Storytelling Tips for Technical Interviews

https://stanete.com/storytelling-tips-technical-interviews

by stanete • 6 years ago

113 30 6 years ago

stanete.com

pcmaffey• 6 years ago

Here's one of my favorite examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDoH15ylAeo&feature=youtu.be

suyash• 6 years ago

haha, this was fun!

diN0bot• 6 years ago

i lol'd. hey, if anyone wants to practice answering behavioral questions for real on my youtube, let me know. it's a nice way to practice and help others learn from what you do well and can improve. it's meant to be earnest and lighthearted, not intentionally comedic, though making an interviewer chuckle is not a bad way to connect ;-p

https://www.youtube.com/CandidatePlanet

jowdones• 6 years ago

And in today's interviews environment, telling the greatest stories along the greatest CV, training for months and months on leetcode problems and being able to convincingly act like you never seen them before during the interview, generally bending over backwards and taking it into your ^H^H^H or what else, all that that will dramatically raise your chances of getting hired from 0.1 to 0.2%.

Benjammer• 6 years ago

Also it will have zero bearing on your starting place among the organization you’re joining. No matter how well you excel at the interview or how applicable your past experience is, you’ll be dumped on one of the fringe, “new features” teams with a first time EM, and a PM right out of college or MBA with no relevant experience.

asimpletune• 6 years ago

I think if you actually did all that then you’d almost certainly get the job. I wonder why there’s that disconnect?

lowiqengineer3• 6 years ago

I've done all of that, and the best job I got was Amazon :/ It seems like this industry only works if you're just naturally intelligent (or lucky)

1ris• 6 years ago

I'm currently doing way less and got multiple offers. No FANGA salaries, tho, but still fine for a uni drop out.

vkou• 6 years ago

If you actually did all that and applied to four of the FANGMA firms, you'd almost certainly get a job in at least one of them, probably two or three.

Source: I have both ran interviews, and worked on hiring committee for one of them. Someone who actually did those things would be an obvious hire.

Actually, someone who just grinded leetcode for two months would be an obvious hire, regardless of what their CV says, or what their life story was.

khalilravanna2• 6 years ago

If you’re doing all of these things I think the reason for not getting hired is because of the pretty negative attitude encapsulated in this comment. I wouldn’t strongly advocate for a candidate who views interviewing as a fabricated system with the deck stacked against them. Nevermind someone who would lie about being exposed to problems they’ve seen before.

Interviews should be a collaborative, albeit stressful, experience. The interviewers would be much happier to hire someone than to say No and have to interview another 10 people or whatever. My advice to any candidate: stay positive, focus on what you can control, and try to have fun with it if possible. Any negativity you bring into an interview will be picked up by interviewers. But the opposite is also true! If you go in with a smile, ready to meet some new people, and ready for a challenge, interviewers will take notice and appreciate it.

hellisothers• 6 years ago

I think this is a nice theoretical fiction. In my experience and colleagues I’ve talked to about it, those that go into it knowing the system to be a nonsensical game and train defensively for it interview at 10 places and get 9 offers. Those that approach it organically, casually, get no offers and eventually after months go back and train aggressively and try again.

Interviewing isn’t fun, if you find it fun then you probably find casually engaging in leetcode competitions fun, which is totally fine, great even that you enjoy that. But let’s not pretend that it’s not a game with particular rules.

itronitron• 6 years ago

Taleb makes the observation in his latest book Skin in the Game that the best storytellers are necessarily also bullshit artists.

aspaceman• 6 years ago

Hard disagree. A bullshit artist is a good storyteller because they tell you exactly what you want to hear. The best storytellers can change your mind.

Wistar• 6 years ago

I've seen both. I had a manager who was a mesmerizing storyteller but was really full of bullshit and I have watched the even more mesmerizing Brian Greene who is not full of bullshit.

TheCowboy• 6 years ago

Does he provide any evidence for this assertion in his book or is this just an opinion? Because he frequently plays the role of bullshit artist on Twitter where it's hard to take him as a credible intellectual anymore.

codeformore• 6 years ago

Being interesting is generally more important than being right: https://codeformore.com/technical-interviews-interesting-is-...

es7• 6 years ago

This is true for life in general, but I'm not sure it works for technical interviews.

I've seen many candidates derail themselves by trying to tell interesting stories without realizing that the interviewer doesn't care. Many companies treat technical interviews as a test and have strict rubrics that are specific to the question.

If I ask a candidate:

"Okay, but how would you replace that XMLHttpRequest with fetch?"

all I want is a straightforward answer that shows you know the answer to the question, or an explanation of why you don't, ex:

"Oh, I would Google that. I exclusively used Axios in my prior job but I could learn fetch in an hour or two"

I know you want to feel heard and I will listen if you want to tell me how you fought your boss and won in a quest to replace all of your homegrown internal tooling with jQuery, but pay attention to your interviewer's body language and responses.

In general, my advice for an interview is never talk more than 1-2 minutes without getting active encouragement from your interviewer to continue on the current thread of conversation.

eatbitseveryday• 6 years ago

You can read this post in Spanish here.

Just a small comment: isn’t this better written in Spanish? Just this sentence. Non-English speakers won’t know what this says to click it.

The Spanish version has this, too:

Puedes leer este post en inglés aquí.

I wouldn’t know this means the same for reading the post in English.

Storytelling Tips for Technical Interviews

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