How to pass a first-round interview | Hacker News Reader

How to pass a first-round interview

lennysnewsletter.com

195 pointsjger15215 comments

> Formulate high-signal questions (to get interviewers thinking). Interviews are often won or lost by the questions you ask the interviewer at the end. Half of the battle is preparing well and showing up to answer the interviewer’s questions; the other half is asking them questions that get them thinking (and make you stand out).

I've performed hundreds of FAANG interviews, and I categorize this firmly in the "interview astrology" side. In my company we don't use questions asked by the candidate to determine the outcome (at least not for software engineers), and often we don't even record them. It sounds good to "impress your interviewer with your questions" but we are mindful about biases that might favour some candidates e.g. those with particularly good storytelling skills.

My advice would be to not overthink it. Just ask the questions that are genuinely important to you, and don't try to focus on impressing your interviewer.

It's weird that you dont judge potential hires on the quality of their questions, the most important parts of most creative jobs are being able to ask the right questions.

The questions a candidate asks during that part of the interview have almost no overlap to the questions they would ask as part of a real job.

And no, not really. My job is to assess their technical skills, not how well they ask me about my work life balance while in a relatively high stress environment.

I'm not talking about inane questions like your work life balance. I am talking about questions about your product, your design decisions, etc.

If I am interviewing at a company I certainly want to know that I am not going to be working at a dumpster fire. I want to know how you internally resolve conflicts relating to code reviews for example, so I know that you uphold standards and dont just allow things to get progressively worse as time goes on due to systematic indifference. Now you could be lying to me but that's why I ask more than one question. Certainly to me it feels like if a candidate is asking these kinds of questions during an interview process then that candidate also cares about those things, which depending on whether you are running a java sweatshop or an organized and productive development company seems like it would have some importance.

Maybe the candidate don't feel they need to ask such questions because they have 5 friends who work for the company and know the answer already. From an interviewer perspective, you get more signal from the candidate by asking them such questions in a behavior interview in a more standardized way.

> I want to know how you internally resolve conflicts relating to code reviews for example

I call this process fit. It's important to some candidates, and some employers. It's clearly important to you, and you should ask those questions; interviewing is a two-way street.

But if I'm an employer that makes process a big deal, I'm not giving you points for those questions, because I'm going to be sussing out your process fit earlier anyway. If I'm not an employer that makes process a big deal, I'm probably not giving you points for those questions, because it's not a big deal to me (this could be a red flag for you, depending on the answers you get from your probing questions)

> “The questions a candidate asks during that part of the interview have almost no overlap to the questions they would ask as part of a real job.”

An apt symmetry, as typically the questions a candidate gets asked during an interview also have no overlap to the questions they would get asked as part of the real job.

the quality of questions is important during the technical segment, almost as much as getting the correct (or at least reasonable) answer/solution. charging into a solution without picking up on the ambiguities is one of the classic ways a leetcode legend fails a technical interview.

after all that, I feel the candidate deserves at least 5-10 minutes at the end to ask their own honest questions without having to worry about what they're signaling.

When I'm asking an interviewer questions, I'm trying to get a read on what it's like to work there. Are there any red flags that'd turn me off? Is this a place I'll enjoy working? Do my potential coworkers seem like decent people? Does the work/life balance match what I want to see?

When I'm actually working at a place, I don't need to ask those questions. I already know the answer.

These questions are important but they are not the types of questions I am asking about. Part of determining if you want to work somewhere is figuring out how mature the team is when it comes to design decisions and the development process, to accurately ascertain this, you have to ask technical questions, the act of asking these questions is itself an indicator that you yourself are thinking about these important things and as such value them and should, to a well functioning development team with a working product, indicate that you would at least contribute to keeping things working optimally and contribute positively.

I would be worried if someone nevet asked about the thing they were going to be working on, asked why certain design decisions were made, or asked how it gets developed.

Sure, I agree. That's part of me finding out if I want to work there.

The unfortunate reality is usually you're given 5-10 mins at the end in a hasty "what would you like to ask me?" so I tend to stick to the more basic type questions. Repeating across interviewers to see what patterns pop up.

That said I'm not shy about pushing back with questions during an interview session itself, and that's where things like you're talking about can get worked in. Of course if they insist on "solve this problem" type sessions, there's less of that. But it's also less likely I want to work there. So it works out for me.

One issue with that is it's very subjective. One interviewer will be impressed by a question, and another will not.

do you ask all of your interviewers the same set of questions to ensure they’re all suitably impressed by you?

if not how do you decide to allocate them?

This. I might call out a particularly good question in the debrief but only as an aside.

I don’t think I ever made a decision where the questions factored in at all; most of the time there’s more than enough material in the actual interview to cover a decision being made.

I think the questions that matter are clarifying questions in e.g. architecture rounds.

E.g. design a document storage system

Asking about requirements can help provide evidence you're aware of tradeoffs, various concepts, etc. and separate yourself from other candidates. Not surface level "what QPS do we need to support?" type questions, but beyond that.

Otherwise, yes, I agree, questions are not recorded and don't matter (unless there's a serious red flag like someone asking if they can avoid working with $GROUP_THEY_DONT_LIKE which raises HR type concerns)

On the other hand, at small companies, this can be a big deal. FAANG companies pretty much know how interested you are in working there, based on the fact that you’re the type of person who thinks they want to work at a FAANG company. And since the scope of these companies is so large, there are all sorts of ways to fit your interests into work at such a company over the mid-to-long-term.

But early-stage companies are looking for folks who have an interest and understanding in the task at hand. For many hiring managers at these companies, expertise – or at least interest – in the problem space is noteworthy. On the hard-skill side, it can suggest that you may be able to help see around corners with your product team, identifying and solving issues during planning or on the fly. On the soft-skill side, it can suggest that you’re bringing positive energy and motivation to the still-nascent team.

In the end, it’s still a matter of knowing your audience and reading the room. It may be a waste of time in some places, and may be the difference-maker in others.

Yep.

Folks at 200+ and especially FAANG companies are mostly interchangeable. The interviewer is mostly derisking chance of a dud and comparing a 86%er vs 87%er. A few exceptions like at the rarer million dollar comp level. For everyone else, especially non-insiders... Cookie cutter comparisons it is, and whatever edge.

Startups are very much making a more existential bet. For our openings, I'm equally looking for ownership, interest in our customers/mission/long-term, and other bits that have little to with a whiteboard. On a HN Hiring thread from yesterday, you'd be surprised how many emails I got that were 'here is my stale CV from 5-10 years ago' and little about why they're excited to do hard things with us. Likewise, if someone is on a second round with us and hasn't bothered to use our free tier, that also tells us a lot about their (dis)interest in doing for what is, for everyone else on our team, career-defining creations.

Frankly most startups aren't very interesting. The ones who want you to be super interested are often the most boring ideas "were passionate about sox compliance", and if they are interesting they won't tell you shit about the company due to secret sauce or just moving so fast nothing is documented. It's hard as a candidate to get excited about every idea. And many people purposefully don't as they don't want to get shot down later by a job they were excited about. Finally if I'm actively looking I have 10 leads I'm following and I'm practicing for interviews. Signing up for every beta tryout eats into that time. I'll take a look when ivw got an offer.

I took a career pivot from web forms /rails to AAA playstation games. I played the game after they flew me to Seattle and gave me an offer. It involved buying a PlayStation 3 and their previous game. And that's an obviously cool job. Bought it right after I landed home and played it the next morning. Accepted the offer a few hours later.

Yea, I've had a similar issue happen to me. Was interviewing at a small-mid company that I was increasingly interested in and passionate about, and had really delved into with various interviewers to learn about their business and what made them a good product and good place to work.

Ultimately, they went with someone else. I'm not upset about it, but it stung more than getting another form letter from some large company. It feels almost cruel as an interviewer/hiring manager to expect every viable candidate to get really invested in you and your company when you know you're going to reject some high percentage of them just because you can't hire more than a few people.

Yes, generally I assume each candidate is having serious conversations with 2-5 others, and non-serious with more. We do the same. There are exceptions, like folks not actively interviewing, but that's the typical case.

It is big stakes for all involved, so someone not treating it seriously is a big warning flag. That is fine for later stage companies where individuals mostly need to not screw up and add reliable incremental value, and the resume screens and interview processes people are complaining about here reflect that need. Different job, different interview..

I certainly understand the stakes for you in making the right hire, but you're fundamentally much less invested in the candidate than you seem to be asking them to be in you. At the end of the day, you can reject them and pick someone else, or wait for someone better, while it seems like you have some expectation that they should be upset and disappointed if they don't make the cut with you.

Ultimately, if I'm really passionate, but don't have all the skills you want, or want more money than you can provide, than you'll pass on me and move on to the next candidate. That's fine, but if we've spent the time making sure I feel like I could really create something good with you and your team, and that I'd be a good part of it, that's just setting up 3-5 of your candidates to have a really strong letdown, even beyond what's already a difficult thing to hear.

I'm not sure where I say we "have some expectation that they [candidates] should be upset and disappointed if they don't make the cut". I would assume they'd be disappointed they didn't get an offer, wasted application time, and didn't get an impactful role... for easily avoidable reasons.

Agreed that people not a match for a job shouldn't get the job offer nor should they take if the offerer have messed up. This is all match making... Which is two-sided.

