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How to talk about yourself in a developer interview

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Re: How to talk about yourself in a developer interview

#161

Post by cookiecaper »

sweezyjeezy wrote: post #20

> If you give them a resume, expect questions about stuff you worked on at your past jobs. If you gave them a link to your Github profile, expect questions about your projects. If you gave them a link to your Stack Overflow account, expect questions about some of your answers. On my Linkedin (and also resume etc.) I give a link to my blog / github. Every time I've been asked about it in an interview setting, it was a…

Doesn't surprise me, but if you're handing it out, you should still be prepared to answer questions about the stuff that's on there.

Re: How to talk about yourself in a developer interview

#162

Post by cookiecaper »

codingdave wrote: post #38

>In all likelihood, the interviewer doesn’t know what they are looking for with these questions, and they are just being used to fill time. Wait a sec -- just because the author of the article doesn't know how to get value from those questions doesn't mean that those questions hold no value. It is true that they won't give you information to help you in a tech screen, or to gauge the value of where to initially place…

It's the rote, cliche questions that show an interviewer doesn't really know what he's talking about. Questions about personality and culture are very important, but if someone asked "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?", it would point toward their not being a skilled interviewer. It's better to phrase the same question in any other way that's not associated with corporate ineptitude, like "What are your long-term career goals?"

Re: How to talk about yourself in a developer interview

#163

Post by Verdex_2 »

scient wrote: post #79
scient wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see this as being humble, I see this as a lack of confidence in their skills and abilities and achievements. These same people, for the same reasons, are adverse to avoid making decisions and second guess their work, which causes delays and communication problems. Instead of trying to make this into an excuse of being humble, it should be acknowledged as a lack of a certain important trait.

But if you think the stuff you work on is cool, why can't you express that feeling by telling it to someone else? Because you lack the confidence in your work, which is the exact problem. The interviewer should not change here, you should change to be able to convey your work and why you think its cool etc. Thats exactly what the interviewer is looking for.

I'm 30% through writing a 10-20K word blog series about something that I've been working on for the last 6-8 years. I've probably written ~5K words already on blogs unrelated to my series where I'm kicking around the ideas that went into my project. Finally, the project probably isn't that interesting unless you've encountered a very specific type of problem before. Which means I probably should put in another 5-10K words to market it.

Sometimes it's not about confidence. Sometimes it's about complex social dynamics and how people react to suddenly being thrown into the deep end of a domain that's completely new to them.

"Tell me about a technical challenge that won't make me feel inadequate or be difficult to follow. Don't make it too simple though because then I'll think you're an idiot."

Ah yes, just be confident. That's the ticket.

Re: How to talk about yourself in a developer interview

#164

Post by freshflowers »

All that matters is having a good conversation and not appearing completely incompetent.

After an enjoyable conversation, the hiring person will rationalize wanting you all by themselves, even if they have to make up / project qualities you've never demonstrated.

95% of the time, there's nothing rational about hiring.

Re: How to talk about yourself in a developer interview

#165

Post by magicalist »

hueving wrote: post #151
tn135 wrote: post #146

This is one of the best blogs on the topic and as someone who has easily cracked all big tech company interviews I can say this is a good piece of advice. I will make following broad points: 1. Never walk into that room without practicing. Practice before a mirror, practice before a friend, practice in a car. Have a written script and optimise it to remove redundancy, highlight achievements etc. It is not about repea…

If that's what it takes to get a job as an engineer at the big companies, it's not particularly surprising that the quality of their engineers has declined as they've grown. The skills of a con artist are not related to the ability to build good systems.

>> learn how to have a conversation

> The skills of a con artist are not related to the ability to build good systems.

lol.

Communication is about moving information through someone's senses and into a model constructed in their head. If you can't effectively communicate about yourself, the interviewer is going to make more inferences about you and may focus on areas that aren't your strengths while not even knowing to ask about strengths you think are very relevant.

It would be great if they could just sense your innate value through your aura, but it's not going to work. Being able to talk about yourself may feel uncomfortable or like self-aggrandizement, but that's actually a great reason to practice it. The interviewer wants to learn about you but also has a bunch of other explicit and implicit goals (get through the interview questions, to not be incredibly bored, etc), so there's no reason not to do a good job at honestly telling them about yourself.

