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Ask HN: How do you tune your personality to get better at interviews?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you tune your personality to get better at interviews?

#11

Post by z3ugma »

Is there someone you trust who has been a mentor to you at one of your past jobs? Send them a note and ask them to mock interview you. People love being asked favors and for their opinion.

You sound unsure and defeated in your post. Were you feeling confident the day of the interview, or do you think you seemed desperate for the job?

I will say that all the best technical interviews I have had are ones where I spoke in short sentences, was able to end on a point rather than rambling, and left plenty of time in my answers to ask questions of the reviewer and demonstrate curiosity.

Re: Ask HN: How do you tune your personality to get better at interviews?

#12

Post by blindriver »

This isn't 2021 anymore. You need to recalibrate your world view.

There are probably 300 people interviewing for the job you interviewed for. So they need to not just pick someone who checks the boxes, but the BEST of all the people who checked the boxes.

Assuming you checked all the boxes, you weren't the best and someone else was chosen. That's all it is. What makes them the best? Who knows. There's likely 50 of them they had to choose from.

Job hunting has always been a numbers game but now it's worse by a factor of 100x. Don't take it personally, and keep going.

Re: Ask HN: How do you tune your personality to get better at interviews?

#13

Post by _swfb »

roscas wrote: post #6

My advice is 2 portions of Chivas Regal 4 hours before the interview and then 2 full bottles of The Famous Grouse and Blue Label, 15 minutes before. Then, let it flow. If they don't get that you are a good tech guy, move on, they don't deserve you. Now, I've had a few strange things myself with interviews. Except for the company I ended work for, all other were a disaster. Everyone from HR knew 0 about Linux or progr…

Oh I have a bunch of anecdotes about interviewers from BigCos that knew absolutely nothing about concurrent programming but thought that they knew a lot about concurrent programming and "corrected" my answers during the interview. There's a lot of confidently incorrect people at the staff level of big corporations, and it's a little concerning.

Before someone thinks I'm being cocky about me being right and them being wrong, after every interview involving concurrency I always write a PlusCal/TLA+ spec with my answer and use the model checker to make sure that my answer actually solved the problem correctly. This is why I can be confident that my answers were correct; I'm not smarter than anyone really, it's just that I try and verify my work.

Re: Ask HN: How do you tune your personality to get better at interviews?

#14

Post by _swfb »

arethuza wrote: post #10
roscas wrote: post #6

My advice is 2 portions of Chivas Regal 4 hours before the interview and then 2 full bottles of The Famous Grouse and Blue Label, 15 minutes before. Then, let it flow. If they don't get that you are a good tech guy, move on, they don't deserve you. Now, I've had a few strange things myself with interviews. Except for the company I ended work for, all other were a disaster. Everyone from HR knew 0 about Linux or progr…

You seem to have stumbled onto the secret of the Inebriati: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zmp_--Oow5o

Due to sleep apnea, I've avoided any alcohol for the last couple years.

I've never really had much of an issue saying what's on my mind, so I don't know that alcohol would really help me much, generally all alcohol does is make me louder and sleepy; according to my wife I don't really talk different when I'm drunk.

Re: Ask HN: How do you tune your personality to get better at interviews?

#15

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

Let me say first I understand the frustration you must be feeling right now. It's no fun to be under the gun with bills to pay and think you're getting turned down from jobs because of something that isn't even really the core of the work (at least that's my assumption).

You don't have to be 100% sure about what it is personality-wise that you need to tune up to start making changes. You're an intelligent agent; your intuition is much better than random about things like this. I would say act on your intuitions about what specifically you are going that is rubbing them the wrong way, and be less like that - regress a little to the mean, in other words. This is generally good advice in the business world, even if it isn't good advice for e.g. becoming a celebrity on Twitter.

Take note that most psychological studies suggest that personality is very unlikely to change dramatically in adulthood no matter what you do. It's better to focus on techniques that let you chill out for a few hours/days/weeks than it is to try to actually change who you are at core.

Re: Ask HN: How do you tune your personality to get better at interviews?

#16

Post by _swfb »

blindriver wrote: post #12

This isn't 2021 anymore. You need to recalibrate your world view. There are probably 300 people interviewing for the job you interviewed for. So they need to not just pick someone who checks the boxes, but the BEST of all the people who checked the boxes. Assuming you checked all the boxes, you weren't the best and someone else was chosen. That's all it is. What makes them the best? Who knows. There's likely 50 of th…

Yeah, at some level I know this; I've given interviews before and seen people get declined for the dumbest reasons, or no reason at all, and I usually give people this same advice when they're down.

Dunno, it's just hard not to take this a bit personally sometimes. As I said, if I felt like I knew what I was screwing up, then that would be something I could work on. It's not hard to buy textbooks and learn more about concurrency theory or distributed systems or something, or to build a project on my server to play with a library, or something like that. It's extremely hard to solve a problem if you have no idea what the problem even is.

You're not wrong with anything you said though. I just need to keep applying and go from there.

Re: Ask HN: How do you tune your personality to get better at interviews?

#17

Post by johnwheeler »

It's natural to feel this way. But the thing that you have to remember about interviews like this where you're doing multiple rounds is that a lot of times they'll have people come to a round table discussion. If one person says something negative, that can often change the course of whether or not you're going to get the job. It depends on how much influence that person typically has. A lot of times people might defer to that person,etc.

Re: Ask HN: How do you tune your personality to get better at interviews?

#18

Post by golly_ned »

Speaking from my experiences in dozens of debriefs: I don't think I can recall a case where an otherwise good candidate was rejected for something like not liking someone's personality.

There might be a middle ground between "technical skills" and "personality", though, which we do take into account, falling under "soft skills", which may be affected by certain personality traits. Things like polling the interviewer for their thoughts, asking thoughtful questions, being curious about the source of disagreement or misunderstanding, not being dogmatic, and so on. I think it can be harder to demonstrate these kinds of skills with certain personality types -- I used to be very nervous in interviews, and it wasn't always easy to have the presence of mind to exercise these soft skills.

But even still, at least in technical interviews like programming or system design (as opposed to cross-functional/manager/tech leadership interviews), I've found it relatively rare for a candidate to be rejected for 'soft skill' failures when the right signals are there for technical strength.

Re: Ask HN: How do you tune your personality to get better at interviews?

#19

Post by codingdave »

Don't change who you are for an interview. It will just result in a job where you aren't happy being a different version of yourself. I know it is frustrating to not find work, but finding work that isn't right for you brings whole new levels of frustration later.

And, as others have said... this rejection might have nothing to do with you. If they had 1000 applications, and you were their choice above 998 of them, you still get the rejection because they hired the person who was above 999 of them.

Re: Ask HN: How do you tune your personality to get better at interviews?

#20

Post by al_borland »

There could be a lot of reasons why they may have passed, and it could have absolutely nothing to do with you or your personality.

If it was just one company, I wouldn’t start trying to change who you are. If you make up a new personality for the interview and get the job, then what? How long can you keep the character going? Do you want to work with people you can’t be yourself around?

In terms of what to possibly change, that’s almost impossible to say without seeing what you’re like in an interview.

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