I'm lucky enough to have reached a point personally & professionally where I can highly value where each hour goes & doesn't go. A lot of time goes into a job, so the idea of applying for a bunch of 2-5yr (or longer) journey candidates, and the possibility to do the best professional work of my life to date.. and not doing my homework on the options just doesn't make sense. For some people it does and for many legit reasons, and for them, a leetcode interview for a FAANG style job probably makes more sense. Just that kind of approach is a harder sell for making a good match at a startup at the more formative years.

I'm implying it somewhat, since if you're "looking for ownership, interest in our customers/mission/long-term" and getting involved in what you see as "career-defining creations", then that's a relationship with a job that requires a candidate to buy into what you're doing to the point where they'd be upset to be rejected from the opportunity. I'm not trying to say you're deluding them or anything, but that the level of commitment you're asking for out of candidates before they've even started with you is such where it's a harder rejection than just "it's on to another job."

What I'm trying to say is that expecting the candidates to do the work to sell themselves on your vision and importance and viability feels like both a large burden on them and something that's setting even those dedicated enough to do it up for likely heartbreak.

Like you say, this is two-sided. Loading up the free version of your offering is more work than most interviewers are putting into a candidate. I could see it being very fair and very interesting to have a section of an interview where I sat with one of the company's developers or product folks and played around with the product to learn and talk about it - that seems like it would be a good signal both ways.

Otherwise, it just feels like you're asking candidates to put in far more time and personal effort deciding to care about them than you're likely putting in to learn and care about them outside of the interviews. That's always the case with interviews, but this additional layer just feels like an unnecessarily interviewee-unfriendly level on top. If it's working for you, then that's good for you, but consider the sorts of candidates that could be a good fit but don't have the time after work to spend even more time becoming invested in your company and a vision.

Agreed all around.

For us, folks using our tech and then realizing what it's for is the beginning of much more interesting technical & mission conversations than programming language, monetization model, or RSU vs ISO. I rather talk about where data analysis is going for tough problem XYZ, and what we - and their area of ownership - needs to do to help get our users and the tech community there.

Both sides needs to be ready for that conversation though, and those are the candidates that stick out. And yeah, if the company is say streamlining parking, or the candidate just wants a 9-5 -- both of which are fine -- it'll be a different kind of interview.

As others have said better, you are essentially asking the candidate to put in more time applying for opportunity than you are for them as a candidate to the filtering process. Eg they've got email exchanges, resume, interviews, and researching your company and doing the free trial. You have filter the resume, do the screen, write up decision.

I think you're missing that there's a power imbalance between you as the comfortable person offering a job (who is employed), and a person who may be currently looking and has mouths to feed and no income. I think you're making some assumptions here that might rule out excellent candidates in many scenarios and filter in for ingenuine yes people.

Also I did look, you seem to be a CEO on a graph visualization 3d acceleration system. I'm not sure that wows me instantly. I did sign up for a free trial, but I don't have an example data set to upload, and you don't seem to have one (I tried no-code visualizations). The main stuff I'd upload is something from work, but I generally don't need graph visualizations there either. I'm not going to upload proprietary info to a trial account. So as a enterprise customer I'm kinda at a crossroads for trying your system out. I'd have to go to Security and Legal and get approval, or I could just use tables or d3js, graphviz, or any of the solutions I'm currently not using. It's also unclear what of my data hits your servers.

As a candidate I imagine I'm at 45 minutes in before I actually get to kick the tires. You're not really making it easy for me to love your pitch.

At a minimum it'd be great if you could just have a notebook or collab or whatever people could just spin up instantly or use via browser. All I see are images, which while pretty seem to show the same issues I have with every other graph visualization program, they're incredibly cluttered.

Again you're not Games and you're not Space... I'm not sure why people would be passionate about your product in under 45 minutes or could afford to spend more than that to do so. I'd ask you to really consider if anyone can be as passionate about your idea as you are.

Beware, with such good criticism you may have a job offer by him in the next hours or so.

I appreciate the good faith attempt!

https://github.com/graphistry/pygraphistry

No 3d/vr/etc unfortunately, we never saw commercial demand in our segments, just looking at bigger datasets and increasingly 'wide' / high-dimensional/scattered/heterogeneous data using accelerated viz & AI, and now text2code

And yes, we currently get used by data scientists and devs on problems like supply chain analysis, misinformation, cybersecurity, human trafficking. Seeing 100x+ more data than d3 and having a full env there makes analyst investigations easier. Our original GPU client <> GPU cloud tech helped lead to what is now Apache Arrow (we contributed the JS tier as part of the GPU Open Analytics Initiative) and Nvidia RAPIDS (we wrote the precursor in nodejs/opencl, and worked with Nvidia to restart for pydata), and are now focusing on the Nvidia Morpheus & graph AI sides for end-to-end GPU pipelines with our bigger customers (cyber, ...).

More recently, to make this kind of tech easier for analysts who are traditionally stuck with Splunk/Kibana/etc style UIs for investigations, we have been launching louie.ai (genAI-first notebooks) with various customers

Hopefully now it makes sense why we don't go far with candidates who can't have conversations on these things, such as how they are built, how they get used, and where they are going . It is ok-but-not-great on conv 1, but weird by conv 2. And as a CEO, far from what I look for in someone in a senior/leader role who is supposed to be looking ahead.

> if someone is on a second round with us and hasn't bothered to use our free tier, that also tells us

Now that you've said it on HN... soon, most of the applicants you get using your free tier by second round will be doing so because that'll be added as a standard part of the generic tech jobs interviewing ritual for people who just go through the motions (along with memorizing Leetcode, and practicing good-sounding lies to behavioral questions).

Great!

I can't fathom having a serious discussion about a 2-5 year career bet, and hopefully even more impacting, and not having a serious look at the actual work or at least the highly related technologies. Some of our best hires have been from our userbase and the OSS communities we helped start, and some of our misses have been from those who couldn't get on board with those.

(We don't do leetcode etc, though for junior roles we do ask for a Jupyter notebook, and for senior, might do a contracting period if mutually agreeable.)

Having a contracting period for senior engineers sounds like you must not get many of them. Most people I know at that level are swimming in offers when they go looking for work, so a contract period is just incredibly unattractive.

Yes it varies. Some prefer it before jumping in, eg, super senior who mostly do advisory and light consulting. We are a small team so by definition each person gets more ownership than at your average bigco or megaround VC co.

A friend told me that Bumble require you sign up to apply for a job. And now my pet theory about why guys get so few swipes back is that they're all swiping away on leagues of job applicants.

> if someone is on a second round with us and hasn't bothered to use our free tier, that also tells us a lot about their (dis)interest in doing for what is, for everyone else on our team, career-defining creations.

This is on a completely different planet from my experience as a candidate and as an interviewer.

It looks like you're doing interesting work, and it might be great to work for you. But that's true of a lot of other companies. You're asking for a level of interest and dedication to your company that is completely unwarranted at this stage. For all I know you're about to ghost me. I suspect a major effect of your approach is that you select people who are better BS artists and have fewer employment options.

Maybe this is why you've been ghosted so much.

I haven't been ghosted "so much." I've worked at a cool startup and two FAANGs. But there's no guarantee the interview process will go your way no matter how good you are; there's a lot of luck and interpretation involved.

Yes, we are looking for folks to work with us, not for us. Different mindset & process. We try not to hire ex-FAANG (but occasionally do) in part because of this kind of difference.

It's fascinating to see so much resistance to this kind of thinking for a forum that is nominally about startups. In a sense that's good - some people are well-suited for the needs of scaleups and post-scale, vs startups (0-1, 1-10), and recognizing that is healthy. What you do & learn in a big company or a already-figured-it-out late-stage & highly funded VC co is different from the wild west stage of startups.

I will work for you, not with you, as the loyalty of your company is non existent. I worked for many start ups, and enjoyed working on that type of challenges, but I am always aware loyalty is non existent. It is a red flag if company talks about "we are a family" or "work with us".

I always liked the Netflix reframing of 'professional sports team's vs 'family' because of that reason. At the same time.. I'm sorry you've had a professional career with so many folks lacking loyalty. I've been lucky enough to work with a variety of 'recognized' great people, and with them, loyalty is so common that it has been the folks who lacked loyalty (and often in politicized bigcos that seems to encourage that) who stand out as the exceptions.

Fwiw, I'm using 'work with us' in the sense of taking ownership over a problem and ability & interest to work through many unknowns, vs preferring a weekly jira with big decisions made by the time they reach you.

The analogy of 'mercenary' specialist may align with your world view. Sometimes that type of person can be worth their weight in gold. We like that for short temp consultations for example, and in big enterprise engagements, I often like when a mix of them + lifers are involved..

If you miss revenue targets, you will have to lay off staff. Maybe it is too early yet for your company, but as you go to different funding rounds this will happen. A spreadsheet will decide if you retain me or lay me off.

It really doesn't take long to try out a free tier of a product and it's a great way to get a feel for what the company is building, how far along they are, how much you like or dislike the direction they've taken.

I even like to briefly try the free tier of a product (if available) ahead of warm lead sales calls. It always pays off to have a rough understanding of what a product does and how it fits into an overall ecosystem.

It might be a reasonable thing for a candidate to do. But for a company to judge me based on whether or not I've done it is silly.

> On a HN Hiring thread from yesterday, you'd be surprised how many emails I got that were 'here is my stale CV from 5-10 years ago' and little about why they're excited to do hard things with us.

