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

I didn’t say I wanted to lie about my personality. I said I wanted to tune my personality so that I do better in interviews. It’s subtly different; I wanted advice on putting my best foot forward, and I was wondering if people had ideas for doing so.

It’s not just about this one job, obviously it’s impossible to know what a single employer’s reasoning is for this stuff; I have just noticed a pattern of me being pretty bad at interviews, and being declined enough to where I probably need to make some kind of change. I am not asking for one simple hack to make friends, it’s fucking interview prep. I don’t think I have low social intelligence in most cases, I have never had much issue making friends or anything like that. I don’t dispute that I am probably annoying and I don’t think I am awesome.

It’s not like interviews are anything like actual human interaction in any meaningful sense, and clearly a lot of people must agree because there are dozens of specific “interview prep” services out there.

Sorry for being slightly off topic (though true to the topic in explicit: personality tuning before an interview).

I don't have much experience with interviews and never got a job you had to interview for (hopefully will at some point). So don't take it as a gospel.

4 out of 5 interviews I've ever had went fantastic. I stressed a lot before the interview (kind of anxious personality) and had a long (20min) meditation before. Very often, for some time after meditating, I get much less anxious, much more confident and humble.

That 1 of 5 interviews that was a trainwreck - well, I didn't meditate before it. I also didn't do a mock interview with ChatGPT right before it, and believe that lack of warmup did me in. Literally, the first thing I was to say that day was an answer to an interviewers question about myself. I got stuck, realized it's going really bad, got even more stressed and didn't answer a single question in a composed manner.

Just because some people treat it like Facebook doesn't mean you need to treat it like Facebook.

That's generally what I do, I bring things up just to handwave them away and acknowledge that they're there.

The problem is, of course, that even handwaving things away, there's still a near-infinite number of potential caveats for any given subject, and I always feel a compulsion to list all of them. I did bother a friend of mine last night in order to get him to tell me how much of my rambling is tolerable so hopefully I have a better handle on it now.

> I gotta admit that it saddens me a little to think that calling myself a "wannabe-intellectual" or "eccentric" would have any connotation other than very mild self-deprecation, but I suppose it won't hurt to make it simpler in the shorter term.

Don't stress on changing that too much - it's unlikely that an interviewer is going as deep as your hacker news profile. Eccentric can mean flaky and unreliable. Wannabe can mean aspiring but perpetually falling short. Neither put your best foot forward. I merely pointed that out as something that if you're generally seeing that view of your self then you might be presenting that outward.

A good way of looking at the interview process is that you want to give out as many strong-hire signals as possible. You need to find ways to turn no-hire signals into weak hire signals. (E.g. silly little things like "I don't have experience with that, but I've worked with ... where ...", or "I but and ", and you definitely want 0 no-hire signals.

> That's decent enough advice, but when people confidently "correct" me with something that's actively wrong, it's always a bit jarring to me.

Sounds a bit like you might need to expose yourself to be challenged by external viewpoints more often. Find an open source product to contribute some fixes to and see how the PRs go paying particular note about the communication aspects.

BTW, you might want to reconsider the domain that your GitHub profile currently points at.