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Ask HN: How to talk with logical flow and coherence at interviews?

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Re: Ask HN: How to talk with logical flow and coherence at interviews?

#121

Post by gcanyon »

idoh wrote: post #45

This is a bit wild, but learning and being fluid in MECE changed my life. Not really, but it really helped me in interviews and all types of conversations. Check out How to be MECE on Youtube. MECE = mutually exhaustive and completely exclusive. The short version is that when you describe something you want to divide it up into mutually exclusive and completely exhaustive chunks. There are five ways to be MECE - alge…

Mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive.

That’s just pedantic — great write up!

Re: Ask HN: How to talk with logical flow and coherence at interviews?

#122

Post by lkxijlewlf »

scrozier wrote: post #95
lkxijlewlf wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you answer immediately, you will "ummmm uhhh" a lot. Learn to take a breather and buy time. Not just in interviews (I don't interview that often), but just in general, I've trained myself to smile and say, "That is an interesting question!" (and subtle variants so I'm not a robot). It buys me a second or two if it's not that hard, and even more if it is a hard question because now they know I'm thinking about th…

Seems like a good technique, but boy, is that overused these days. Let's face it, not all questions are that interesting. Seems that a lot of people start with that, robotically.

> Seems that a lot of people start with that, robotically.

Can't tell if you're trying to be an ass or not.

People can use whatever they want. The point, as many others point out, is to come up with something you'll use to not say, "ummm..." so much.

Re: Ask HN: How to talk with logical flow and coherence at interviews?

#123

Post by halayli »

Being coherent, succinct, and articulate is an outcome/reward that you achieve as a result of learning and hard work.

Try improving your learning skills, and focus on your cognitive map you've built so far and identify the gaps/holes.

In general, if you are having a hard time explaining something it simply means you don't fully understand the topic. But that's fine, I often say something along the lines of "I am not doing a great job explaining X as I am still learning the topic and have gaps in my knowledge about it". Self awareness is key here.

Re: Ask HN: How to talk with logical flow and coherence at interviews?

#124

Post by 0xFACEFEED »

klenwell wrote: post #116
0xFACEFEED wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freestyle rappers basically do the same thing! It's very impressive when you see it done in person; very good strategy.

Just like Homer, haha. I guess when you think about it, it's all just another form of the prehistoric craft of oral poetry or storytelling.

A pessimist might say that this only demonstrates how tech interviews reward the better performance art.

:P

:|

:(

Re: Ask HN: How to talk with logical flow and coherence at interviews?

#125

Post by PragmaticPulp »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #44
muzani wrote: post #2

Preparation. Anyone who has done public speaking knows that it's a lot of work to be a good speaker. Neil DeGrasse Tyson says you have to be 10x more prepared than you need to be. He calls it his Batman utility belt. You anticipate every question you'll get and do your research. One interviewer asked Neil whether it was worth the $3B mission to Saturn. He brought up that it's $3B over 12 years and that it's how much…

> He calls it his Batman utility belt. You anticipate every question you'll get and do your research. Part of the reason Neil DeGrasse Tyson is so painful to watch/listen to (especially on his recent appearances) is that this over-preparation or expectation of specific talking points comes off as smugness, interrupting behavior, etc... is it this which hurts the flow of conversation and even seemed to exasperate Joe…

It's the difference between natural conversation and performance.

NDT wasn't trying to have a conversation, he was trying to put on a performance. He was using intonation, cadence, and speech patterns rehearsed for putting on a show, whereas podcasters want to have something more like a natural conversation.

This can actually be a problem when people try to study social skills and speaking habits from performers and then deploy those habits into natural conversations. It comes off as inauthentic and awkward.

Re: Ask HN: How to talk with logical flow and coherence at interviews?

#126

Post by marginalia_nu »

aarghh wrote: post #29

The best learnt behavior I have is to slow down. In practice that means using phrases like "Let me think about that for a second", and maybe looking at or writing notes. As an interviewer, if anyone actually took a minute to think about what I had just asked them, I would consider that a huge positive signal.