I was about to write a moderately snarky comment and went to your profile to check which Java banking middleware or Rails-based Uber-for-dogs your startup is building for applicants to be excited about... but looking at the description your company seems quite interesting! Sorry to hear that you've got flooded with generic low-effort application from disinterested people. I guess in current job market some people just desperately knocking on all doors hoping to get any job at all.

A lot of people here would argue it’s just a numbers game. I’ve been lucky over the past 25 years to hit 2 or 3 targeted possibilities with a single email to someone I knew. But I realize that’s probably not typical.

I think that's more true than people, especially pure engineers, would like to think

Ultimately companies are made out of individuals going through their own lives and making decisions as they go. Raising capital, selling software, and getting a job offer are all very much sales processes. That means very real human + numbers components.

Agreed on the numbers side too on the long-view.. join a company, vest + 1yr, and either stay if it's growing or on to the next one. At least a couple times, stay longer - ideally at the growers - so you can go up in learned seniority too vs just in title. An equally important numbers game.

Thank you, and thankfully we are fine

I just feel bad that folks are pretty much disqualifying themselves needlessly. It's a tough job market, and if folks are flubbing it with us that needlessly, I can only imagine what they are going through with their other applications. A bit of effort here can go a long way, hence my advocacy...

> Likewise, if someone is on a second round with us and hasn't bothered to use > our free tier, that also tells us a lot about their (dis)interest in doing for > what is, for everyone else on our team, career-defining creations.

This makes sense. After a first round, if I'm still interested in a company, I want to dig in and find out everything I can to see if they're a likely fit and signing up for a free tier (if there is one) is absolutely a no brainer. And it's usually is a great way to form some meaningful questions to ask in the next round of interviews if I AM interested.

Exactly, same thing in my company, at least for technical interviews. I always tell interviewees that questions are off the record, and if they don't have any questions, it's totally fine.

OTOH, I have known interviewers that would not pass an interviewee that asked no questions. Wasn't first-round interviews though.

The only universal truth when it comes to interviews is that there are no universal truths.

As an interviewee there is nothing you can do that will universally be read as a positive across all interviewers. There are so many contradictory rules among interviewers that you might as well not bother gaming the system and do what you want to do. Let the chips fall as they may.

As an interviewer, no filter you put in place will give you a perfect read on what it's intended to test. For instance I know I have my quirks in terms of things that'll turn me off of a candidate based on resume alone. But I also recognize that many candidates are coached to do it this way in the first place. So I need to be conscious of this and try to not interpret these things as "shitty candidate"

>The only universal truth when it comes to interviews is that there are no universal truths.

100%. This is what makes me roll my eyes in all of these threads. Do enough interviews and you'll see people regularly dismissed for the most pretty and inane reasons. Hell, just the other day in one of these threads you had someone saying that they rejected a candidate because they said "bro" too much. No amount of interview prep, "They Hate This One Weird Trick" blogs, or hiring astrology will beat the fact that there are humans sitting on the other side of the table. And humans are weird and finicky

>they rejected a candidate because they said "bro" too much

It would depend on context but that would certainly trip alarm bells for me.

Case in point, tbh

I do think I'd mark it against someone if I reserved 10-15 minutes at the end of an interview and they didn't have anything at all they wanted to know about the job or the company. I'm not expecting them to have a laundry list, but still. Or if you're not going to ask something, then have something to say at least. I'd rather you just go "No questions, since I assume this job pays me in money I can use to buy things?".

Getting a new job is a big deal - either you're about to quit somewhere and presumably you're looking because you care about finding a new employer that's better on some axis than your current job, or you're out of work and desperate to take anything, which is fine as well, but if you don't want to just admit that, you should probably have some idea of what to say otherwise.

How many companies would actually answer the real questions people have? You might actually get red flagged. So they go to GlassDoor for those.

And then you are left with "polite questions", fillers.

It depends on the questions - I don't feel like I've often gotten bad answers when I've asked and I know I try my hardest to be as honest as possible when candidates ask me hard questions about my position.

If I get red flagged for asking about their on-call policies or office-work plans or how they're handling the position/responsibilities that I would be taking on, then that seems like a bullet dodged? It's not like I'm expecting people to ask "So tell me about why you hate your manager" or "When was the last time you fired someone". You can ask probing but polite questions that give you information without having people tell you the sort of angry gossip you get on Glassdoor.

Obviously, tailor this to how desperate you are. If you want absolutely zero chance anyone will reject you for any reason, then you should be asking the most fluffy questions you can. I certainly don't reject people for asking those questions. I just find it a weird signal when someone seemingly doesn't even want to pretend to care about content, structure, and culture of the job they're interviewing for.

Interviewing candidates in a startup context I try to answer questions as openly and honestly as possible–I want both parties in the conversation to be on the same page and know what they're getting into. I don't think anyone benefits when people dance around topics that will materially impact success and satisfaction at work on a daily basis.

Companies don't conduct interviews, people do. You need to be able to ask questions in an inoffensive way, and you might get some meaningful signal back. If you conclude you can't ask hard questions and instead go to Glassdoor then you're biasing yourself to demonstrative cheerleaders or people with an axe to grind, neither of which will really tell you anything about what's actually going on within the ranks of power on the inside of a company.

I'm struggling to think of legitimate questions which would get someone red flagged. Asking about oncall, team dynamics, inter-team dynamics, culture, why people want to work there, etc. all feel like they're important for the candidate to get to know if they'd want to work there.

> and they didn't have anything at all they wanted to know about the job or the company.

I assume that does not include scenarios where the large company interview claims they can't answer questions about a specific job until much later after a "team matching" step.

Sure. Obviously there's exceptions, and I mostly haven't worked anywhere where that's been an issue, but you also know what you're in for if you're interviewing somewhere that size. It's a very different process.

That said, I've regularly done interviews from both sides where I wasn't talking with someone who would be anywhere close to my role/team, and there's still plenty to ask there. At worst, you'll learn some about a different part of the organization, and maybe get some interesting contrast to other people you talk to later.

Even finding out what things are and aren't the same across the whole company can be interesting. Does vacation policy vary by team? Their use of various tools? Their work/ticket management process?

As an interviewer, the only signal I ever take away from interviewee questions is if they manage to come across like a complete asshole. And this isn't common because most people aren't complete assholes, and those who are usually have displayed their colors earlier on in the interview.

As an interviewee, I refuse to put any effort into gaming the system and hoping to come across as a better candidate. I treat these sessions as me interviewing them. And yes, this means that a lot of times my questions will come across as banal. But you can get some decent signal on red flags by asking several potential peers to describe their day, challenges that they're facing, and that sort of thing.

On few occasions the questions interviewees asked at the end did help me form a better picture of them as candidates; example, someone asked what Java version we run predominantly and, and this is the important bit, didn't balk when the answer was some ancient LTS version but instead a nervous laugh of commiseration followed by war story time. This told me a lot both about the candidate's maturity and experience.

That's a good heuristic. Someone just starting doesn't know what "best practices" are. Someone early into their career demands strict adherence to the best practices. Someone later into their career knows what rules can be bent, and knows a good reason for doing it.

>As an interviewee, I refuse to put any effort into gaming the system and hoping to come across as a better candidate.

This is something missing from all the "interview coaching" advise and very few people seem to understand.

Suppose there is an actual technique that allows you to get a job you otherwise would not get. Say, hypothetically, you used it to become an astronaut. Do you think you perform well as an astronaut even though the selection process would have culled you? I'd imagine you get kicked out anyways so all you gained is a line in a resume. The same advise also insists that having a whole bunch of 0.5-1 year "gigs" in your work history is normal, but is it really? Do people really believe hiring managers don't see the pattern? Does anyone really think that people go: "Oh, we should hire this person, he worked in all of FAANG, one year in each, must be very good!"?

Do you really think interviews only cull people that would be a poor fit?

People are terrible judges of character and interviewing is every bit the shit show dating is.

It depends on the company, I guess. The first-round interviews, which are the subject of this topic, that I have seen, were all Fizz Buzz level to cull the obviously incompetent.

The biggest companies and the FAANGs don't care. It's a numbers game for them. They know interviewing isn't a science but there's very little incentive for them to improve the process because they get so many applicants.

Well, yes, interview preparation is a bet on the incapacity of the interviewer to determine a candidate's capacity.

Anyway, neither of those things is binary, if you ask me, I would really advise into getting some amount of preparation; but if it too useful, it's actually a red flag.

Indeed, it's a bet that you, an outsider, know better than the interviewers that you will not be fired after the first performance review (note that it says nothing about your general competency, just the performance metrics of this particular company). If you had not been personally involved, which side of such a bet you would have taken?

As I said, it's not binary.

I would be on the interviewer having a lot of issues undermining his evaluation; and I would be on the performance review having them too. Those are very hard tasks, nobody gets them perfectly right.

It's not the absolute evaluation of the candidate as a human being. It's an evaluation of fitness for the particular job by someone who has some insight into the company requirements vs. evaluation of the same requirements by someone outside. It is not binary indeed but, statistically, the outsider will be wrong more often than the insider unless insider's evaluation has no or a negative correlation with the performance metrics.

> Do you think you perform well as an astronaut even though the selection process would have culled you?

