Interview tips: the free-form technical chat
Being interviewed is, next to giving talks, pretty damn stressful. And like talks, it doesn’t seem to matter how much experience I have, I still get nervous. Like all things, it takes practice to give the performance we want. It’s hard to get good at it when we do it so seldomly. Some people would say “who cares, just wing it”. That’s easy to say, but our performance in a job interview can have high stakes. Even if we still get the job, our interview performance can affect what salary we start with.
Me to myself: Find a way to practice, overcome your laziness, even if it is just one mock interview with a friend. And document your learnings. I tend to remember things when I document them, so here:
1. Give a concise tour of your experiences
The free form technical chat is usually when interviewers want to understand your background and get a feeling of how well your experience fits the role. You can’t really go wrong, except, I can talk too much, in an unstructured nervous babble. It happens, it’s ok. But for the next interview: the interviewers have limited time — we want to give them a tour of our work thus far. Sketch outlines, give a few examples in each area. Practise saying this out loud — maybe record ourselves and play it back.
2. Answer top-down
When you get asked a really general tech question, like “how would you design differently for real-time vs not real-time requirements”, start with a definition to clarify, then go into the different constituents of the problem, and then give a detailed example in one of the areas. Don’t just jump straight to some nitty gritty detail about cold starts and garbage collection LOL.
3. Start every answer with a pause
This is a bit cheeky, but you know how sometimes you’re on fire and answering off-the-bat, and then you get asked a question and your brain’s garbage collection kicks in and you are completely blank and you are worried that gives a sign that you don’t know something… If we start every answer with a pause, reflecting about what we think is important about the question, then they won’t know as easily when we are genuinely stumped :) It has the neat side-effect that we might give better answers in general.
4. Think of our style, not just our content
I had an interview this morning and of course I was up late last night cramming just like in uni**cough high school —reminding myself what CAP and SOLID are. It didn’t work at uni and it won’t work.. well it kinda does work a little bit, but not much. Not enough. We know it’s more valuable to practise surfacing the knowledge we already have, but it’s also important to think about our style, just like when giving a talk. How do I want to come across? How do I act when I’m under stress and how could I counter that? There is a great piece of advice from the book Cracking the Code Interview that resonated with me(thanks Marie D!): Be specific, not arrogant. That is how I want to be!
Lastly, be kind to yourself
If we had a bad performance, it happens —our performances do not define us. The judgements others make about us do not define us. Let’s not waste time on feeling down. Let’s learn what we need to improve and move on.
Btw this reminds me of an old post of mine on how to make the most of media opportunities.
