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

Deep introspection is really hard. Assuming it is you that is the problem, and working from that assumption is anything but natural for most people. Even in your own thoughts. Arrogance, defensiveness and a skewed sense of self are things most people tend to carry with them.

I've read, listened to (audio book) and otherwise experienced a lot of leadership training in my life. A lot of it didn't really click until I was at a point where I could really self reflect, and literally seeing my own flaws in another person changed me significantly.

If you are up for playing, why not play with sales and marketing? Playing isn't limited to tech. Grab a pencil from your drawer and try to get someone to buy it. Just like with those little low stakes tech projects, as you keep prodding at it to get it to work, you are bound to learn something.

And if you truly have nothing left to learn about sales and marketing, well, then you will have at least learned that the problem you have isn't what you are currently suspecting.

From their perspective, they might be interviewing, say, six people. As you say, they've already weeded out people from their resumes before they even get to the interview. From my experience, and I have heard people note this before, interviews tend to be a Gaussian curve with a normal distribution. People are weeded out by resumes and such. However, if I interview six people, usually someone slips through the cracks who knows nothing or next to nothing. That leaves the remaining five.

Of the five, four are usually interchangeable. They're like you - they get the technical questions right, or right enough. It's obvious they've been writing features for code for a company like yours. But of the five, often one person seems to not just know the easiest questions, or normal questions, but has a very good understanding of the subject matter. You keep probing how much they know, and they have in-depth knowledge about a lot of things. They know how registers on a processor work, they know about cache, they know the big O space of various algorithms, they can explain different approaches to concurrency in depth, or testing, or a lot of things. So you got the answers right, they just did better.

It could be something else - you might be just as good as someone else, but they were recommended by someone already on the team, or on an adjacent team, and they get brought in.

I guess personalities are on a bell curve as well. Maybe one out of six people fail on this. Maybe they're disorganized, or immature, or arrogant. Sometimes they miss basic social cues, or don't follow instructions, or even seem like they have a screw loose. Then four out of six people seem nice enough - professional but friendly. Then maybe one out of six just seems very sharp and smart, or avuncular, or what have you. A lot of it ties together - someone who has done the work to learn a programming language more than the other candidates, you assume is going to be hard-working on features as well, and they also seem sharp because they know so much (about IT, but other things as well).

Some things are contrasting. The hard-working person who knows the programming language in and out, and who gets a lot of feature work done is probably willing to sacrifice a little comity within the group to get a feature out. On the other hand, some people are so stubborn and argumentative, their presence would be a negative, even if they have technical skills. But some personality traits can contrast - I've working with friendly, supportive leads with great technical skills, but if they are a little bit hard charging this type of thing might be expected to come with the package of being very good technically.