Yes, and it's not even remotely close. It shouldn't really be surprising, "code up an algorithm that some genius needed half a lifetime to develop, but from scratch, in 45 minutes, on a whiteboard, while being watched, with the job on the line" has nothing whatsoever to do with what you'd do at the actual job. So why would the interview be a predictor of job performance?

>So why would the interview be a predictor of job performance?

Because most companies want to hire people who perform well and not hire people who don't perform well. They have variable success at that but even some fly-by-night startup will try to adjust interviews when they find that a significant number of people they hired needs to be sacked.

> As an interviewee, I refuse to put any effort into gaming the system and hoping to come across as a better candidate.

That reminds me of this part of the article: "You can use mirroring in your interview process. How? Use their language when describing your experiences."

I consider mirroring to be a form of gaming the system, or at least something that can backfire. Having heard many interviewees parrot back terminology they didn't really understand, I'm sensitive to when somebody is trying to dazzle me with BS. I'd much rather hear an interviewee use much simpler, even non-technical verbiage, when describing things than try to use the words they think I want to hear.

I have failed several interviews by knowing too much about the employer, or in cases, even the interviewer --- where I felt I didnt have any pertinent questions to ask at the end of the interview...

If I already know the answer I have to consciously remember to still ask questions at the end....

No worse interview feeling of suddenly thinking of all the questions you _should_ have asked after youve left the meeting...

In the past, I've dealt with that by saying something like "I would ask you X, but I saw from [place] that the answer is Y. Can you confirm that this is correct / confirm that this still true / tell me more?"

I put my cards on the table to show that I've done my homework and establish what I know already, then elicit more information. If there's nothing more to be said, then fine, but at least an interviewer who cares what I ask will know what I'm curious about even if I already happen to have an answer. And if I'm wrong, then it gives them an opportunity to correct the record. Or it gives them an opening to provide additional nuance.

> My advice would be to not overthink it. Just ask the questions that are genuinely important to you, and don't try to focus on impressing your interviewer.

I agree with this, except in one sense that I think lends to the point of the blog post.

The questions you ask can drive perception of how you might act as an employee. On more than one occasion I have asked a question about X at an interview and then had a subsequent conversation with a recruiter where they ask "is [something related to X] a concern for you?"

I've not ever had one discontinue me due to it but it shows what's coming up in conversation at the interview debriefs.

Out of those hundreds of interviews, can you discern some clear patterns, that are common to all candidates that impress positively?

> hundreds of FAANG interviews

hundreds??

So that's at least 200. Assuming you interview for the 5 FAANG in parallel, and you have, let's say 5 rounds per application (and you do reach the 5th). You would have done the whole process 8 times. Assuming they let you apply only once per year, that means you have interviewed at the very least every year for the last 8y. okay.

I assume they mean as the interviewer

517 interviews as an interviewer.

Google is the only place I have worked where we didn't judge peoples' follow-up questions. I'm not sure FAANG is representative in that respect.

Counterpoint: I've performed hundreds of interviews at early-stage startups, and this is spot-on, fantastic advice. If you can ask questions about things that I have spent time thinking about, that's a really good sign to me that you were able to look at the company from the outside and apply your knowledge to understand what's important. If you can ask questions about things I haven't been thinking about but that subsequently get me thinking, even better.

Questions really distinguish you from other candidates more than answers because the fact that they're unprompted means they tell me more about where you focus your attention than do the answers to my questions.

> My advice would be to not overthink it. Just ask the questions that are genuinely important to you, and don't try to focus on impressing your interviewer.

With all of that said, I still 100% agree with this. The ideal result is that you ask me questions about things that are important to you and that I find those questions compelling - then we've probably got a good match.

But do make sure you have some thoughtful, researched questions. Those are always better than "what's the best thing about working here?" regardless of topic.

The article claims that most first round interviews are behavioral questions / culture fit.

That doesn't match any interview processes I've been involved with. If you are running an interview process for ICs (which this article clearly targets), you should put the highest signal questions first.

That usually means a somewhat easy coding question. If people fail that, then you can immediately eliminate them from the pipeline. If they fail a hard coding question, you usually need more signal, which means more wasted time.

If your culture fit / behavioral question is good at weeding out candidates, then there's probably something seriously wrong with your hiring practices. Sociology studies show that those questions are more correlated to drinking the same brand of alcohol or playing the same sports than they are to job performance.

Other studies show that diversity significantly increases team performance, so filtering people on whether you'd like to hang out with them during the weekend is fraught with technical peril.

> Other studies show that diversity significantly increases team performance

Ah yes, “studies”, no doubt by “experts”. Think about how ridiculous this claim is in the context of a software engineering team. What mechanism is supposed to be at work?

(With one exception - gender differences, that’s perfectly plausible).

I would not care to work for a team where members flippantly disregard exclusion of significant subsections of the population from their ranks, for whatever excuse they design to choose. Either way. There are competent people of all colours, creeds, and classes, and if your company is not able to get any, there's something wrong with you.

Indeed, at scale, a company that is significantly unrepresentative of the population from which it draws its employees surely has something wrong with it. That’s basically what these studies show (flaws notwithstanding).

But that’s got nothing to do with individual teams (unless they’re huge) which are far too small to exhibit population-level statistical behaviour. I see this claim repeated often but the sources always end up being these flimsy studies of company-wide public company reporting correlated with market performance.

Agree. Using market performance as the primary indicator of the success of failure of workplace attributes seems very suspect IMO.

I can’t believe how much stock I’ve seen out in studies that just boiled down to “1 year trial showed 4 day workweek didn’t impact performance as measured by stock price.” wat.

> you should put the highest signal questions first. That usually means a somewhat easy coding question.

While I agree with you, what do you make of the claim in the article (that I've seen elsewhere) that behavioural questions are x% more predictive of job performance than technical questions?

Depends on the job and the question.

I had a candidate that didn't believe they were allowed to make decisions, just carry out edicts of "the leaders" even if terrible idea. They didn't believe they should ask questions to clarify or help structure the request. This person has worked at a higherarchial bank then a rule by fiat game studio.

There's no way I could have used this person at our company. Didn't matter their tech chops. They would have been a disaster. In this case behavioral would have caught them.

Instead I asked a tech question which they failed hard and started blaming the recruiter on for not knowing this was a tech position. I tried pivoting to behavioral and it went downhill from there.

I had to try and save the interview by talking about games war stories for 45 minutes taking us over by 30 minutes. It was not great.

But if I had caught it with behavioral I would still had to ask the tech question for fairness. So I'm not sure what would have helped.

I worked in a team where the behavioral part of the interview was nearly impossible to fail. (Someone managed to, but that's a different story). Basically, they just needed to seem enthusiastic about the position, and not commit any HR-worthy offenses during the onsite interview.

However, we had a very high, quantified technical bar, and the recruiters were extremely good at selecting candidates that had demonstrated success elsewhere (top of class, winning coding competitions, managed teams, shipped stuff, worked with trusted engineers / researchers outside the company, etc, etc.)

The result was the strongest team I've ever worked with. We ended up having to let go about 1-3% of new hires, sometimes due to technical skills, sometimes due to lack of motivation / team fit.

More behavioral questions might have filtered out half of the people that didn't work out. However, we also ended up with some socially awkward, uber-nerd types with performance that was way above that of the stereotypical 10x engineer outliers. (They weren't awkward in a hostile work environment way -- those were not tolerated, and were usually filtered out via interviews! Instead it was more things like not being great at getting credit for their work, or at reading social cue's like "I'm busy", or "I have no idea what branch of discrete warp manifold <-> flux capacitor interconnection techniques you're talking about, but I see you're going to keep talking for 10 minutes")

So, if you're at a giant company with a low bar where organizational stuff matters more than technical contribution (like, say FAANG, where hiring targets are in the 1000-10,000's, not 10-100's), then behavioral questions make sense. (No offense to FAANG, but different stuff matters in larger companies.)

If you're at a smaller place where all-by-all communication still works, then I'd suggest keeping an extremely high technical bar, mostly ignoring the behavioral stuff, and then figuring out how to make sure you retain technologists that are not ladder climbers as the organization grows.

I'm really interested to see what studies you're talking about specifically, but I didn't put much value in your comment without it.

I've had a ton of trouble finding good research on this.

Studies have shown.

I just want to figure out how to come up with a good answer for "Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a colleague." (used as an example in the post, but not in any detail). It seems to be the question that anecdotally is the biggest reason I'm not getting offers right now, so I'd welcome pointers.

Where I'm at:

* I don't really know what other people mean by "conflict", so I probably go for examples that are more charged than is necessary.

* When I hear "conflict", my head goes towards relationships with people who were widely problematic within the business (i.e I wasn't the only one who had difficulty with them), and more often than not, they eventually got fired or manage out -- so the conflict often resolved itself based on external factors.

* Minor disagreements, ie differing opinions on how to approach a problem, aren't conflicts in my mind. Because they had no long-term emotional impact on me, I don't tend to remember these well enough to spin a story or discuss particular conflict-navigation techniques or outcomes.

* I have one example where a CEO got an employee to do something unethical (and possibly illegal, not sure), and I challenged them on it. But this was kind of a no-win situation for me, I said my piece, he heard me, the particular instance was stopped, but I'm told he's still doing similar things today (I'm no longer at the company).