Yeah, when you're nervous you kinda feel like you need to have an answer immediately and deliver it quickly, but you'd be surprised not only how long you're allowed to pause, but how slow you're allowed to talk.

Re: Ask HN: How to talk with logical flow and coherence at interviews?

#127

Post by nescioquid »

lucisferre wrote: post #84

The one tip I'd give any interviewee is to take time and *pause*. Often the interviewer is looking for fairly short and concise answers to their questions so they can direct the flow and conversations to what they need to hear through further questions. Filling all the available air time either forces them to rudely interrupt you (which feels awkward) or wait for you to finish even though they aren't that interested…

That's a good way for a candidate to help the interviewer. Often an overly general question sends the candidate to empty out their mental filing cabinets in hope of finding the magic word the interviewer is waiting for.

If a candidate does that, I feel I've screwed up as an interviewer. The best interviews I've conducted turn out to just be conversations where we're talking shop and we get to know each other a little.

There's so much coaching on the interviewee side of the equation, yet the only guidance or coaching I've seen given to interviewers is to shield the company from discrimination claims by turning in a consistent set of interview questions to HR.

Re: Ask HN: How to talk with logical flow and coherence at interviews?

#128

Post by lostcolony »

kettro wrote: post #85
kube-system wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you answer immediately, you will "ummmm uhhh" a lot. Learn to take a breather and buy time. Some of the best advice I've ever gotten for this was: If you're pausing to think, just be silent. Practice for a while and have someone call you out on it. It's a hard habit to break, but someone who doesn't fill space with "um" will sound twice as smart.

A coworker I had (a good friend and an _amazing_ engineer) would generally just pause silently and think after a question. It was initially off putting, and I couldn’t tell what was happening, but very quickly got used to it. I started doing it myself, but start with a short “hmm” to indicate that I’m now thinking about the question, or just say “let me think”. Waiting helps you ignore the impulse responses, and doub…

Yep. "Hmm, give me a second to think on that" is my favorite pause to collect my thoughts. Take a minute to flip through my prepared stories, potentially think through ones I haven't prepared but that might fit better, settle on one, decide the beats I need to hit to best answer the question, and then "Okay. One time..."

Re: Ask HN: How to talk with logical flow and coherence at interviews?

#129

Post by gknoy »

scrozier wrote: post #95
lkxijlewlf wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you answer immediately, you will "ummmm uhhh" a lot. Learn to take a breather and buy time. Not just in interviews (I don't interview that often), but just in general, I've trained myself to smile and say, "That is an interesting question!" (and subtle variants so I'm not a robot). It buys me a second or two if it's not that hard, and even more if it is a hard question because now they know I'm thinking about th…

Seems like a good technique, but boy, is that overused these days. Let's face it, not all questions are that interesting. Seems that a lot of people start with that, robotically.

I can see how it might get old hearing that a lot, but when I look at the suite of tech screen questions we have here, several of them are basic under the hood (tree-building and traversal, string manipulation, etc). However, they all do have something about them that made them interesting to me when I did them to calibrate my interviews.

Things can be interesting without being hard or novel, and as Aphyr's entertaining "Hexing the interview" series shows, you can often find something interesting for purely personal reasons that are separate from the question itself. The interesting part might be that a normal data structure isn't enough, or that the difference between the naiive solution and the performant one is substantial. It might just be that we might be doing a task that we normally use a library for (string manipulations) in our normal work, so it's refreshing/challenging/interesting to look at things from a different level of abstraction.

Re: Ask HN: How to talk with logical flow and coherence at interviews?

#130

Post by rangersanger »

muzani wrote: post #2

Preparation. Anyone who has done public speaking knows that it's a lot of work to be a good speaker. Neil DeGrasse Tyson says you have to be 10x more prepared than you need to be. He calls it his Batman utility belt. You anticipate every question you'll get and do your research. One interviewer asked Neil whether it was worth the $3B mission to Saturn. He brought up that it's $3B over 12 years and that it's how much…

This plus having a formula for how to answer. I like the star technique. It’s what people want to hear in the right order. https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/interviewing/how-to-use...
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