed with a large tech company and they were the first ones to actually offer me an initial interview. I went through 3 stages of interviews with them and had the 4th stage scheduled when I canceled because i had already received multiple job offers from other companies, which I had applied to several weeks after them.
In tech a lot of these are easier because you have a lot more power over the interview process if your job skill is one of the in-demand ones. In my interview process I really could bend most of the companies to meet my needs and to move faster than they planned for. But that is a fortunate position to be in. I am watching my sister go through job interviews right now for HR related jobs and the process is completely different. I was going through a 3-4 stage interview process in 1.5-2 weeks. My sister was waiting 2-3 weeks between individual interview stages. In my interviews I could tell people that I want to accept an offer in 2 weeks, so they need to speed up and they would do it for me. If my sister said that in her HR interviews, they would simply disqualify her.
So count your blessings if you are in tech. Sure, we get to complain about take-home interview projects and technical interviews. But we can get jobs within weeks (or even a week) that pay 2-4 times what other people are getting after months-long interview processes. So consider ourselves fortunate.
And she never has to grind or prepare beyond making sure her portfolio is ready. They don't ask her to prove her InDesign or Powerpoint or HTML or even tech skills (one job she had to lead a tech initiative to lead the department into evaluating and then switching to new proposal management software that was HTML template driven, and then basically be tech support for a bunch of salespeople that didn't want to invest the time to learn how to use it).
I'd rather go through her process than mine, quite frankly. Although she has found it more difficult than I have to find a company willing to pay her what she's making now, as her salary has gotten pretty high for her field, and she often has to sell them more on what she can bring to the table since she's had experience with so many large accounts in the past.
Meanwhile I could move to SV and double my salary easily, so I'm nowhere near the top, just the top of the ranges for all the recruiters in my region that contact me (I could probably find something in the area that's about $50k higher, I'm guessing, but no one is advertising it, most are advertising about $30k less than I'm making right now). And yet my process always seems to be long and painful.
Interesting opinion when weighed against studies like PNAS' famous parole decision study that found morning and right after lunch were the most favorable rulings: https://www.pnas.org/content/108/17/6889
The problem is that the researchers were eager to conclude that hunger can influence case outcomes, and unable to consider the possibility that hunger can influence case scheduling.
"They found that the likelihood of a favourable ruling peaked at the beginning of the day, steadily declining over time from a probability of about 65% to nearly zero, before spiking back up to about 65% after a break for a meal or snack."
The first person that makes a good impression almost always has an advantage IMO. The hiring manager will remember that person, and human psychology makes your memory of that interview better than it actually was. So for someone to unseat you they have to do significantly better. (And obviously the reverse goes if you are among the last to interview). I think recency bias would only into play if the first couple successful candidates reject their offers or something.
Most important is to get your resume in early though. After spending that first weekend with the mind-numbing task of sifting through hundreds of resumes, a hiring manager is only going to look at new ones if absolutely nothing works out from the first batch.
The whole article is kind of weird though. The interviewee doesn't really have that much flexibility in scheduling interviews. Unless it's for a company with centralized recruiting that's always hiring, in which case when you schedule makes no difference at all.
Rule 1: get through the process as quickly as possible.
Rule 2-5: slow down the process by putting these specific restrictions on when to schedule your interviews.
> Just like you interview with multiple companies and choose between multiple offers, companies also interview multiple candidates for the same role. Duh. So if you are interviewing with a company, assume that you are interviewing with a pool of candidates.
Sure, but here is an opposite take, maybe you should delay your interview rounds as long as possible. Hiring managers can be hesitant to extend an offer before having fully explored their options. If your candidacy is evaluated at the end of the cohort the hiring manager might feel more pressure to extend an offer to keep their headcount.
There is also the reality that when companies need to fill a role, and when first start interviewing they will set the bar way too high and reject some perfectly qualified candidates. After the interview process has dragged on for some time they will eventually decide that enough is enough and will hire the next candidate that shows basic competence (or just hire someone's friend).
BTW, one solution to this I recall being suggested by Eric Schmidt is to use a hiring committee among other things
I'm familiar with that feeling though. I've had several interviews where I really (subjectively) liked the candidate, and really wanted them to succeed - but having a prepared interview plan ended up doing its job and helped determine that the candidate was not a good match for the role.
Because people are anxious in interviews, and a lot (but not all) people calm down a bit if you give them a few minutes to talk about themselves.
[To be clear: Not disagreeing with your main point]
I've hired hundreds of people and this is just not true. A first impression matters a bit, sure - but it has hardly any effect on the decision.
> There is also the reality that when companies need to fill a role, and when first start interviewing they will set the bar way too high and reject some perfectly qualified candidates
This is a very poor hiring practice. You should what you're looking for and what you are willing to pay for it. And then you should recruit a candidate pool that meets this criteria and go from there.
Hiring is literally the most important job a manager has in any fast growing company. It should be taken very seriously and systematically.
The thing about confirmation biases are that they are at the subconscious level and you likely wouldn't be able to detect them. It's possible that you have an impartial and immune to confirmation bias interview process, but it's also possible that you are indeed deciding (skewing) most of your interviews in the first several seconds.
> Hiring is literally the most important job a manager has in any fast growing company. It should be taken very seriously and systematically
I agree. Which is why, if it is found that hiring committees are more effective, and your company isn't using them, then are you taking them seriously? The same with bonuses and promotions. These should not be decided by a single person (manager).