Assuming they're not just reading it from a checklist & tuning out when you start talking - they're looking for a story where you had a problematic relationship with a coworker or coworkers, but managed to make it work. Ideally over a longer period of time, and not "Bob stole my lunch out of the fridge one day". For reasons similar to what you said I've found a lot of people don't have very good stories along these lines, and because of that this question is less useful than people like to think. And on top of that, most candidates are terrified of saying anything that makes them look like the ahole in those situations. So if their answer sounds pretty milquetoast who is to say if they're being careful or just don't have good stories.

I have a story I use now. It involved a coworker with whom I had an oil vs water relationship for a couple of years. In retrospect I could have gone about it all a lot better than I did in the moment, although that was true for both of us. I don't have the perfect "And then I solved everything" punchline to my story, they were eventually let go. But, my journey during it all was critical to my own development. And that started me down a leadership path, changing the course of my career. So I talk about my lessons learned, things I wish I'd have done differently in retrospect, etc. I'm not painting a perfect picture of myself, but I do display introspection, personal development, willingness to take different approaches to resolve an issue, etc.

The oil vs water thing resonates. Given that tenures are relatively short these days (1-2 years), it's pretty easy to just wait it out -- especially if the other person has issues with other people too.

I do feel like too many of my examples (for this whole class of questions) are times I could've handled better (though I didn't handle them catastrophically by any means), that ultimately shaped how I think about such things going forwards (after a fair amount of introspection)). But I often seem to lack the examples of a subsequent situation where I put that into practice (pandemic meant I basically took a holding-pattern role for a couple of years).

One would think that introspection, recognition of ones own mistakes and being receptive to feedback would be a massive pro; but lately that hasn't been my experience when interviewing.

If the question feels unclear to you, that’s an excellent opportunity to ask clarifying questions, e.g. “Sure, but what do you mean by ‘conflict’? Do you mean a disagreement on how to solve a problem, or an interpersonal conflict?”

When I ask a question like this I mean a disagreement, and I’d imagine that’s what most interviewers mean too. So I recommend you continue to search for a situation you can recall in detail.

If the answer is that they’re looking for interpersonal conflict, you should use a situation where you took effort to work past it with the person for the good of the mission/company. Your last story could work if framed that way but it lacks a moment where you found a way to move forward with this person.

> So I recommend you continue to search for a situation you can recall in detail.

Or just make one up. Ask silly questions, get silly answers.

This is really what I'd guess a lot of people do. Nobody is going to go back and verify that the "conflict" actually happened.

All these interview questions just boil down to "can you carry on a coherent conversation and do you project a pleasant and social disposition" or even more simply stated, that you "are likable."

I don't care what your technical abilities are, if you are weird or fidgity or sweaty or can't make eye contact you are going to have a lot more difficulty getting hired. At least in the places I've worked. Work on your personality and your abilty to hold a conversation. The details don't really matter.

I don’t think it’s enough to be likeable. That, and “personable” are common words used to describe me, but this particular interview round (eg behavioural questions) are still where I’m most likely to fail a process these days.

Feedback is usually “everyone really liked you, but we had some concerns related to…”. I really do think you need a prepared bank of stories/examples, because otherwise your memories will be biased towards the most emotionally charged examples, which are rarely the ones where you come off looking good — even if you can show self-reflection and subsequent growth.

I agree. You need to have prepared stories for the standard questions, and you need to be able to convincingly bullshit on questions you didn't prepare for.

I'm with you on this.

I've even been told that my lack of a good answer to this question was the only negative mark on one of the interviews for a job that I eventually was hired for.

My honest answer is that I don't generally have conflicts at work. I get along with people and generally handle disagreements easily. I haven't worked in an environment that was rife with conflicts, maybe I'm just lucky or maybe my definition of conflict is different than others.

"I'm really good at predicting potential areas of conflict with my coworkers so I make sure to address them head-on before they turn into something much bigger. This is why I've managed to avoid any major sources of conflict so far (knock on wood). An example of this was..."

Conflict means disagreement. They want to be able to see that you can disagree with someone or handle conflict with someone but not make it personal and move on professionally.

So you disagreed over something technical, like architecture. You show they you can handle conflict by not taking it personally, but involving other people on the team, and regardless of whether or not the outcome is in your favor, you thrash it out once and then stick to it.

I'm a manager whose definition of conflict mostly matches yours, so here's how I handle it (as an interviewee) and how to translate the "default behavioral interview question" to something you can answer:

- the scope of the question is usually "how do you reconcile your worldview, desires, and best interest with someone else's". When answering, I tend to first clarify to the interview that "conflict" is a word that has intense connotations for me, and then ask "Are you asking about a time I had to negotiate with a person that was coming from a different point of view or background, or about how I handled an emotionally charged situation?" (As a manager, it is more common that I do get asked about emotionally charged situations, which also take skills to defuse, just different ones.)

- At least for me, I often think of non-emotionally-charged disagreements as negotiations; there are absolutely negotiation skills to be used to resolve disagreements efficiently and effectively, and if you can't think of any, it may be something for you to practice. Do you often get what you want? When you do, is it mutually beneficial? How does that course of action happen?

- Sometimes you can sidestep the question and showcase better conflict resolution skills by thinking of a time you arbitraged a conflict between two other parties. Describe how you dealt with each party. Did you feel you were unbiased? If you were initially more on the side of one party, how did you set that aside to listen to the other person?

- Don't mention abuses of power (by you or the other party) in a conflict resolution question. Also don't mention conflicts that are primarily personal - the origin of the disagreement should be about work, not tone, physical threats, intimate history, etc.

- If you do have a story about building a working relationship with a known problematic person, so that your work with that person yielded good results and you didn't fall into the trap of a bad personal relationship with them, you can mention what you did to get there. E.g. "X was widely known for his temper and would often yell during code reviews. Although this caused problems with all his teams, and he doesn't work there anymore today, I always got civil, useful code reviews from X by sending him my points in writing in advance, and expressing that I valued his feedback which was why I wanted a trace of it."

I've been asked this numerous times, and similar questions. Most of these questions boil down to "are you, the interviewee we are about to give a job to, a crazy person". Most likely you are not, so find some plausible scenarios, like a missed deadline, scope creep, or any of the normal shit that happens to us, humanize the other in the story, state the resolution (or what you changed in process), the end.

If someone asks me this I tell them about the time when I was working late and another engineer who happened to work a few desks away from mine broke our unit tests and tried to pressure me into committing a quick patch to fix them without testing it first so they wouldn't be late to a movie.

I explained I was new to the group, had no special understanding of the code they changed or the tests that failed and wasn't about to deviate from SDLC principles when there wasn't a compelling need. In my view committing an untested change was what caused the trouble in the first place and I had no confidence that the fix they wanted me to commit would make things better. I suggested that they simply revert their change and come back to it later when they had time.

This only made the other person more irritated. They raised their voice and continued to demand I do what they suggested and I continued to politely explain that while I was willing to help them work through the problem, review their code, examine the data or follow any appropriately documented procedure, I wasn't willing to violate proper engineering principles this way. Their shouting started attracting some unwanted attention and they decided to just pack up and leave. Later that evening another engineer reverted their change and everything was fine again.

My manager asked me how I felt about the incident the next day. I said that although their behavior was irritating, I didn't hold it against them. Even the best of people make mistakes when desperate or rushed. Their mind just wasn't in the right place at that time. They really just needed to get away for a bit. What matters is that we move on, try our best to treat each other with respect and remember that we're all part of the same team.

Just make something up. Or take a real incident and change the details a bit.

Is it better to learn something from the conflict yourself or is it better to help someone else learn something? Come up with different versions and A/B test them to see what kind of reaction you get.

Isn’t this what everyone does in interviews? If not, why not? It’s a storytelling game to get a job offer, not a deposition. I interview a lot of people and hope they’re telling me stories that are partially untrue.

Unfortunately, I’m not good at making things up or embellishing the truth. I’m far more inclined to downplay something than exaggerate.

I’m literally someone who took an inch off my height on my dating app profiles because I have slightly bad posture and didn’t want to misrepresent myself.

Are you not good at them or do you refuse to do them? Or both?

Both. I think knowingly misleading people (or allowing them to be misled by omitting key information) is wrong. There are exceptions, but I’m more strict on this than most appear be.

As a result, I don’t have a lot of practice at it, and the very act makes me feel incredibly anxious.

Well these are skills you can develop if you like.

And remember that the interview process is a game of hiding information from the other player. You would likely never tell an interviewer about the worst thing you’ve done in your professional life just like the interviewer will likely never tell you about the ways the company has fucked over previous employees.

My eyes were rolling too much to finish this piece, but I’ll share a pair of tips:

In a technical interview, learn to recognize when the interviewer is trying to help you, and take notice immediately when they do. If they say, “Do you really need to use a float here?”, nine times out of ten what they really mean is, “Stop trying to use a float here.”

As an interviewer, it’s really unpleasant to be trying to throw a candidate a life preserver and have them keep shooing it away.

(Sometimes “Do you really need” questions are a trap and the interviewer is testing your confidence, but in those cases it’s usually said with a completely different tone.)

My other tip is for the squishy personality test interview: come into it smiling, and keep that up for no reason. The interviewer will usually start doing it too, and that leads their brain to think, “I’m smiling, so I must like this person.”

