This post is the follow-up to "How To Be More Interesting During A Technical Interview" that's been languishing in my drafts folder since 2015. I've dusted it off and re-written it a bit in the hopes it helps somebody.
The title of this post is actually paraphrased dating advice and I believe it's applicable. Stay with me, I promise it'll make sense eventually.
What's a positive sign that a date is going well? Great conversation. How do you make great conversation? By being interested.
This is different being interesting. If you weren't interesting, you wouldn't be on this date. Or in an interview room.
How To Be Interested:
10 listen attentively
20 ask questions
30 GOTO 10;
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. ↩︎
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