Not the original commenter, but I've had interviews where I was feeling pretty negative about a candidate in the first 5-10 minutes, but ultimately recommended them (sometimes even quite enthusiastically).
Given that empirical evidence to the contrary, it seems like a pretty incredible claim to insist that I'm deciding primarily based on the first few seconds. Do you actually have anything to back up your claim? That would suggest that, for instance, performance on a coding exercise has absolutely no bearing on my recommendation, since it usually takes a few minutes to get the coding rolling.
A confirmation bias is not a conclusion, it's a skewing/filtering of how you see something. Read the book "A Thousand Brains" by Jeff Hawkins. The way your brain works fundamentally is that it makes predictions and assumes that the prediction is what will happen (the book explains this better). That's why in my original comment I said " Of course with an amazing interview performance you can switch a predetermined no into a yes, and with a very poor interview you can turn a predetermined yes into a no."
What if they get the technical questions wrong afterwards?
I get night owls generally get the short end of the stick. However, we are practically half the population. It’s a strange kind of irk to have someone tell me what hours I’m most productive at.
The biggest issue is to maintain balance. Once I am checked out of the job, then moving on the new company is the only way out. So, one becomes a bit desperate especially if the management kinda knows that you're not giving your best anymore.
Holidays/Q4 is one of the best times to interview, since you get breathing space from your work and get more free time to schedule interviews right before holidays and then, post holidays you're ready to kick off your new job.
- Yes try to schedule ASAP, although it gets so complicated lining up availability I don't think it is possible to aim for mornings vs afternoons.
- Try to read between the lines in the job listing. How does it align with the company's goals/growth? What aspects seem important? Try to focus on that. Example: I noticed company ABC is hiring a few hardware engineers for the first time. I would highlight how I can work independantly and my skills in building a new hardware team
- Be enthusiastic about things besides the tech stack. I am surprised how many people I interview who don't seem to care much about the job beyond if we use Java vs Python.
- Just be yourself...
Other places open up several new roles, and conduct rolling interviews until all are filled. In this case I would rather get in early and compete for one of N positions instead of competing for the final one. With several similar roles open they could also decide which fits you the best and make the offer based on that. When there is only one junior position still open, that might be the only option.
I'm currently interviewing for software development roles and it just seems like a lot of luck is involved, good or bad. Uber ghosted me a week ago after the recruiter missed our appointment. A few weeks before that, I completed a week long 'test project' and haven't heard back from them.
For such a technical field, there's too much bullshit involved in finding a job.
I don’t find that I get to dictate interview scheduling a great deal. But then again I haven’t interviewed in a while.
I don’t know if that’s just a remote thing or what.
1. Don't schedule your driving test right before lunch. 2. Don't schedule your driving test on a Friday afternoon. 3. Don't schedule your driving test on your birthday.
The first two were about not getting the interviewer at a time when they really have somewhere else they want to be. The last one was because it sucks if you schedule it on your sixteenth birthday and fail.
Pre-covid, if you were not from the bay area, this happened naturally. You just tell the companies that you are traveling in the bay area in a given time frame and would like to schedule your interviews in that period. Not sure if post-covid it has become simpler.
The problem is...that we need this level of creative thinking in the first place.
We need hacks like this so that we can make it through a completely broken industries interviewing process.
But for the most part, you want to interview as soon as they can and if they have multiple rounds (phone, meet a manager, meet the team) you want to do them as quickly as reasonably possible. They have a position open, they want to fill it, if they hire you quickly, there will be no more competition. They don't want to interview any more people than they have to, so if you're right for the job, they'll hire you fairly quickly. If they aren't willing to schedule your interview fairly quickly, they aren't particularly motivated to fill the position (or have other candidates that they consider higher priority) and might not be worth your time.
When interviewing, remember that the interview is a two way street. Try to figure out what the job really is (the hr who posted position and phone screen people likely know much less about the actual job than the interviewers). If after finding out the details, you are genuinely interested in what they do and what you would do in the position, it'll keep the tone positive, even if you struggle. An underqualified, but motivated, candidate is much more interesting than a highly qualified but apathetic candidate.
Also, by keeping the interview as a conversation (trying to figure out if/how their questions relate to what they job is), you might get glimpses of feedback on how you're doing that you will almost certainly never get directly. This should help get you an idea of if it is going to be a good place to work or not.
If possible, show usages rather than tell qualifications. Rather than saying you can do X, tell a 10 second elevator pitch style story about how you've done it before. Try to have something to say about anything on your resume. They should come out confident that anything you claimed on it was actually you, not just "your team".
If they ask about something you are weak in, admit it, and try to see how they use it and try to offer related experience that shows you understand and are willing and able to learn it. They don't really expect to find a candidate that knows everything, but if you can demonstrate that you are familiar with the space enough to learn it, they'll be more willing to give you a pass.
If you totally fail at the interview but are genuinely interested and show the ability to learn it, you still have a chance. If you show disinterest or get defensive (rather than motivated) when challenged, they won't want to hire you.
If it isn't a good fit in your mind and you'd be looking for something better the day you start, be honest with yourself and them, thank them for their time and let them know that it isn't what you thought it was. A gracious interviewee who doesn't waste their time, may get called back if they have a position that better matches your interests (perhaps even if that interviewer moves to another company). If you accept a job and leave it fairly quickly, that's a big red flag and future employers will likely check that company for references.