With algorithmic questions, the life preservers often throw me off more than they help. I had one which was actually wrong, i.e the path I was going down was correct _and_ simpler. More commonly though, if I'm struggling, I'm normally juggling too many things in my head, and them adding another thing to think about makes me drop all the balls.

I still value them in principle, but it seems to be a skill that many interviewers haven't developed to the point where they're a net positive.

It can also be the case where the interviewer doesn’t really understand the question and are going from prompts. So when you try to get further understanding of their hint from them, they just repeat the hint. I think this reflects poorly on the company culture, that they’re throwing interviewers out there who aren’t ready.

It definitely can, but I've been asking one of my questions for almost a decade at this point, and I've seen nearly every attempt at a solution that anyone would come up with. Often the difficulty is that the candidate is working towards something that may be a possible solution, but has a myriad of edge cases that they're going to discover and end up needing to spend far too long trying to work out. Meanwhile, there's a much easier solution they could do instead.

I'm not sure of a good way to re-target someone in that situation. I have let a candidate just go down that line before because they were making swift progress on it, and I gave them pretty good marks at the end for an incomplete solution that I was pretty sure they could have worked out eventually, but for other people it's much harder. I totally sympathize with the disruption of an interviewer essentially telling you "not like that" when you're frantically trying to come up with a quick and workable solution, but at the same time, you're probably not going to make yourself look good if you're putting together an increasingly obviously unviable solution by bolting on more and more logic as you find holes.

So what are you testing for in this interview?

Is it:

Demonstrate to me you meet our hiring skill level by working on the problem.

or:

Find the best solution to this problem, get $200k/year

Every interview is "Demonstrate you meet the hiring criterion, get $XYX/year". It's not as if I reject everyone who doesn't arrive at the perfect solution, but I do need to get some signal that even if they don't get to it that they're thinking about the problem in a productive way. Trying to do a problem one way and then adjusting when you realize it may not be a good way to solve it is a common and important thing that happens to most engineers regularly. Soliciting or synthesizing advice from your peers is a bit part of it as well. Obviously an interview isn't a normal "we're working together on a team" environment, which is why I'm musing about how best to provide advice and guidance without making an already stressful situation worse.

I don't just reject people who give a sub-optimal solution, but going down those unfruitful paths of solving the problem often leads to situations where they stymied and just staring at the problem trying to work out how to work around what have become larger and larger issues with that approach. At that point, I'd either want them to recognize the issue and try another approach, or ask me for advice, or accept my nudge to find another path.

It's a problem I like to give because it's a problem that's easy to demonstrate your baseline skill at and get out a simple working solution, and then we can spend the rest of the time improving and optimizing.

I've had an experience where the interviewer tried to stop me from doing a DFS on a graph. Then they tried to tell me that's not how DFS is done. I am a pretty chill and curious guy, so I turned this into a discussion. At the end, I go like 'so my initial approach was correct', he goes like 'yeah, I guess it was' then I never heard from them again. I still think about that interview from time to time.

My top interview tip, and it's painful that I have to say this but so, so many candidates get it wrong, is "answer the actual question".

It is so frustrating when I word a question very specifically and the candidate doesn't answer it. Most commonly it's a question like "tell me about a time when you encountered a bug in production, how you discovered it and the steps to resolve it". And instead of answering the question, they tell me about what they _would_ do, if they _had_ found a bug. Or worse, they step me through some process that their company uses. I'm looking for personal experience, not what you read on a blog post once.

I also am mindful at the start of all of my interviews to tell the candidate I am not trying to trick them, I'm just trying to learn where they're at. So if I ask you for an experience you haven't had, that's totally fine - no one has done everything, we're just looking for the boundaries.

The problem is that you misunderstand the question you are asking.

When you say "tell me about a time when" you are really saying "Tell me a prepared story about when".

In this case the person didn't have a prepared answer for that question so they went with a generic answer to show to you that they knew what they were doing.

They could have found & fixed hundreds of bugs in production over their career, but trying to recall an example that will make a good story during an interview is hard and risky.

The good news is they will prepare a story for the next interview at a different company.

> Or worse, they step me through some process that their company uses.

Ugh, I've had this so many times and it's the worst. Often those candidates will pull that move multiple times in the same interview, too. Sometimes this is also paired with a level of oversharing that makes me think "wow, I sure wouldn't want a member of _my_ team going off and blabbing this much about _our_ projects when they start looking for their next job".

> Most commonly it's a question like "tell me about a time when you encountered a bug in production, how you discovered it and the steps to resolve it". And instead of answering the question, they tell me about what they _would_ do, if they _had_ found a bug.

Of course they do, it's only natural and smart. They hear your standard formulaic behavioral question and cut to the chase instead of being sheep.

If you want real answers, hold real, natural conversations. Don't read items off a checklist.

The question is just a jumping off point to talk about things like monitoring and alerting, production logging, your release process, testing, etc. It's why I want to start with personal experience.

> Don't read items off a checklist.

I've gone through periods of interviewing 3+ candidates a week for months at a time. It's just not reasonable to expect me to have a unique and interesting conversation with everyone. There are things I need to get into.

That's fine, just be aware that the way you phrase your question is indirect and smells of the typical interview BS. If you'd like to find out how the candidate handles bugs, ask for that directly. Otherwise you're no longer in the realm of a technical question anymore, but in the "can you, on the spot, come up with a plausibly-sounding story that puts you in good light?".

The ability to recall/make up/tell good stories (under pressure!) has nothing to do with engineering.

It's sad this is the reality of hiring now. It's byzantine and wasteful and I'm surprised that companies are willing to burn money this way. There are great candidates who may not perform well in an interview and there are a lot of serious clowns that can waltz through this process. The questions being asked are not likely going to yield useful information and the whole thing seems designed by pick-up artists to neg candidates into accepting bad offers. Why stop at 6 interviews?

But that's the reality. Doing good on an interview does not guarantee the ability to do the job

What is a better alternative?

Certifications should mean something, not be a sales channel for AWS

That sound terrible. Most jobs are for specialty positions, so you'd need 10,000's of different certifications tracks.

A written engineering competency test (basically, an industry-standard set of whiteboard questions) sounds good, but, having hired credentialed-but-incompetent engineers from other fields, I can definitely say it helps a lot less than you'd think.

There is no reason why we can't have that, and I don't think you'd need that many tracks. Even something as narrow as cybersecurity has several different (ISC)2 tracks. They could have a different cert for each major programming language, for instance.

So, I write mission critical software that sits behind narrow interfaces. In my field, security and correctness are basically synonyms. Other people manage large fleets of machines, and there intrusion detection is probably the best you can do. Still other sets of people write frontend software with 10,000's of dependencies, so dependency management is the name of the game. Still others deal with PII and credit card numbers, and in that space compliance matters deeply.

I could list many more sub-disciplines of cybersecurity, but I'm already up to five (and haven't even mentioned cryptography!). None of the skill sets from the five I mentioned really translate well to each other.

Also, what purpose would having a cert for a programming language serve? For things like C++ and JavaScript, there are so many sub-dialects that the cert wouldn't say much about whether you could write inside a particular code base. For things like rust and go, the certificate would need to expire every few years.

Also, it takes an experienced developer a day or two to pick up a new language. Getting a certificate for a language would take longer than that. That lands us where we are right now, where such certifications exist, but they're simultaneously too much trouble to be worth it, and also not worth the paper they're printed on.

Reading and assessing resumes and having a single interview with HR and the hiring manager or a panel. And this process should fit within the larger operational framework and processes of a company.

How can 2 measurements (CV + 1 i/v) be better than 8 measurements (CV + 7 i/vs, with different kind of questions, to boot)?

This is a misplaced concreteness fallacy.

This is you deflecting a valid question.

Have you been involved in hiring software engineers much?

I understand your sentiment, but, having been on the other side of the fence, there are a lot of people that apply for jobs they're completely unqualified for, and they end up being most of your candidate pool. (Come to think of it, this would make a decent whiteboard question about reservoir sampling without replacement...)

Another way to think about it is that these interview processes often have a ~ 1% acceptance rate, and the softball questions typically filter 80-90% of candidates.

So, yeah, it sucks for a qualified candidate if they fail half their interviews, but they'll end up getting a job somewhere. That's much better for them than working at a company where 99% of the engineers can't perform basic coding tasks or explain how products in their industry segment are designed.

> this would make a decent whiteboard question about reservoir sampling without replacement

Ah, the secretary problem: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem

I was thinking of a variant where there's a finite pool of candidates, and everyone is implementing a similar algorithm. Each time a candidate is hired from the pool, a candidate with IID skill level is put into the pool.

What does the average skill level in the pool converge to over time?

(This might be too hard for a whiteboard problem.)

First “round” interviews are so often done by recruiters that it’s basically a joke to pass them. I always call them screeners and “are you a serial killer” calls. Unless you say something that goes against the typical grain of what these calls should have (e.g. speaking poorly about a company, saying you were fired, clear anti-social behavior even if minor, you have niche demands that no one will fill, etc…) then you’ll pass them easily.

The first call is always about seeing if you even know that there’s a good amount of acting going on from both sides. You play your part and you’ll get to the technical interviews. People have a lower threshold for acting as you progress in the interviews and you can say more things that clearly aren’t good to say. (I.e. anything that demonstrates you don’t tolerate bullshit)

No one is complaining about this round of interviewing because it’s not a real issue or obstacle for anyone.

