The, uhm, polite and terse feedback on the previous post suggests to me that survivor bias and imposter syndrome are still robustly represented in the tech industry. Which is okay. This stuff is hard.
I've had some follow-up thoughts in draft mode for awhile, and given the Current State of the Industry it seems like good time to address a few common concerns.
"I don't feel comfortable asking these questions"
I think you'd be surprised at what interviewers can and are willing to share.
Remember, you're trying to start a conversation, not perform corporate espionage[1]. It's perfectly reasonable to want to know if you're going to be spending your time solving problems or putting out fires.
If you're worried about non-disclosure, just say that! "I'd like to hear a little bit about your tech stack, if that's permitted," or "if this topic is confidential, we can talk about something else." Any experienced interviewer should know where the line is.
That said, respect that line. Be interested, not nosy.
Oh, and if you're anxious that you'll offend your interviewer by asking these types of questions, let me just say you can't do any worse than candidates who ask softball questions or no questions at all.[2]
"I'm new. How can I ask these questions if I haven't experienced them myself?"
You don't need deep experience to have a conversation between peers, and you don't need to have solved any of these issues yourself. In fact, think twice before offering solutions. They should hire you for that!
By flipping the script, you're getting crucial insight into how the team or company operates. Just be sure you're actively listening and look for opportunities to ask follow-up questions. Maybe you've never had a job with an oncall rotation. Great! You're about to hear about what that's like here. Maybe you haven't had to gather requirements on your own. Awesome! You're about to hear how they do that here.
You're not doing anything different than your interviewers are by asking your own STAR-esque questions. You're just leaving out that "tell me about a time when—" part.
And if your interviewer does ask about your own experience, you can always say something like "I haven't experienced that situation yet myself, what's that like here?"
(All of that said, you should probably work on having opinions.)
"I don't think I can keep a conversation going"
Please don't be mad, but I don't believe it.
Why? Because you're in tech, and tech folk LOVE to talk tech! They have opinions. You've never debated the merits of some language or framework or Linux flavor with your classmates? You've never spent a team lunch discussing how to deal with some gnarly legacy code? Server vs. client-side? "ɡɪf" vs. "jɪf"?
One of my teams spent part of an afternoon talking about whether one should ever put comments in their code.
You can do this because you've already done this. Take advantage of this energy! Leverage the addictive properties of tech discourse!
Now you've found some common ground. You're no longer the candidate who crammed on sorting algorithms all weekend vs. the interviewer who hasn't thought about sorting since their own interview, and is preoccupied with why their deployment pipeline needs manual intervention several times a day. Now you're compatriots, fellow travelers — peers, even!
By asking questions that imply you're interested in discussing and solving problems, you're signaling that you're not just keen to get a job, but you're someone they should want to work with.
Be interested. Engage. Converse.
A super-secret stealth-mode startup might balk at answering in detail. But then, they may not have actually built anything significant yet (and if they have, it could be bootstrapped with hot glue and duct tape). ↩︎
And if you're around long enough, you're guaranteed to encounter folks that radiate some truly toxic vibes. Better to discover this now before you accept an offer. ↩︎
The third animated Neat Hobby! comic was an adaptation of "Sea Shanties for Modern Mariners" and wow I had to do a lot of work on this one. Not that it wasn't fun! I had a blast making it! But to make it a proper length video I had to add more sea creatures than the original comic had, which meant a total of ten different voices I had to come up with. And also a bunch of music, because it's a shanty!
And they're all singing! That's a lot of mouths to animate! When I was done I watched the final cut about one kabillion times, and then took a long break. Still my favorite of them all.
"Non-player Characters" is one of the most popular comics I've made and once I'd finished "Continuity I knew I was gonna animate it next. I had to do four voices, and you can tell by the dwarf's voice occupying an uncanny/horrifying spot between Inigo Montoya and Shrek that I'm not particularly skilled at accents. I made a joke at the time that I was trying to make the knight sound heroic like Superman, but ended sounding more like an imitation crab meat Space Ghost (RIP George Lowe).
Last summer I got extremely into animating a handful of Neat Hobby! comics. It was the perfect distraction for someone like me: art, animation, video, music, and voice acting! I did the animation on my iPad using Clip Studio, the same program I use to draw comics and I wrote and recorded the music and all the voice acting in Garageband.
If you follow this site you've probably already seen one of these: I released "Yurēi-mazing" last Halloween. I had big plans to do about ten videos, but ran out of steam halfway through. I think once I figured it all out it just didn't hold my attention. Which is ridiculous because twelve-year-old me would've sold his Huffy bike and Micronauts collection for the chance make his own animated cartoons, something I can now do on a tablet while watching TV. It's not too late for twelve-year-old me to jump in a time machine and come kick my ass.
Here's the first animated Neat Hobby! from last summer: "Continuity." By the way, Neat Hobby! Newsletter subscribers not only saw this last summer, but also got to see behind-the-scenes stuff like animatics and proof-of-concept videos. You can too! If you join us!
In January I published some code that connects a Buttondown newsletter to Eleventy to create a Patreon-like "soft paywall" for your free and paying Buttondown subscribers and encourage more subscriptions. Now you can do the same for Wordpress, with this WP Buttondown plugin.
Eleventy is fantastic and still my current go-to for making websites, but ya gotta be pretty nerdy, love to write JavaScript, and know your way around a terminal. As of this year around 43% of websites are Wordpress sites, and the process for making plugins is well-documented, so it was sort of a no-brainer. Creating the plugin settings dashboard was the most complex part.
Connect your Buttondown newsletter to your Wordpress website and encourage subscriptions with subscribers-only content. - scottandrewlepera/wordpress-buttondown-plugin
GitHub
PS: there's a new version of the Eleventy/Buttondown code that adds the ability to put whole pages behind the subscribers-only gate. Eventually this will work its way into the Wordpress plugin, but I have other priorities.