Re: How to talk about yourself in a developer interview

#167

Post by dahart »

cthalupa wrote: post #137
dahart wrote: post #25

I see some criticism on this point, but for me this passage is a gem. > In general, real stories are told chronologically backwards. This is why we start off with a punchline. In contrast, practiced stories are told chronologically forwards. It’s a solid indication as the interviewer that the person is reciting something they have committed to memory if they tell the story forwards, and in turn it’s significantly mor…

> In general, real stories are told chronologically backwards. This is why we start off with a punchline. In contrast, practiced stories are told chronologically forwards. It’s a solid indication as the interviewer that the person is reciting something they have committed to memory if they tell the story forwards, and in turn it’s significantly more likely that the story isn’t entirely true. This is awful and just co…

Interesting opinion. I find the quote somewhat true, and the article's broader point mostly true and rather valuable.

The broader point of that quote is that a dynamic conversation usually does reveal more truth and paint a more accurate picture than a practiced story. I find that to be very true.

I feel like you might have misunderstood the article and decided it was wrong before taking the time to understand. That could be an indicator of poor writing in the article, or of excerpting and discussing a quote out of context, but is it helpful to respond with hyperbole?

STAR & SOARA do not dictate a chronology, so they are orthogonal to this point. But their goals align with the article & this quote almost entirely, if you think about it.

Re: How to talk about yourself in a developer interview

#168

Post by mwfunk »

hueving wrote: post #151
tn135 wrote: post #146

This is one of the best blogs on the topic and as someone who has easily cracked all big tech company interviews I can say this is a good piece of advice. I will make following broad points: 1. Never walk into that room without practicing. Practice before a mirror, practice before a friend, practice in a car. Have a written script and optimise it to remove redundancy, highlight achievements etc. It is not about repea…

If that's what it takes to get a job as an engineer at the big companies, it's not particularly surprising that the quality of their engineers has declined as they've grown. The skills of a con artist are not related to the ability to build good systems.

Good communication skills are certainly essential to being a con artist, but they are also essential to working with other people who are almost certainly going to be very different from them. If someone is incapable of explaining something to another person or discussing and agreeing on a course of action, that's somebody who probably doesn't know a fraction of what they think they know.

For every gregarious person who uses their communication skills to fake competence, there's at least one person who is convinced that they are a misunderstood genius, but their lack of supposedly BS communication skills has cursed them from ever being fully appreciated by the "normals" that they think they are better than. You don't want to be either one of those people, they are equally useless when working on hard problems.

Re: How to talk about yourself in a developer interview

#169

Post by [deleted] »

aidos wrote: post #160
sheetjs wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all relative. Sometimes solutions require insights. Other times solutions involve a ton of grinding. Many people have a tendency to overemphasize the first and greatly underemphasize the second, even though the grinding may actually be harder than devising clever solutions. We build tools that read and write Excel files (open source library: https://github.com/sheetjs/js-xlsx ) There are plenty of very difficult…

That's actually my default response when people intimate the work I do must be complex / I must be clever - it's really just hard graft. Sometimes you just have to be willing / stubborn enough to chip away at a problem that initially seems insurmountable. Sure, the more knowledge you accumulate, the faster you can figure out when to look, but often enough you just need to roll up your sleeves and bisect your search s…

[deleted]

Re: How to talk about yourself in a developer interview

#170

Post by dahart »

alok-g wrote: post #159
unimpressive wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure I tell my stories chronologically forwards. What a strange accusation. (This is one of those things that's going to bug me for a while every time I tell a story.)

The assertion in the OP is that forward stories are practiced beforehand and are thereby less likely to be true. I am introspective in nature, so I do have many (true) stories thought over again and again. I would rather disagree to the idea of telling stories backwards. We aren't doing Memento things after all! :-) It's best to tell the (true) story the true way, the way it happened.

I'm not sure the "backwards" suggestion was meant to be taken quite so literally, my interpretation is that interrogative conversation, as opposed to narration, is the goal. Conversations, as opposed to narratives, do frequently go backwards without us even knowing about it or thinking about it, it probably happens more than you think.

"Hey I wrote this code"

"Why did you do that?"

"Because the frobnobbitz wasn't accounting for tribbles."

That's a conversation that runs backward. Anytime someone asked you 'why', and you answer, it's backwards. You don't have any control over what direction it is because the person asked you a question.

I'm really not sure but I suspect my own stories are less likely to paint an accurate picture of something than an interrogative conversation is. All humans have cognitive biases, so I wouldn't rule it out by thinking that I'm trying to tell the truth.

I've watched people practice true stories, many times, to a point that they become misleading. Not untrue, just misleading. (NB the author said "not entirely true".) Events are left out, motivations are made to look better intentioned than they were, etc. etc..

To be fair, I've seen plenty of lies made up on the spot too, so I'll refrain from defending the claim that one is more likely to be true than the other.

I still see value in placing conversation over narrative in a job interview.

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