This reminds me: what's the interview approach when someone was fired from their previous job? Just lie because disclosing that information will very likely disqualify you?

I’ve been fired from a job - it’s glaring obvious from my CV - I’m just honest, tell then how I learnt from my error and how I believe it makes me a better dev having reeeealy messed up that one time. If a company doesn’t want to hire me after for that reason it’s not a company I’d want to work for anyway.

People could be on different wavelengths.

When I read "fired", I don't immediately think of "forgot a WHERE clause when deleting from a production database table". That happens, but I don't think I've actually seen anyone fired for it.

I think of it more like "you just gradually found you couldn't do the job, didn't meet performance standards, etc". In that case, the usually bland stuff about how the position wasn't a good fit but this one is seems to me like the way to go.

And "CV" suggests to me a non-American or an American academic - whereas some people in this thread may be in the SF bay area (although I'm not).

I’m English and it was a balls up that cost the company six or maybe seven figures. I actually left on good terms (at least with the team) but they needed a sacrificial lamb for the board.

Don't lie. Don't act/feel guilty. Embrace (in your head, in preparation) the reasons you had to leave as though they were your own. Only talk about the aspects of leaving your job that you have in common with a voluntary resignation on your own initiative.

If you were hiring someone, think about what you would want, and what you want to know. Anything negative in someone's past, you do not really care about it, you just care they are past it and it won't have negative future consequences.

Avoiding the negative aspects of your past is not a matter of deception, but of proving that you are emotionally ready to move on.

On a written job application, which in my experience comes at the end after they think they want you, be honest, but read it like a lawyer and make sure you don't disclose anything that you don't have to.

Embrace (in your head, in preparation) the reasons you had to leave as though they were your own.

Interesting and very well put.

What people who advocate the "fuck it, just lie" approach is that lying (about things one doesn't really need to lie about) can be more harmful to the person telling the lie than to its recipients.

Yep. Lie. It’s what I do every time.

I’ve continued to get new jobs and ones that were better than previous.

That was my experience every other time I've applied to a job in the last 10 years, but not during my recent job search. I got a number of rejections from 5 minute first round interviews for no obvious reason. Whereas once I got to a "proper" interview it was plain sailing. I think companies are getting a lot more applications than they were and are having to put a stronger filter in the first rounds than was the previous norm.

We had reception (basically someone random) do the first phone screen interviews at my last company.

So if, heaven forbid, someone ever does get fired - which of the two remaining options do you propose is best: (1) commit suicide, or (2) lie in response to the "have you ever been fired" question?

Since answering honestly is aparently a deal-breaker in your book.

Yeah, lie. No shit. You think companies aren’t lying?

Lying is part of the theater that is our current employer-employee relationship. Everyone knows this

Everyone "knows" this but it generally applies to more nuanced categories. For example, about liking your boss's jokes, believing in "Agile", etc.

But in regard to, you know, important stuff, such as matters of one's employment record -- you know they have ways of checking up on what you say, and that any company worth working for does exactly that -- right?

So definitely don't give the boss that fired you as a reference that they might call to check up?

Many employers make a point of checking the past 2-3 places on your resume, regardless of whether they were listed as references or not.

Also, not listing your most recent clients/managers as references (because why wouldn't they be glowingly positive?) can be seen as a red flag.

Again, I’ve never had this issue and never has anyone I know. They don’t call companies to ask if you were fired. They ask and tell you if you worked there and for what dates.

Reason for leaving is never told.

OK, so you're dodging the question, then.

"What to do if they ask question X?"

"Just lie, like everyone else does."

"Except you know that won't work if in fact they do ask you question X, right?"

"Doesn't matter, because they they won't ask you anyway."

Weird.

In any case it absolutely is standard practice for a significant portion of companies to go this route (especially in more traditional sectors). Even if it hasn't happened to you personally, or to people in your bubble world.

This is HN - the bubble of Silicon Valley and venture capital. I can tell you with great certainty it is incredibly uncommon to encounter people in HR who will tell you the reason why X person left the company. In a region that is happy to do lawsuits - they don't bother. After all - it's no longer their issue. They'll just verify dates of employment and that's it.

I made a comment here on what I think is the right approach:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36588394

There are also "legitimate" reasons to fail first round interviews, such as the recruiter picking your resume for a role that you are not actually qualified for (which the hiring manager notices after the interview), your salary expectations being too high for that specific company size/geography/role (usually a communications mismatch where they advertise a more senior role than they actually have), or it coming out that you are not legally allowed to work for them (they cannot sponsor visas; they don't hire in your country; they require citizenship; etc).

All these cases are technically the company's fault, not the candidate's, but they do often come out right after the screening call.

Article suggests more research and prep for a 30 minute first round than I’ve ever done for a half-day loop. Good lord. If you have to work that hard to seem like a good candidate, the real job is going to be a nightmare.

More than I spent studying in college.

Interviewing has gotten out of hand...

The entirety of the years spent studying in college is within the "interview prep" budget for most people. It's all interview prep. Really your whole CV content is interview prep.

Your whole life leading up to the interview was prep! I'm not old, I just did some thorough preparation for your interview.

No wait, that's not what they're talking about. They mean extra prep specifically done for that specific interview.

I don't know what a half day loop is, but a few hours preparing for interviews doesn't seem weird to me. Do you have more than 1-3 serious interviews anytime you want to switch jobs?

For me, the problem is that 95% doesn't reply to their application form or email box, so that's where I'd optimise for time spent.

Sometimes I get recruiter calls and interviews stemming from that I'd not classify as serious, like I might do 20-30 minutes beforehand to figure out what this company does and whether/how it fits into my life, but if I'm not actually looking then I'm not going to spend hours preparing my presentation. Seems to still work to get an offer, though; they seem biased towards those they initiated contact with

The half-day loop is probably referring to FAANG-style interviews where you have an initial screener (30 mins) and 4-5 subsequent interviews (around 30 mins each).

Here's a controversial opinion: one of the top tips to passing an interview is just to lie.

I don't mean lying about qualifications, or lying about jobs you've had in the past. But, I feel no compunction about answering a question like "tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a colleague" by making up a scenario that could plausibly have happened and hypothesizing about what you might do in it. The reality is that no two such scenarios are ever exactly the same, so a real anecdote would not be helpful, even if you happen to have a good one in mind (which I never do). Next time, the people involved (including you) are going to be different, with different personalities, a different set of problems and pressures and constraints . Forget it, there's very low predictive power in a question like that, even if the interviewer were qualified to analyze you. So, just tell them what they want to hear, and prove you speak the dumb language of corporate interviews.

Is this unethical? Maybe, but only to the extent that such questions are meaningful filters (which I believe they aren't). And it is surely no more unethical than answering a question like "why do you want to work for Company X?" by saying "I am inspired by the mission and the fascinating problems you're solving" rather than "the salary is higher than my current job, and I think it will make a good stepping stone to an even bigger salary at another company in a few years", which is what we would say if genuine honesty were what that particular discourse was trying to get at.

I think it's possible to underestimate the extent to which people can perceive this type of dishonesty, because it may be in the form of an uneasy and largely unconscious experience that leads them to vaguely report "not a good fit".

Yep. I am really good at coming up with stuff on the spot, so when I last interviewed, I straight up made up some stuff for my behavioral interviews.

I resorted to this because on my LinkedIn interview, the behavioral interviewer kept pressing me when I told him that the situation never came up (I can't remember exactly what it was, I think if I was ever asked to work on something that I disagreed with) and it dinged me on my evaluation. So from them on, I would make up white lies to satisfy my interviewers. I also make sure to note what I say on my interview notes so I keep my stories straight.

Interviews want a certain "type" of answer, so if you don't give it to them, more often than not they will ding you. The same goes for Leetcode questions, if you get the answer wrong, you will get passed over, but if you get the answer "too quick", then you will get passed over because you were "too prepared", so better to just pretend to struggle and come up with the answer.

Yes, while I do not advocate lying, it seems clear to me that this is the effect of these types of interview questions: filtering for better BS artists. I am continually amazed that anyone thinks these questions are doing anything else.

And in particular a lot of people seem to think it's impossible to lie and not get caught out, which... all I can say to that is I don't see how anyone who has lived as a human among other humans could possibly think that.

I would very much caution against doing that. I know when I'm doing interviews and get tasked to ask these sorts of questions, I usually ask follow up questions. I'm not trying to figure out if someone's just making things up, but once in a while, people draw a blank when you drill down on something and that just looks weird.

It's far better to just prepare an answer based on something that's actually happened to you, so if you have to explain further, there's something actually there.

Seems risky and not worth it over a fluff question that is unlikely to factor into the decision to hire you or not. Lying is grounds for termination after getting the job if you’re caught. You might underestimate the ease of lying in an interview, if you aren’t prepared for followup questions or a conversation. Speaking personally, it does seem a lot more unethical than a rosy half-truth to me. I can be inspired by the mission and problems and also interested in the salary & resume filling aspects at the same time. Leaving some of them out is quite different from fabricating experiences. I somewhat doubt that lying will help you in the long term, giving a great answer for this conflict question won’t hide any technical gaps.

Uh, no. The answer is to:

- Have marketable skills and experience

- Market and communicate these effectively

- Take many interviews because too many are arbitrary and some are terrible places you don't want to work

- Aim to be fit, in good health and spirits, and presentable

- Be honest

In general, everything works out because the synchronicity of individuals and organizations is a self-selecting phenomenon.