The last few years have been, uh, notable for Big Tech layoffs and industry disruption. New grads are struggling to find jobs, and are now competing with freshly laid-off engineers with more experience but less flexibility. It sucks.
I don't have a ton of strategy to share and I'm not interested in Thought Leadership (deragatory). But I have spent over 20 years interviewing candidates at a big ol' FAANG company. I couldn't tell you anything about the hiring process you couldn't find yourself (pro tip: stalk subreddits), but I do have observations and opinions. So maybe I'll share them here in hopes it helps someone.
I posted the following short article to Medium in 2018 in response to a pattern I was seeing in interview loops. Candidates would generally do well, but when it came time for Q&A, they'd ask safe, deferential questions. It seemed like a squandered opportunity to engage with the interviewer as a peer.
I rewrote the article in 2023 with the intent to start a new tech-focused blog, but that didn't happen. I've had some follow-up thoughts in draft mode for years, so I might post those later.
“Do you have any questions for me before we wrap up?”
This your chance to make a lasting impression on your interviewer. It’s an opportunity to show your prospective employer you're interested in solving real problems, for real people. That you care about your work and the humans at the opposite end of the tech stack.
It’s also a chance to learn something about how your prospective employer operates. Maybe there’s a pain point you can help address, or a process gap you can help fill. Maybe you’ll see some patterns that indicate how happy — or miserable — you’ll be if you accept an offer.
Over two decades of interviewing candidates, the ones that stood out were the ones who tried to engage me in a conversation about things I cared about. Below are some conversation starters I jotted down from memory. Feel free to use them, and create your own.
What’s your worst day like here? How do you manage it?
If you could change one thing about your tech stack, what would it be? What’s blocking you from implementing this change?
What are some common pain points for your customers? Are you working towards solving them? Why or why not?
How do you respond to customer complaints? Do you have a system for customer-reported issues? How has that been working for you?
How does your team handle requests for new features? Do you have a process?
How do you evaluate new technology for use? What are your criteria for adoption?
I see from your [source code|press release|company blog] that you’ve adopted [a particular technology]. What decisions led you to that adoption? How successful has it been?
Tell me about your deployment methodology. Are you able to do continuous deployment? If so, how? If not, what is your release schedule like and what determines it?
How does your team handle code reviews? Do you have standards or criteria for reviews?
When was the last time your company or team had to migrate to a new tech stack? How did you approach this? Would you do anything differently now?
How do you handle professional growth? What does the typical developer career track look like at your company?
What’s the ratio of [engineering|product|project] managers to developers? Does this ratio work for you?
What’s one thing someone would need to know to be successful here?
How Core Git Developers Configure Git. Like a lot of folks I learned Git on the job and just the bare minimum to get the job done, so a lot of these cool options went undiscovered. I'm definitely adding a few of these things to my personal Git setup.
AI is Stifling Tech Adoption. All coding assistants have a starting prompt, and that prompt can be biased toward "proven" technologies like React and Tailwind.
Interop 2025 Dashboard. "Interop 2025 is a cross-browser effort to improve the interoperability of the web." Sucks to see my favored browsers lagging so far behind Chrome.
I'm glad I took the off-ramp from software engineering. I see a lot of echoes of my own career here. The industry changes fast and at some point you're competing with younger folks with more time, energy, and willingness to work for less money.
Grind 75. A curated list of 75 leetcode questions that cover basic tech interview patterns. I really don't get the continuing obsession with leetcode in a world of AI coding assistants and snapped-together cloud services.
The Visible Zorker. Game design legend Andrew Plotkin wrote an app that is a version of Zork that reveals the original Infocom source code *as you play the game.Which reminds me: the text adventure game I dreamed up when I was 14 and started rewriting in 2022 using Inform7 has been sitting around waiting for me to finish the last 10%. I should set a deadline and get that done!
I suspect that some firms believe AI allows them to get around the "cheap, fast, good — pick two" dilemma. Especially if the definition of "good" is "works well enough" and doesn't include secure and trustworthy.
Leaving secret access keys out the open is a rookie mistake that should never make it through code review. Yet a security engineer found exactly that when they discovered their fancy high-tech bed was hackable.
I'm not saying the company in question used AI, because I can't possibly know that. But when I see reports like this, it makes me think: did a human review this? Did a human write this? What else is going unnoticed?
As AI empowers firms and inexperienced engineers to hastily slap together an app and rush it to market faster than ever, expect more hacks, data breaches, and other security woes.
Unlike the dry heat of the southwest US, Florida has a wet heat that moistens your skin, and scalp, and underarms, and the areas just beneath your eyesockets. Despite alleged alligator allocations, I didn't see a single alligator in the wild. So enjoy this captive alligator ass, whose owner seemed completely uninterested in any visitors, or turning around, or moving at all.
Back in 2016, I started working on HERETICAL, a short adventure comic. Then, as is the way of things, stuff happened, and as more stuff happened the comic fell lower and lower on my list of priorities. So it sat unfinished for a while—like, as two entire presidential administrations came and went. Then last year I found myself with a bit more free time than I am accustomed to and I basically finished it by grinding out one panel at a time.
As I once told the folks on my newsletter: I have to keep relearning the lesson: the world is always gonna be hot garbage in some way, whether we make art or not. So we may as well make art, and have a hot garbage world with art in it.
I hope you enjoy it! I've already gotten started on the next one. Just don't ask me how long it'll take!
(P.S.: the folks on my newsletter got to see HERETICAL a week ago, and also got to see sketches and process art all last year. If that sounds like your thing, you should subscribe )!
