Flip The Script

This is a follow-up post to git payed.

If you have just finished going through your end-of-year review and did not get what you felt was reasonable, now is the time to start considering your BATNA. If you don’t know what that means, please read the above post from last week.

If you want to get your hands on a BATNA, you are going to have to start applying to other jobs. The good news is that there are a lot of jobs out there. The bad news is that you are going to struggle to get one.

The problem is that the interview process is exhausting and filled with bureaucratic nonsense. If you are like most people, you probably have not interviewed in a long time, or have done it frequently enough to really do a good job at it. Maybe you have been in the same job for several years and your skill set is adjacent to modern technology stacks (meaning some of the machinery in the interview process is chewing up and spitting out your resume before anyone even sees it).

Depending on your skill set and your urgency to find a new role, you might be operating at a disadvantage. You should be honest with yourself about your position against other candidates and what you feel are your strengths and your weaknesses. On more than one occasion a few friends of mine have gone into an interview for their dream job and did not succeed in getting it. There are a variety of reasons for most of these and in at least one case the rejection was entirely preventable by some upfront coaching.

So what can you do to prepare yourself to interview for a job when you need a new one?

The best thing to do would be to interview for a job when you don’t need one.

If you see a really interesting job that is available, it might not hurt to reach out to one or two other companies, especially if you see a competitor is hiring, so you can get some practice at your interview. Especially if it is a company you REALLY want to work for. The practice will be worth it. If you get turned down from a company that you really want to work for, you might also realize that you conducted your interview differently from one of the other companies. I have seen a number of very enthusiastic candidates try to jump through hoops to get a job just a little too eagerly, or choke because they started overthinking things.

If you like sports metaphors, you can think about this like batting practice. The best hitters in baseball do not just show up one day and start slugging the ball out of the park. They are in the cages hitting the ball. They have people soft-tossing to them on the field. They are watching video footage of previous games. All of these things help them increase their performance when it matters.

If you think that is creepy or weird, I can respect that. I do think that if you arrange a few additional interviews you get a few things that are worthwhile. You may get a more competitive offer to increase your leverage in negotiating a salary. You may also get a sense for what tools or technologies are common today and what “state-of-the-art” looks like by talking to multiple companies. You will definitely get experience in managing the stress and negative energy that comes from being in a high-stakes interview where you are trying to demonstrate that you are worth being offered a pile of money.

These are not the most important things to me when I interview with a company. The most important thing for me is to understand their challenges and what kind of people I am going to be working with.

Quite often I am being recruited into leadership roles and generally will be meeting with peers, or potentially with staff members who will be joining my team. In many of these cases the first thing I want to do is to break the script and take control of the interview.

When interviewing with peers, most of them will not be in engineering roles. I break the script with them to understand what it is they are currently not getting out of their engineering team, or what they see as current problems. This helps me to relate their current problems to situations I have dealt with in the past and how I was effective at generating positive outcomes.

When being interviewed by technical people, half of the time you will be asked questions that you might not be able to solve. This is one of the biggest fears for most engineering candidates. If you are being interrogated by someone who knows something really well and you know almost nothing about it, your best bet is to just own it. I had at least one interviewer in the past ask me a question and I did not have a great answer. I took it as far as I could and then changed the subject to talk about an interesting project that I had just finished. It happened to be written in Golang, and I had some particular issues with using Golang in that capacity. The conversation resonated with the interviewer immediately. It sparked off an interesting discussion on language choices and how to make decisions on that level for various teams.

This is not a tactic that works well all of the time. I have found times when my attempts to take control of the conversation made people uncomfortable or irritated. I generally do not get upset when I get the “best of luck with whatever you do next because it is not working here” email. It honestly feels like I dodged a bullet.

I heartily recommend taking control of your interview, especially when the interview is being conducted poorly. If you are asking a potential VP of Engineering to get up on the whiteboard and solve your favorite brain teaser question, you might be doing the wrong thing. It is in your best interest to point that out. It might be the case they actually do not even want a VP of Engineering, but a very senior coder who will help put butts in seats if the next round gets closed. When this happens, many of these companies will proudly proclaim “we are a lean company”. Over the years I have learned “Lean company” generally means “poorly managed”. Most of the time they just expect everyone in the engineering organization to be spending half to three-quarters of their time writing code. That works great for ten people and not so great for one thousand.

If you spend enough time interviewing with different companies, you will develop a knack for figuring out what a company is actually trying to hire for. Sometimes they do not really know—they just know they need to hire someone to do something differently.

This probably does not work so well for you if you are interviewing for “Software Engineer I”. 

That is okay. Sort their linked list, answer their Big-O question, or just steeple your fingers and say “this is a great place to use MapReduce”. If they give you an obvious brain-teaser question, it might be worth saying that their process encourages cognitive bias towards a particular set of employees. Just move on when they ask you to leave the building. You did not want that job anyway.

Another benefit to some practice interviews is understanding if your resume is any good. If you applied to five or six jobs and no one responded, you might want to see if there is something wrong with your resume. A good resume should be able to get you an interview.

If you do not manage to get any interviews, you should ask someone who has some experience interviewing people to conduct a mock interview. There are lots of places that have practice interview questions (some companies will actually construct their list of questions from these books) and lots of people out there who can do a mock interview for you.

If you are struggling with your resume, feel free to reach out to me. I have looked at thousands of them and can generally give you some kind of actionable advice on what to do to improve yours.

Who knows? If your resume is solid enough, I might even recommend a company or two to check out, because I think there is a fit.

Thank you again for reading. You might have guessed I am very passionate about hiring and team building. I am also passionate about eating unsweetened dried cherries. This link may contain a referral code that will make me crazy rich if you all go buy these cherries. You don’t buy the books (which I have not read) nor will you buy the t-shirts (which I do not own). Maybe you will go buy a product I actually really like? I do not know how all of this works.

See you all next week.