> Aim to be fit, in good health

Unless you’re interviewing to be a personal trainer, this doesn’t really have any relevancy.

Like yes, be presentable, don’t be a slob. But you don’t have to be “fit” or “in good health” to land a job.

Physical fitness is a reflection of your discipline and a signal that you think clearly.

I know plenty of unfit people who think clearly. I know plenty of fit people that have no discipline.

Do you have a scientific study that proves any of this without a doubt or are you just pushing your own biases and societal norms onto candidates?

Colcombe, S., & Kramer, A. F. (2003). Fitness effects on the cognitive function of older adults: A meta-analytic study. Psychological Science, 14(2), 125-130.

Hillman, C. H., Erickson, K. I., & Kramer, A. F. (2008). Be smart, exercise your heart: Exercise effects on brain and cognition. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 9(1), 58-65.

Erickson, K. I., et al. (2011). Exercise training increases size of hippocampus and improves memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(7), 3017-3022.

Voss, M. W., et al. (2013). Plasticity of brain networks in a randomized intervention trial of exercise training in older adults. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, 5, 32.

Loprinzi, P. D. (2019). The effects of exercise on memory function among young to middle-aged adults: Systematic review and recommendations for future research. American Journal of Health Promotion, 33(6), 879-889.

Northey, J. M., et al. (2018). Exercise interventions for cognitive function in adults older than 50: A systematic review with meta-analysis. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 52(3), 154-160.

Roig, M., et al. (2013). The effects of cardiovascular exercise on human memory: A review with meta-analysis. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 37(8), 1645-1666.

Smith, P. J., et al. (2010). Aerobic exercise and neurocognitive performance: A meta-analytic review of randomized controlled trials. Psychosomatic Medicine, 72(3), 239-252.

Schmolesky, M. T., et al. (2013). Aerobic exercise improves cognition and cerebrovascular regulation in older adults. Neurology, 81(11), 1074-1080.

so to you someone with a disability shouldn't get a job ??

People with disabilities can be physically fit and active. You can work around your limitations.

ok so if they're over weight, they're no good to you ?

Yes. Absolutely. Many jobs at that, not necessarily related to the immediate discussion at hand, but many occupations require physical ability.

did you even read the article ? we're not talking about firefighters here

You do not live in the same society as some of us.

Below is a story about how insisting that a fitness instructor look physically fit is unreasonable and sometimes illegal.

The icing on the cake is that her day job is said to have been in tech, in SF.

`` Jennifer Portnick, a 240-pound San Francisco aerobics instructor rejected by Jazzercise because of her size, has reached an agreement under which the firm will drop its requirement that instructors look fit.

After weeks of mediation with the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, Jazzercise Inc., the world's biggest dance-fitness organization, agreed to change company policy.

The case, which drew international attention, was the first to be settled under San Francisco's "fat and short" law, an ordinance barring discrimination on the basis of weight and height.

"I'm absolutely thrilled with this outcome," said Portnick, 38, a computer systems training manager who works out six days a week and has sufficient stamina to lead back-to-back aerobics classes.

"I'm lucky to live in San Francisco, where there's a law to protect people like me." ''

https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/EXERCISING-HER-RIGHT-TO-...

I think you underestimate how much looks affect your success.

And being fit (not to be confused with a hulking mountain of muscle) and in good health is a large part of looks.

I think you massively overestimate how much it affects your success in this field. Maybe if we were in the modeling business or another where looks are critical. But we’re not; your looks are not an indicator of your skills, the actual thing people are judging.

As long as you look presentable, your skills outweigh looks by magnitudes.

In my experience, the first round interview is fizzbuzz because it can be graded objectively. The questions the author brings up like “Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a colleague” are saved for a later round

what is a terrible talent market? is it when major corporations reach all time high profits while laying off most of their employees?

It's that, plus the candidates flip them the bird, and go to smaller companies.

Most of the places that just laid off are also mandating work from office, and are having a very hard time with attrition and hiring.

This is a perfect time to go to a company without those problems, since they'll be hiring much better than average these days, and, with any luck, their major corporation competitors are going to see their roadmaps implode.

I like the writing on this article a lot more than I thought I would, some of the advice is sound - but the big caveat is most of this has nothing to do with a first round interview. What the author describes here are pieces that will come up in a typical interview process somewhere, but probably not a first round.

First round to me is typically a “bozo filter” - screen out individuals who are clearly unqualified or who are an obvious bad fit.

Any decent dev should get past round 1 without significant prep.

I think some companies send junior techies to do first round filtering (with easy coding questions), while others keep the HR folks busy doing first round filtering (with, well, behavioural etc. questions as outlined in the article).

The article calls this out, stating that they define the first round interview as the one after a phone screen/video screen.

So it is like two screens before the “real” interview? Weird. Sounds like a very lengthy process!

Yep. Hiring is expensive.

But it didn't used to be, and not because of inflation. Somehow old school companies like IBM, Hewlett-Packard and NASA managed to hire top engineering talent by doing single interviews instead of multi-day seven interview slogs.

I’d imagine a smaller applicant volume helped a bit there.

If you don't pass the screening interview is due to a few issues.

1) You are applying to a role you don't meet the minimum requirements for.

2) Didn't take the time to research about the company, salary and benefits, the product/service and the team you'll be working with.

3) Unrealistic expectations about compensation and benefits, which you should have researched above.

The rest is just having a casual conversation with another human being, so if you have communication skills that's another issue you need to resolve.

How do you research the salary if all the company says is "competitive salary". In the part of the UK I live in this seems to mean anything from £45k to £150k for roles of similar seniority.

Really if there's a mismatch in salary expectations then it's not that you failed, it's that the company failed to effectively communicate this information and wasted your time on an introductory call.

Re 2: one of my peeves in job listings is when the job description will specify the name of the team using internal labels/codenames that means nothing outside the company.

Bad: “this is a developer for the lookinglass team”

Good: “this is a developer for the team that builds monitoring tool”

Yes, this.

A lot of people don't even realize they're doing this. In particular, people who have spent a significant portion of their career in one company (junior devs, long timers). They're used to thinking of these terms as everyday knowledge.

it can also happen if recruiters start thinking that their job is to make things easy for hiring managers rather than making things easy for applicants

Oh hah, I didn't even notice you were talking about job listings instead of candidates. Candidates do this too was my point. But you're 100% correct. Companies are *really* bad about this when interviewing/screening/talking to candidates.

I go out of my way to talk in general terms, but then I'll see a colleague talk in secret code. And it's like, what on earth do they think the candidate took away from that?

I concur with the other comments here that this is almost useless. It could be useful if you're interested in companies dumb enough to care about most of the stuff this article focuses on. I've conducted over 3,000 interviews, most of them via Karat (https://karat.com/), and I can say that, as a software engineer at least, you can safely ignore this kind of advice.

Yep. This describes only how to game the famously byzantine hiring process at FAANGs, a tiny highly abnormal subset of the tech workspace out there — only those companies that began as explosive startups who gained giant market share mostly due to great timing in catching the wave, not smart management practices.

OK so I may be biased but please don't do this. After a couple of interviews everybody is tired. 1-2 short questions are perfectly fine, but some people treat it as "the floor is yours". You won't make a better impression by asking questions, but you can make it worse. For most people though, it doesn't matter at all. Use the time you had before, when being asked, to show your best side.

The fact that we have long articles like this on how to game interviews and then interviewers become keen and it becomes a stupid meta back and forth game of cat and mouse. Meanwhile us normal non-career ladder psychopaths want to talk and be treated like regular people.

Every time I’ve been asked about a conflict I’ve had and how I resolved it, I die a little bit inside.

What's important is that you die a little bit inside in STAR format.

- So, once I interviewed with a company and was asked about a conflict at work.

- The task at hand was to recall (or, for that matter, invent) a situation involving a conflict at work, and convince the interviewer that I handled it with aplomb.

- And so, I proceeded to recalling a situation involving a conflict, explained the Situation to the interviewer in detail, outlined the Tasks I was responsible for, conveyed the Actions I took, and related the Result of my actions.

- Result: I died a little bit inside, but the interviewer was very impressed and offered me a job on the spot.

what's the real expectation for these conflict questions? is it to show that you've encountered it before? that you can manage it? that you're a reasonable person when faced with interpersonal difficulties? that sometimes hard choices have to be made wrt bad actors? that you are some kind of golden Spongebob/Candide that has never experienced being ground up in the gears of office politics?

I never know which way these are meant to go

It depends on the role. IMO the bar is pretty low for many engineering roles. Determining “that you're a reasonable person when faced with interpersonal difficulties” is usually good enough.

I'm really good at other people's interpersonal problems, I'm a natural mediator. Less good at my own.

The bar is very low.

is it just me or is the entire Amazon interview panel like this? "leadership principles." makes my skin crawl.

> I verified that no employee would have a compensation regression

What's wrong with "I made sure nobody got a pay cut"?

most of the first round I've done are just leet code ... also saying the market is terrible is an understatement, it's the worst I've seen in over a decade.

A massive wall of text and just one paragraph that says "oh by the way there will be a coding assessment in the interview, you need to prepare for that as well, good luck." No further details.

Totally useless guide.

I think the assumption is that everyone understands that part if it applies to their role, i.e. to the engineer role.

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